meditation upon the benefits of keeping poultry

The chickens are turning into chickens.

"What an odd thing to say," you mutter to yourself.

Dear reader, worry not - I shall explain.

The chickens, three weeks ago fuzzy chicks, are now flapping around their pen showing off their shiny new feathers and developing combs.

Of course, this means that they have increased somewhat in size and the old rabbit hutch can't quite cut it as chicken house any longer. Logically, this would mean that the chickens could move out to a shed somewhere around the yard - however, since mother nature seems to have decided to give spring a pass this year and just add a couple more months of winter it wouldn't take long before we were left with a flock of poultry-cicles and that seems counterproductive to me.

So last night I renovated the rabbit-hutch-come-chicken-pen.

Originally I had just wanted to find a big, sturdy cardboard box to move them wee birds into. As it would turn out, large chicken-flock sized boxes can be hard to come by.

Kayla came up with the solution - find a box of similar size to the present cage and attach it to the side, thereby doubling the space (thank God for logical wives: I was seriously considering building a gate and giving the chickens the run of that part of the house).

Eventually I did turn up an appropriate box: with the aid of a hunting knife, some chicken wire, and a handful of clothes-pins we rigged up something that looks like it belongs in the slums of Rio, but it works.

The chickens, of course, went nuts. The cardboard box was new for them - they have never encountered cardboard before - and they spent the rest of the night hammering on the cardboard floor of their new home which, because sections of it are suspended off the floor, sounded like a session at the Rhythmically-Challenged-Drummers Convention.

In a world where it seems that everything is falling apart, I feel awfully lucky to be able to come home to my crappy old house and flock of chickens - it's a good place to escape for a little while from indifferent political "leaders" and deteriorating economic conditions.

Being a naturally depressed, pessimistic individual (my normal self would assure you that yes, the glass is indeed half empty and that half-full glasses are statistically improbable) I'm glad I've discovered that a few minutes spent watching chickens can make the world seem less bleak.

Which makes me think that the next great advance in medicine will be the discovery that, instead of writing prescriptions for anti-depressants, someone needs to prescribe more chickens.

Regards from Alberta's brush plain.