You are expecting me to go on about how superior our home produced eggs are to the crap ones you get from supermarkets produced by battery hens. You are right to a degree, the eggs are very good, but the eggs I buy from a supermarket have a use by date on, produced by hens that have all their vaccinations and who don’t compete with crows or plague carrying migratory birds for food.
For all their deliciousness, before I pop my poached or scrambled egg into my mouth a pang of anxiety is triggered. Will this be my last? Will I contract some extraordinary illness from our semi-wild hens. Should I have cooked them a little longer.
I advise you not to google chicken diseases and illnesses – e coli, salmonella, bird flu, the list of things that are potentially resident in your flock doesn’t bear thinking about. My children come bounding back into the house having spent an hour communing with our hens covered in chicken shit. While I insist they wash their hands, I know both my children have their hands nearly permanently in their mouths and god knows what lives under their fingernails.
Wuhan had bats – we have chickens. In my mind it is only a matter of time until some pathogen makes the leap from our hens to us.
This was brought to my mind again recently as Basil has developed an unusual issue with her neck. I am struggling to describe it, it’s as if her head if falling off, or trying to twist itself off with the net effect that her head is at times nearly 180 degrees around the wrong way. Clearly resorting to the authority that is Google, I’ve identified this as “skygazing” and the list of causes range from injury to future Wuhan.
A couple of weeks have passed and we have tried massaging her crop, giving her some vitamins, putting her in the cage in the house (equivalent of a chicken spa day), none of which seems to have any effect. Luckily the other birds seem fine, so I feel that rules out any contagion.
Apart from the independent movement of body and head, Basil seems fine and shows no other issues apart from not being able to climb up to her perch. I am now required to tuck her in at night, gently placing her on the perch while she gazes up at me with her weirdly angled head. I wash my hands even more thoroughly, just in case.
Hampshire Daddy 