Hens add colour to a garden

I’m not going to surrender in the fox wars, writes Dick Warner.

For most of my life I’ve kept poultry. It’s a family thing. My father did it before me. I find something comforting and homely about a run in the garden with a few gentle, clucking hens in it and I like the routine of going out with the dog to feed them and collect the eggs. They also dispose of a lot of kitchen scraps which would otherwise go into the bin.

Last spring I went to a poultry fair and bought five lovely new hens. They were pure-bred large fowl and I selected an interesting mixture of breeds. They settled in quite well, becoming tame and producing eggs in a variety of colours and sizes. Then things started to go wrong.

There was one cuckoo maran who was determined to be free range and to forage in my vegetable garden.

In the evening she would come to be fed and obediently go to roost in the hen house but every morning she escaped from the run. I clipped her wings and raised the height of the wire but I couldn’t keep her in.

This went on for a month or so but one day she disappeared leaving only a mound of feathers behind. The fox had been casing the joint.

A smaller hen had developed another bad habit. She stayed in the run but she didn’t like roosting on the perch in the henhouse. Instead she flew laboriously up into the branches of a tree and spent the night there. Then last winter there was a violent storm which blew her out of the tree and out of the run. Once again the fox was waiting.

Then there were three. At least there were until the other day when the fox, which now had a litter of cubs to feed, staged an audacious assault. I went out to feed my dwindling flock in the morning and they were gone.

Forensic examination showed a fox-sized hole chewed through the wire in a quiet corner of the run, a few feathers and a little smear of blood. It had been a precision raid, planned and executed with great efficiency. They were large birds and a fox could only carry one at a time so it had returned several times to clean me out.

Believe it or not, I like foxes. I think they’re very beautiful animals and I admire the intelligence behind the campaign to steal my hens. I feel privileged to live in close proximity to a large, wild carnivore. But I was also rather fond of those hens.

I’m not going to surrender in the fox wars. I will rebuild and reinforce the hen run and I’ll get more hens. I’ve been looking on the internet and I’ve found a source for ‘rescue hens’ . These are ex-battery layers under a death sentence because they’re past peak egg production. I like the idea of saving and rehabilitating them. And they’re also much cheaper.