We know a few folks back at home who either are keeping or have kept chickens. For basically urban folks, it seems a slightly odd decision to me, perhaps because several weeks frequently pass without our using a single egg and/or because I could never manually dispose of a chicken that had reached the end of its “useful” life. In my situation, a trip to Waitrose for the occasional half dozen eggs or oven-ready free ranger suffices admirably.
One doesn’t have to travel far from French towns before much of life switches into the slow lane and becomes decidedly rural, though. Witness all the large plots of land in the Marais Poitevin given over to vegetable production; plots of land that require significant investment in domestic versions of industrial irrigation equipment (petrol-driven water pumps and canons) and rotivators to obviate the need for back-breaking digging work. Those folks must be self-sufficient vegetable-wise which, I’ve just thought, may go some way to explaining the lack of street markets in that area.
There’s another manifestation here just outside Réalmont. The chicken-keeping habit is rife in rural France where, at about 6:00 AM this morning, I was awoken by several alarm cocks going off. From the variously strangled tones and relative volumes, I lay trying to count the individuals and came to the conclusion that probably four were involved in our local, less than tuneful addition to the dawn chorus. I’ve never thought of it before but I see now that Cockerels crowing really is a part of the dawn chorus. I just about heard a Blackcap singing together with a Golden Oriole trying to whistle its short but melodious tune from a nearby poplar tree but the combined cockerel cacophony [Ed: how’s that for alliteration?] had them both licked.
And while we’re at it, why does our language say that Cockerels crow? We have a bird called a Crow which surely should be said to crow, if anything does, but Crows caw. What a curious thing language is. Just a thought.
Leave a Reply