Our allotment has been broken in to several times over the last few weeks, but the culprits were looking for things to steal, not hens. The lockdown means that, now that they know we have hens (and chicken feed etc) on the plot, our hens are more at risk... even if the original thieves don't want them, they may well tell other people.
When we thought that Norah (our oldest hen) had died, before the Announcement, we had made the decision to relocate ALL the girls to our home, and to leave the boys on the allotment. With the good news that Norah is still alive, we've had to revise this. We are concerned that the shock of reocating her, and the resulting, inevitable, battle for pecking order, will be the death of her. So, we decided we'd leave her at the allotment for now.
Of course, we can't leave one hen with 2 boys, that would be an even worse fate for her. So we had to work out how many - and who - else to leave. We ended up leaving 6 hens. 2 of them are our lovely Dorking girls, Ping and Pong. They've been left because they are in lay, and that means a source of eggs for the Other Chap. We've also left Norah (the oldest hen), the 2 harem girls who are from the same hatch as Poppy and Gloria, and Big Bird. We brought Phyllis, who is aged between the Harem and Big Bird, home. DG has a soft spot for Phyllis.
It took quite a long time to dismantle the coop at the allotment and to get everything loaded in to the car. At home, we had to unload, clean it, and then DH built it. It took a while to get sorted.
The Allotment girls were a little fazed by the move. Phyllis was stressed. We put them in the garden in a small section of grass, while we unloaded the coop etc and got things set up for them. They seemed OK, the ad lib grass really helped keep them occupied.
The Garden Girls were not happy.
Late in the afternnoon we moved the Allotmenteers into a sectioned off area with their newly built coop. In the evening, all but one had worked out how to go to bed, and we shut them in.
At some point soon we will need to let the two flocks free range together. Normally we'd take this very slowly, let the two flocks get used to the idea, but we don't have the grass to be able to do that.... and we may have to bring the other Girls up at some point. We'll keep them separate for a couple of days to check for any illness (stress brings it out sometimes), and then go from there.
