The Funny Farm: Get Chickens They Said 4

If you think that chickens are no maintenance pets and you can toss some scratch on the ground and collect eggs once a day, then you’re in for a big surprise. Chickens are magnets for predators, parasites, injuries and illnesses. Sometimes it feels like if it’s not one thing then it’s another. In previous posts of The Funny Farm: Get Chickens They Said the stories focused on the highs and lows of chicken keeping.

Edition #4 turns the tables on us and not our birds, spotlighting chicken keepers’ mishaps and mayhem with lots of humour thrown into the mix.

Don’t ask me how my bra clasp, inside my shirt got stuck in between the fencing. I had to wake my teenage daughter up to save me and you know how that went. And not one of the hens calling me stupid and posing for this picture. I was scared for real. She was too close to my face. Then one of the hens was laughing so hard she spit an egg out on the ground right at my feet. This is my Thursday. – Alasha Bennett

Today I have been violated in a manner in which I had never dreamt of being violated. All by the smallest little nugget with the survivability of a peanut. This all started out normal, a baby quail yelling for me to come hold it. I scooped it up, cupped it in my hands, and began to blow my warm breath onto it, as I like to do with chicks. But this experience was anything but normal. This baby manifested his inner Hugh Glass (DiCaprio from The Revenant) and crawled INTO my mouth. It realized the mouth was the origin of the glorious warmth and wanted it all. That is a texture I never want to have in my mouth again. Like shoving a cotton ball into the middle of your mouth. I still feel that horrid feeling as I type this. I had to pry the little bugger out because he was going to stay. I have a feeling that the crazy stories will be endless with these small creatures around. – May Thatcher

The neighbours had been complaining that my rooster was crowing non-stop. I hate the electric zapping cock collars so I purchased a humane citronella collar. When a rooster crows, it shoots a blast of citronella under their beak and apparently they don’t like it. This evening I was getting the collar ready and filled it with the citronella liquid. And that’s where my evening should have ended. But no, it’s me, and I began to become curious as to how the collars actually work. I stood by my back door “crowing” at my rooster’s collar. Nothing happened. I made sure it was turned on, checked the fill level, and went through the “getting started” checklist one more time. Again, I crowed. Nothing happened. I wasn’t quite sure why I had this next thought, but I did. I put the collar on.

I extended the band and fit the crow box against my throat and crowed. Apparently the collar only works if it feels vibrations, because I immediately received a blast of citronella to the face. I began coughing, which only caused the collar to continue squirting bug spray over and over into my nasal cavities. I was on my hands and knees in my backyard trying to breathe and, to make matters worse, the rooster started crowing. So between coughing and yelling at him to shut up, I received over a dozen blasts of citronella to my face.

During all of this ruckus, I was trying to undo the clasp of the collar, which had somehow managed to weld shut. I finally got the collar off and threw, yes I threw that inhumane f**ker across the yard and laid in the grass, sucking in the cold evening air. In the middle of thinking this is probably the dumbest thing I’ve done in a while, I heard laughter. MY NEIGHBOUR SAW THE WHOLE THING! He was laughing so damn hard he couldn’t breathe. Between gasps, he told me, “I was gonna come help, but every time I started to climb over the fence, you’d set it off again and then I would start laughing and couldn’t make it.” So now, not only were my eyes red, but my face and ears were too. After checking to make sure I was ok, we parted ways and I went in to shower so I wouldn’t smell like eau de Tiki Torch. – Megan Matthews

You leave the house to go check on the chickens and collect eggs. You go down the hill and everybody’s fine. But as you’re coming down out of the pen, the back closure of your blouse hooks on the overhead netting because you have to bend over to get through the low doorway by the entrance. You twist and do everything you can, but you just can’t get the blouse unattached. So you slip out of it while hanging onto the eggs. No bra, dang it, because you’re in the country and for heaven’s sake, you were just running down the little hill to check on the chickens!

The blouse remains stuck because the little button is hopelessly twisted up in the netting and this seems to be a job for scissors, which you don’t have. Eggs in hand, you hurry up the hill back to the house. And as you round the corner to the front of the house, you see that the mailman is at the mailbox. He smiles at you like he sees you topless all the time, which he MOST CERTAINLY DOES NOT! Anyway, I’d love to hear if this has happened to anyone else. Asking for a friend. – Unknown

Ever been locked inside your coop? It was storming. I wasn’t thinking when I put my chicken coop where I did as there is a very questionable branch that hangs over it. I’m very new to this house and the weather in this area. The trees often fall here. It seems like every week I hear a nearby tree crashing down. Today, when the wind started really getting strong my daughter and I decided to put the birds inside our outbuilding. She’s 10. She shut the door. You usually really have to push it to get it to close. I guess she pushed hard.

When we realized we were locked in, panic overtook her and honestly me too. It’s not like anybody would be heading to check on us anytime soon.

The other day I finished trimming out the door with wood on both the inside and outside, screwing the two pieces together. What I didn’t do anything about was on the other side. There were only two zipties holding the left side of the mesh onto the rest of the coop. I was able to barrel through it with my shoulder and free us. Needless to say, I had to rethink the coop door and the latches. Although I’m thankful for my lack of building skills I don’t know that I could’ve escaped it any other way. I sure don’t want that mistake to happen again. – Tia Setina