Pickin' a Chicken

What a kerfuffle! Olivia had not been here a few hours when we'd done catching up and decided to go for a walk. Just down the lane on the edge of a field lay a hen's egg, completely intact, and a pile of roughly pulled out feathers. We went over to investigate, and saw the rear end of a chicken sticking out from under the hedge. We looked at each other in bafflement, and then touched the hen which was alive but not moving. Had it been attacked, or run over? What to do? We went across to Joan and John who have chickens down the end of their long garden, but they were not in. So we decided to have our walk and then work out what to do when we got back. It was just glorious out in the fields, chilly, windy, dull, faintly drizzly but somehow invigorating as only the beginning of autumn can be. We were dismayed to see that Patrick's wheat has not been harvested and it's looking past its best, to say the least. What could have caused such a delay, and is it now ruined? I'll find out next week when they come to tea. We tramped and tramped up hill and down dale, into the woods and up through the still absent John and Joan's. The hen was there as before, and so we set about trying to find its owner. John, who has the beautiful German shepherd Lucy, came back with us and agreed that popping it in with other hens was probably the best temporary solution, and so saying he lifted the chicken up and plopped it into Olivia's arms. Olivia is hen phobic, and to make matters worse it evacuated its bowels all down her clothes. She blanched, she looked ill, but she stoically carried it down to the hen pen where the others promptly started pecking it while it just sat there blinking. We couldn't leave it, and so we removed it to the compost heap where it crept into the corner again and crouched down. Eventually we found the owners, Ben and Dorothy, who went to retrieve it. I hope they managed to save it and that it's OK now. I'll find out eventually. In the meantime I decided to keep the egg for my troubles. 

Today we took a long walk across Westleton Common and the heath through the back of Minsmere to the sea. It was much nicer today with lots of sunshine and a sea breeze, and we followed the path past the flaming heather, in full bloom at this time of year, and the woods with their many fallen trees, left where they land nowadays to encourage wildlife. We stopped to eat our packed lunch and chat while the sun poured down on us, marvelling at the change in the weather. And we ended up in the coastguard cottages on top of the cliff with a cream tea in the National Trust tearooms. I bought a beautiful soft blue rug, the twin of a green one Kitty bought a few years ago. A wonderfully satisfying day. What a treat.