Day 96.

Bush eggs: one. Nest box eggs: none. Feed hopper: really just scraps left now.

Steve was telling me the most extraordinary story today, I’m not even sure she wasn’t joking. She said her and Brian’s mother (I had no idea Steve and Brian were sisters – oops) used to get put in a cage and get taken to a huge room full of other chickens in cages. The chickens would stare all day at people passing the cages and would judge the people for different things like worst anorak, smelliest baby, bouffiest hairdo etc. Apparently it was quite exciting: all the roosters would crow at the same time, and some hens couldn’t hang on and would have to lay eggs with all those other chickens watching and all the people going past. At some stage during the day a person in a white coat would haul each chicken out of its cage, eyeball it, spread its tail and wing feathers and have a jolly good grope around the chickens private poultry place. Really, it doesn’t sound legal! Anyway, after all these indignities some chickens would get a coloured ribbon thing on the front of their cage. Big deal. Give me non-tampered-with privates over a coloured ribbon any day. At the end of that long day all the chickens would go home, only to repeat the same daft process the next year. It must have been a bit of a nightmare. It seems pointless and disruptive. So, like I said before, I’m not even sure I believe Steve’s story at all.