Indoor girl

The old brown leghorn is back indoors. She comes in each evening now for a warm up and a cosy snooze. She's very thin and her lungs still rattle but she's game and mostly fine. Two days ago she was practicing dying on the front doorstep but a sleep in a tray of hay in the kitchen put her right. Now she walks over to the front door in the morning to be let out to join the others, spends the day in the garden mostly foraging near them, then in the late afternoon lets herself be picked up to come inside. Then she moves between kitchen and dining room, eating and drinking a little and standing by my chair while I work. Her cough sounds like one from a life of 60 a day. Lovely company.

a normal day begins...

a normal day begins... at 3.30am on the dot with the first young cockerel doing his musical thing up a tree in the front garden. It's always the same time, he's always up the same tree, but I notice that my attitude has changed. At first a few months ago I cringed every time he crowed, I worried about my neighbours, I imagined a fox just waiting under the tree. Now I can enjoy his new-found ability and the normality of country noise. He's as loud as ever and his hatch-brothers are getting a beak in too from time to time, but it no longer grates. Unless he and his mates move into a hutch they won't last the spring since they'll fly down when dawn arrives straight into hungry jaws whereas now they don't descend till around 7.45am as it struggles to get light.

And another thing... what happened to our moral panic over bird flu last year? The birds all arrived to over-winter and there wasn't a squeak from the press and no dead swans or anything. They also laid off attacking pregnant teenagers and dangerous dogs - is it that global warming is absorbing all our corporate angst?