Anyone who thinks that birds in their little nests agree has never had chickens.
How bad could these little featherballs be? Pretty bad, if last week was any indication.
Nothing lasts forever, and inevitably comes the day when the flock has been thinned out by predators, illness, and old age; and it’s time for the foresighted farmer to add new hens. And never, ever, ever, does this go down smoothly.
We’ve finally wised up after over a decade of raising laying hens; so when that much-dreaded time arrived we took all due precautions. We bought four new hens, not just one or two, so that the newcomers could band together. We put them directly in the coop, rather than out in the yard, with their own personal food and water. We also put out extra food in the yard, in a sheltered corner in case they needed to chill.
You hear a but, don’t you?
The first morning, the four recent arrivals hopped out of the coop with a few feathers missing, but nothing serious. The next day a few more were gone, and our newcomers were beginning to take on the look of Bugs Bunny fleeing the Gremlin. But on the third morning, when one of the four came out with a long gash along the back of her neck, the time had come for action.
It turns out a lot of people deal with this—enough for enterprising individuals to make a living selling helmets for such harried hens. With all the shipping delays caused by coronavirus, none of these clever devices would have come to our aid for at least another month; which left us with only one option.
You guessed it!
I spent the rest of my morning playing with a skein of green acrylic, with this as the result. A coif? A balaclava? Someone remarked on its resemblance to a medieval chain mail hood (and suggested arming our vulnerable bird with a battle-axe).
Call it what you like; but she (we’ll call her Little Green Riding Hood, or Little Green for short) wore it contentedly for a week. The others have been leaving her alone, and the back of her head is healing up nicely. She outgrew it yesterday and we took it off, and she is now free and independent.
However, she looked so funny while wearing it, and I’d already gone to the trouble of designing three different sizes as I wasn’t sure how it would fit her; so I decided to write up the pattern as a freebie. It was also a good time for me to experiment with new-and-improved formatting for my self-published patterns—so I typed up my instructions, took pictures, gave it what I thought was a catchy name, and finally published the PDF to Ravelry yesterday morning.
Apparently there are more chicken farmers (or at any rate chicken lovers) in the world than I thought there would be; this morning the pattern was in Ravelry’s Top 10 most viewed patterns of the last 24 hours (No. 7, to be exact). Just now when I checked, the page had received 3,000 views in the last 24 hours. Perhaps a chicken wearing a hood is much-needed comic relief?
Little Green hasn’t the foggiest notion that she’s famous. Perhaps it’s best to keep it that way—one wouldn’t want her head to swell.
Henpecked Hood by Ruth Nguyen is available as a free PDF download via Ravelry and Lovecrafts.
