Over the past few months, a few of our hens have decided it was their time to go. While we don’t have a problem with foxes in our immediate area(which is a relief), some of the hens still seem to reach a certain point and just give up.
It often happens that they look a little under the weather one day and then the next day a corpse is found curled up in the nest box having apparently died peacefully overnight.
This isn’t always age related though because we have some white hens (White Leghorns I think) that must be the chicks that are mentioned in an old post about new life and death with the chickens during our first year here.
During the first part of this year we lost one of the hens we bought less than 3 years ago but the others from that batch are still happily laying. There seems no reason for one to die and another to carry on but we just continue to do our best for them
It only took a quick trip to Durham Hens last weekend and we now have two ginger hens (always decent egg layers and usually seem to do fairly well) plus 2 other hens just for their looks or egg colours (one a Crested Blue for coloured eggs and the other a Pied Suffolk just for her feather colouring)
For the record, these have been named following the now standard approach with our choices of female singers but this time with the initial letter “D”
After a couple of weeks in a separate pen while they acclimatise, the new girls – Debbie, Dolores, Dionne and Doris – will be joining the main flock. Colin our adopted cockerel already seems very eager to meet them but he’ll just have to wait!
