Our new hen

After the sad demise of C1, we were intending to rescue a battery hen as a new companion for C2. But it turns out there's a 2 month long waiting list!

After seeing how despondent poor C2 was, we decided it wasn't fair to wait. So, I took a day off work to find her a new friend. After a morning calling round various shelters, I discovered a community farm in North London who agreed to sell me a lovely little hen who had just come into lay.

Here she is!


We don't yet have a name for her, for now she is "new C" or "little one" because she is much smaller. C1 and C2 were OK names despite sounding somewhat clinical, because really they were named in honour of the Bananas in Pajamas. But I want new C to have a proper name, I just haven't thought of a good one yet.



She is clearly a different breed, although I don't know what kind. She is smaller and has a funny shaped crown - it's more like a plate actually, with lots of little pointy bits on it. She is very sweet but best of all she and C2 seem to be very good friends already. C2 was so happy to see another chicken she did friendly chirrups for about half an hour! There was a little bit of pecking but nothing like I feared and after a few hours they settled down together quite happily. So, crisis averted, C2 is happy again.

But I felt very guilty because we'd not rescued a battery chicken. So, to offset that (and also as a reward for some great news that I can't write about yet) I've ordered a new chicken house that will let us keep up to 10 chickens! Here's a picture of it from the Omlet website:

In terms of size, it's 3 metres long by 1.6m wide. It is about shoulder height so there's room for them to do play jumps inside from the ladder... I wish we'd had this for C1, she loved pretending to fly.

The house is due to arrive in August and we are on the waiting list with a battery hen rescue shelter in Essex to adopt 3 hens in September. Even though we have space for up to 10 we don't want to be deluged with eggs and also want them to have more space.