Our hens were partying so hard yesterday, making so much celebratory noise, I thought maybe Bernard Matthews had died. That, or they’d heard someone gasped their last after eating a bucket of KFC. You couldn’t blame chickens for being a little vindictive if they really did know half of what is done to their kind.

Of course the truth of the matter is that although spring is officially not quite here yet, the animals and plants don’t go by arbitrary calendar dates. As far as they’re concerned, winter is over. Double-digit daytime temperatures confirm this, as do the first peepings above ground of wild garlic and crocuses, although it still gets below freezing on some nights.

We had 19 eggs yesterday from 21 chickens. Not bad when you consider we have at least one, probably two, cockerels. The silkies from @mumsmuddyveg have developed the tell-tale big wattles and rose combs that mark them out as boys, not girls. We’ve agreed to hold onto them while she sets about adding more hens to her flock, as she has far too many cockerels at present and wants a better balance.

There’s a very slim chance the boys won’t be very noisy, in which case at least one of them could stay. Silkies can go either way, being surprisingly quiet compared to other male examples of different breeds or equally capable of making a persistent racket to wake the dead. Time will tell. Right now any noise they do make is nothing at all compared to the clucking and gossiping and shrieking of our many hens when laying eggs. The ex-battery hens are the worst, understandably so as they lay the biggest eggs and it can’t be easy dropping those off in the nesting boxes.

Eggs are usually seasonal, which comes as a surprise to your average consumer used to eggs being available all year round. Those birds that do lay in winter are bred to do so, and are called modern hybrids. The ones that stop laying in late autumn and start again any time from January through to March tend to be the so-called traditional pure-breeds.

In reality most pure-breeds date back no earlier than the 1700s, the majority from the reign of Queen Victoria in the 1800s with some having been developed in the early 20th. One notable exception is the Dorking, a breed associated with the town of the same name in Surrey but actually traced as far back in time to when the Romans occupied Britain.

It’s been lovely seeing the hens running around on dry ground for a few weeks now, instead of the hideous muddy swamps their feet and scratchings create throughout the colder, darker seasons. Of course we’ve got April showers to come, and we can only hope the floods and incessant downpours of 2008 don’t make a comeback this year.

All times of the year bring their own unique challenges to poultry-keepers, though. As the plants and animals wake, so too do the insects and they include such horrors as red mite and other parasites that like nothing better than to feed on chicken blood when they’re asleep at night in the hen-house. We have to be vigilant all year round, ensure good hygiene and always be ready to dust the birds and spray their accommodation (not with harsh chemicals, I hasten to point out—there are a host of organic and mineral-based treatments).

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