Kury domowe

As I write this, great goose feather flakes of snow are falling on to the car park outside the window. The view to Scout Moor is hidden by driving snow backed by grey cloud and the general feeling in the office is one of great excitement as well as a hope that tomorrow may be a ‘work from home’ day.

Luckily it wasn’t like this on Saturday when we barrelled over to Reaseheath College for a beginner’s course on keeping poultry. Living in the Greater Manchester urban sprawl certainly doesn’t have its advantages when you want to do outdoorsy things, which is why we travelled for an hour to sit in a classroom at Cheshire’s agricultural college to learn how to keep poultry, with a general focus on chickens.

There were twelve of us there, eager to learn. Two women already kept chickens and, as they reminded us throughout the day, knew pretty much all there was to know about the birds. Except where the nose and ears were, as I heard her asking while we were outside. We got to learn a lot over the course of five hours: housing, feeding, breeds. The instructor was an ex-farmer who had been drafted in to take the course and, unfortunately, it showed. His idea of how much food they needed (‘Oh, a kilo a day per bird should be ok’ – it should be 130g) was off, as was his vague notions about housing. Disease weren’t mentioned, except for a brief nod to Newcastle disease. His excuse was he liked classes to be informal, but I think his experience of hens was on a large scale where feeding is done by the bag, not the handful, and hens are left to get on with it, ill or not.

The best bit of the day was when we got to go outside and get down with the birds. While they don’t have a big poultry unit at the college they do have meerkats, a valuable addition to the average agriculture student’s knowledge base. Agnieszka was torn, therefore, between looking at the meerkats, and watching me chase scraggy arsed hens round a muddy plot.

Having never held a chicken before, let alone caught one, it was good experience as now I know I can do both. Whether I can wring its neck, should the time ever come, remains to be seen. What the day did teach us, was that we are capable of keeping them and I am really looking forward to getting our own for the yard, while I know Agnieszka is looking forward to me moving the hen house out of the front room to somewhere more suitable.