Sam Neill: An Easter tale about rescue chooks and Bryce Dallas Howard

Sam Neill - the truth is his chooks "keep him" - rather than the reverse being true.

What came first - the chicken or the egg? It's time to lay that conundrum to rest, says actor Sam Neill. The chicken. Off the back of his adoring posts on social media, he writes about his feathered friends in Central Otago, for Easter.

I own a flock of chickens. Best guess about 60 or 70 chickens of all stripes and colours on my vineyard.
I have no certainty on this - they are more feral than free-range I'd say and it's hard to get a decent head-count at any one time.
They roam around at will, looking like they own the joint. Some of them prefer to roost up trees after dark, rather than their commodious chook quarters.
They nest wherever they fancy, quietly under shrubs unnoticed, so at any time you can stumble across eight or nine fluffy chicks you never saw before.

'A contented chicken makes the most soothing noises' - actor Sam Neill on his feathered friends. Photos / supplied

The numbers have got wildly out of control, really because I adopted a dozen doomed hens from a battery farm, who were to die if no one wanted them.

So, in a rash moment of compassion, I took them on. They were the most heartbreaking creatures imaginable - half bald, undernourished and barely able to walk.

The sky they'd never seen before and even walking on grass was an alarming, novel experience. The real world was utterly perplexing for them.

But after a few weeks they'd recovered and now are pretty hard to tell from my old hens that have been with me for years.

I have two roosters who were delighted to add even more girlfriends to their already bulging harems, so we had a population explosion after a wild summer of free love in the farmyard.

Feral, rather than freerange chooks, at Sam Neill's Central Otago home.

I like having chickens around. A contented chicken makes the most soothing noise. One or two take advantage though.

There is a curious red hen called Bryce Dallas Howard who likes to peer in my windows and see what I'm up to in the house.

I've tried to persuade her that privacy is a basic human right but that just seems to encourage her.

She sleeps at my front door sometimes, so you need to watch where you step in the morning. Maybe she thinks she has adopted me.

And that's it - I like to call myself a chicken owner .
The reverse is probably true: they own me.