20may25

My little mate hanging out while I feed the chicken.

11 days to file 75 pages, and I’m going to lose tomorrow to planting and Saturday to the arrival of new rescue chickens. Every few years we take in a few chickens rescued from battery farms, which get rid of them after a couple of years. They’re thrashed out after their time in the battery, so we basically provide end of life care – often they only have eighteen months left in them, and sometimes they arrive looking pretty much oven-ready. So we give them good food, space, natural light and darkness and a better life. The first week is always stressful, as they establish a pecking order, and the little dinosaurs can get brutal about that. Once they calm down, things are usually nice and easy. That said, the last load, of whom the current chicken is the final girl, was a pain – there was a runt with three feathers to her name who just ran around screaming constantly, which lead her to getting pecked hard by the others, which just made her run around and scream more. I ended up naming her Crazy. She lived, but only because I built her a separate shelter for her to hide in after she’d driven everyone else batshit by jumping all over them and shrieking like a banshee.