If I believed in miracles, I’d call it a miracle. As I don’t believe in miracles, I’ll call it what it is: an egg, a really weird-looking egg.
After months and months of waiting for the slugabed chooks – formerly the Four Hens of the Apocalypse, now the Three Stooges – to do their jobs, one of our trio of feathered shirkers finally got to work last week. And you should have heard the racket! Although only one had actually done the deed, all seemed keen to lay claim to laying it. I almost rang the council to make a noise complaint.
In the end, after the boasting and self-congratulating had stopped and the egg located in a corner of the hen house, it wasn’t hard to figure out which of the three malingerers had produced it. It was definitely the product of our remaining black-and-silver Wyandotte hen, Catherine.
So singular are her eggs that we at Lush Places have long called her (occasional) output “the Catherine”, which, with the strangely pointed top, doesn’t look much like a chicken egg at all. In fact, after I drew a bit of a face on this one, I’d say her eggs have a rather uncanny likeness to a certain politician who, you guessed it, is as bald as an egg himself. From now on, we’ll be calling her eggs “the Christopher”.
Any excitement generated by the arrival of the first egg of spring quickly dissipated when it became clear that Catherine, evidently shagged from the effort of producing just one freckled, pointy-headed Christopher, had promptly gone on strike again. She hasn’t produced an egg since, and nor have her slacker sisters.
We have had chooks at Lush Places for about six years, but they have regularly produced eggs for only about three of them. Even the late, not-particularly-lamented Little Linda, who was the most reliable layer and produced the biggest eggs, seemed to have given up on her job in the months before her untimely demise.
Which is why, over the long winter months, I began wondering just how much longer we will have to feed the Three Stooges with no return before they, too, go to the great chicken coop in the sky. I now have an answer: as much as another 15 years.
That custodian of the world’s silliest facts, Guinness World Records, has just conferred on a hen called Peanut the title of “The Oldest Living Chicken”. Peanut is 21 years old, or about 100 in chicken years.
A story in UK newspaper the Times reports that she and her owner, a retired librarian called – you couldn’t make this up – Marsi Parker Darwin, live “deep in the woods of Michigan”.
Pictures of the farm make it look idyllic, but Peanut’s is a story of bad luck and heartache: she didn’t have an egg tooth and barely survived her birth; she was abandoned by her mother, and her husband, a rooster called Lance, is long dead, as are most of her chicks.
But eventually there was a happy-ever-after ending: she’s since hooked up with a toy boy called Benny, a one-eyed rooster less than half her age, and now, thanks to Guinness, she’s the most famous old bird in the world.
She even lives in Parker Darwin’s house. About four years ago, Peanut began pecking at the door (something our chooks do, too) seemingly asking to be let inside. “I thought: ‘Why not?’” Parker Darwin told the paper. Peanut, when not free ranging, now rests her old bones in a cage in the living room with three parrots, one of which bellows “Peanut!” a lot. I’m sure that’s not annoying at all.
What the story didn’t mention – which I think we can agree is very poor journalism – was whether the now-famous Peanut had been a good layer.
Here’s my bet: if she’s anything like Catherine, Joanna and the ex-Prime Minister, she’s spent about three years doing a half-hearted job. Since then, she’s quaffed all the free food she can eat while not bothered too much with egg production and working on a long-term plan to move into the big house.
I wonder, is there a Guinness record for the world’s laziest, most entitled chicken?
