Basket cases

Round, with integral handles

This was the fulfilment of a long-held dream: in order to enable my daughter to learn to make baskets from willow wands, I had to join in too.

She has always been attracted to weaving and basketry and taken every opportunity a child could take to learn.  But I had to wait for her to grow taller than me before enrolling her on an adult course: this week-end, at a month shy of 14, she joined me, a friend and three other adults on a course at Woodchurch, Kent, with basketmaker Alan Sage.

So even I, who am no good at all at crafts, made a basket.  After starting us off, the ever-patient and generous Alan guided us through the stages of making the simplest shape of basket, round, which nevertheless seemed to offer an endless combination of possibilities.  I chose a large onion shape with integral handles while others made straight ones with bow handles.  My daughter embarked on a large, straight-sided handle-less version to act as her new waste-paper bin.

The task was not without its challenges.  Even once the basics were explained and demonstrated, the possibilities for error seemed multitudinous.  I only had to start chatting to someone for a weave to go wrong, and an agonised call would go up for help from Alan.  I don’t think I was alone but I may have been the one who needed the most support.  My onion shape needed to lean outwards before tilting in again, and at one stage my early effort leaned out so much I thought it had lost the plot entirely.  Alan guided the shape back in, I wove furiously and the result is surprisingly attractive.  In two days we’ve learned a lot and taken home two baskets to boot.

The challenge now is to remember how we did it and try again, with willow from our own woodland.  I will buy some books and rely on my daughter’s excellent memory to get going  as soon as possible.  With its combination of pure logic and three-D visuals, basketmaking is curiously addictive.

Feathery panic

A chick emergency starts like this. It’s early evening and you’re about to go out. The children are taken care of, one on a school trip and the other staying with a friend. You’re got barely an hour to prepare for that long-awaited meal out, much looked forward to and carefully planned at a countryside pub. So you choose a basket with which to carry five chicks who have spent the day in a pen in the garden indoors for the night. But when you reach the pen, a cat is prowling and three chicks are missing.

This happened yesterday and we’re still reeling. The two remaining chicks were black, one of them being Motley whose Egyptian eyes are less distinct these days. With heavy hearts we carried them both into the house. Alex was certain we would never find the others while I remained sceptical, having noticed that the cat, a pretty tortoiseshell we’d never seen before, had scampered away empty-mouthed. We listened for alarm calls as we hunted in the long grass but we heard only birds in the trees and cars on the road. To think we had reared five healthy chicks, four of them probably girls and therefore valuable, and then lost three of them. We felt horribly responsible.

Suddenly a faint cheeping started up. It was difficult to distinguish from the background sounds and even harder to place, seeming to come from several areas. All at once, I stumbled upon the remaining black chick, unharmed and hiding among the grasses. Then I spotted a yellow one by the fence which Alex caught. And while I took the black one indoors Alex used the yellow to call to its comrade, which he found cowering in the tall buttercups and completely still.

All five of them are fine now, if a little subdued as chickens usually are after an attack. But the story could easily have been quite different, a sad tale to relate to our children when they came home. Indeed, though we know through which hole the three chicks escaped (and have blocked it), we will probably never understand what really happened, why those particular three fled and what role the cat played.

The chicks are now quite big and becoming harder to catch each time we take them out. They have reached that indeterminage stage where they are neither cute, fluffy chicks nor the sleek, nearly-grown chickens of Lucky’s generation. But their combs already hint at their gender, and anyway it’s hard not to get attached to chicks you’ve watched hatch from the egg.

The meal out was great, by the way. The Mundy Bois pub is deep in the Kentish Weald, with views of a flat countryside of trees, hedges and fields. The food was good and the atmosphere excellent, enjoyed all the more since we knew all was well at home. We hadn’t been so relaxed in ages.

Flight of fancy

They’re three weeks old. The fluffy chicks that hatched in our kitchen and stumbled uncertainly across a box of straw (see below) have become gangly, noisy bundles with a will of their own. This morning they asserted their independence by striking out across the dining room floor in single file.

It’s been increasingly a job of containment, persuading five active chicks to adopt as their home a large but low box in our house. They still need the warmth of the lamp, but they also love to flex their wings and it’s been a challenge to keep them happy. They’ve been gently introduced to the “great outdoors” in the form of a pen in the garden, which they have occupied a little longer each day.

Transport to and from the garden has been by means of a straw-filled basket covered with a cloth, once each kicking, squealing chick has been caught and lobbed in. The basket is then conveyed with its fluttering cargo, fluffy heads swaying with the movement and an extra person on hand in case of escape.

This growing feathered family had to stay indoors when we went on holiday last week. We were near enough to come and feed them once a day, but since we couldn’t take them outside our only option was to close the dining room doors, cover the sofa with a sheet and hope.

The result, on our return, was a smelly room full of tiny poos in various states of dryness. Our first hour at home was spent scrubbing the wooden floor after we had banished the little darlings to the garden. Even with the windows open and a good clean sweep, it was some time before the dining room felt fit to host a human meal.

Now, thank goodness, the chicks spend most of the day outside in an enlarged run with a covered area in case of rain – it poured today. And here’s the best innovation of all: an infra-red lamp that generates only heat, rigged up in the conservatory to which their box has now been dismissed. Civilisation has returned to the dining room at last.

New life in the house

In a large box in a corner of our dining room lie five small, fluffy shapes. They are quite still apart from the gentle rise and fall of their tiny bodies. Two are yellow and two black, and the fifth chick, for that is what they are, looks as if it can’t decide. The tamest of the group, it has swirly markings reminiscent of Egyptian eye makeup.

It is a month since the birth of Lucky (see below) who now roams the garden as a thriving adolescent. We’ve become old hands at the incubator business, so when another sitting hen gave up in mid-term we just whisked her eggs into the warmth as easily as you please. A week later we watched them hatch.

And now we have a challenge that is entirely new to us: to rear chicks without a mother hen. We’re quite used to the sight of fond mums leading their brood across the lawn, stopping periodically to gather them up close. She teaches them everything: what to peck, where to scratch, how do drink. How would we manage all this ourselves?

First things first: keep the babes warm. The incubator was too hot for the hatchlings, hence the hastily assembled box fill with straw. A pair of spotlights was rigged overhead, and there the chicks, still a bit wet from hatching when we first installed them, gently recovered, ate and drank, stood up and fell over, stood up again and flexed their wings. A week on their are running about, scratching heartily, pecking noisily, cheeping constantly and filling the room with life. The children love them – who can resist the sight of five furry heads turning towards us whenever we enter the room?

Without a protective hen we can at last observe chicks at close quarters and one of the surprises is how much they sleep. We thought the frequent cuddle time with mum was just for warmth, but in fact, chicks are just like little children – they rush around till they are exhausted and then they grind to a halt. You can see it happening: their little eyes close, their knees buckle and they nod forwards until they are lying entirely prone, beaks down in the straw. And there they stay, all tumbled over each other.

In their waking times they are typical chickens, only smaller and funnier. They shove their food off its plate and then forage for it, scratching large chunks of straw aside. One invariably stands in the way while food is being dole out and gets covered, so the others peck it clean. Another will run around the box with a juicy morsel, chased by the others who are ignoring a perfectly good meal on the plate. They would rather jump into my water jug than wait patiently for me to fill their cup.

But there are still plenty of unknowns about keeping chicks in the house. They are just trying their luck at escaping from the box, though they don’t like the freedom and they squawk to be put back in. How will we integrate them with the rest of the flock outside? We still have to find out.

They are awake now, cheeping gently and pecking at the new, shove-proof container in which we have started serving their meals. Yet I just watched one fight the urge to sleep. It stood still and faltered, eyes drooping, and though its legs crumpled it would not give way. Up it sprang, beady eyes bright, ready to go on with the business of life. It’s hard work being a chick.

Lucky chick beats odds to survive

Eggs must be one of the most alluring shapes in nature. Perfectly smooth and almost round, their promise seems unlimited – complete meals, potential life, Easter symbolism and faith in the future wellbeing of our troubled planet. The novelist Philippe Claudel makes one of his characters refer to them as “little worlds”, hinting at the universe of concentric marvels contained inside an egg.

A hen decides for herself when to sit on eggs, her broodiness dictated by her own private timetable. Our own Buttercup took the plunge four weeks ago when she found herself irresistibly attracted to those wonderfully smooth, expectant shapes. We chose five lovely specimens and her own coop for her to incubate them, and she rewarded us by sitting faithfully. She left the nest promptly once a day, always emitting the sharp, metallic clucks peculiar to a broody hen away from her eggs.

Buttercup is a particularly fierce and protective hen when sitting. But as her eggs reached full term she became paranoid of any movement close to her, greeting our visits with angry chirrups and hisses. One day she fluffed herself out even more than usual and held herself carefully above the nest, appearing to tread, yes, on eggshells. The next day two bright and fluffy chicks appeared, one yellow and the other a mottled black.

That was then. Buttercup had been the guardian of five eggs but only two had hatched. A hen has about 24 hours to save the rest of the clutch, after which she must lead her young family out to forage. Knowing that any unhatched eggs would be left to go cold, we had armed ourselves with a borrowed incubator to care for the remaining three. Or so we thought.

This is when Lucky entered our lives. We had given Buttercup five eggs but when we came to candle them for chicks halfway through the sitting, there was a sixth. The interloper had no laying date and was one of a number of very small eggs we had specifically planned to exclude. And yet at candling there it was, apparently laid by another hen while Buttercup’s back was turned, and containing a rather advanced chick.

It was to this egg that all eyes turned as it lay with its three larger companions in the incubator. My husband heard cheeping and we all crowded round. Then I saw it: the smallest egg was rocking; it rolled back and forth in a barely perceptible dance. Soon it developed an unmistakable crack in the shell.

The family’s excitement reached fever pitch from then on. The egg was watched over in relays and our daughter Nathalie clucked, talked and sang to the chick as it struggled to free itself of the protective home that had become its prison. We did lift away a bit of shell and then the “tooth” appeared, cutting in circles and enlarging the hole. But progress was slow, and it was while three of us we out that Nathalie witnessed the greatest miracle of all. The tiny creature threw off its calcareous shackles and greeted the world.

Well, you never saw anything so ungainly. Chicks hatched by any self-respecting mother hen are produced in public dry, fluffy and pert. Not this one. It was flat on its stomach at our first meeting, eyes closed, breathing hard and covered in sparse, slimy black fluff. We watched through the incubator’s perspex cover as the creature tried to stand, fell on its side, rolled on its back with little legs flailing, failed to turn over and generally made a fool of itself.

Slowly it gained strength, and with a helping finger here and there it learned which was the right way up. We had to call it Lucky: it should never have been laid, or sat on, or hatched. And yet there it was (or rather he, given the prominent comb); he made us realise how much goes on under the hen that we never see. These blind, wet, helpless newborns are coddled in the shadowy recesses of her belly until they can survive the cold outside.

Lucky really needed a mother. He cheeped in alarm whenever we left him alone, and an incubator, when all’s said and done, is really quite a hard place. We introduced him to Buttercup, and to our delight she welcomed him as her long-lost babe, though he took longer to accept her. She leaned over to draw him close and when we next looked, he had disappeared completely beneath her.

The photo at the top, in which Lucky appears to be smiling, was taken the following day.