In the event that you have successfully and smugly completed Wordle and Connections this morning and are in need of another pointless diversion, here is a quite interesting quiz about chickens (answers below).
1. Which is the only continent on which chickens are not to be found?
2. It is estimated there are how many chickens, at any one time, roaming the Earth, ruining gardens and pooping everywhere?
3. Which came first: the chicken or the egg?
I know almost all of the answers to these quite interesting facts, and many more fascinating facts about chickens because I am reading Fowl Play: A History of the Chicken from Dinosaur to Dinner Plate, by Sally Coulthard (who, by the way, also wrote a most riveting book about sheep called A Short History of the World According to Sheep).
We’d been in Greytown and had arrived early for our lunch booking at the quite fancy White Swan Hotel. So we went to Greytown’s quite fancy and pristinely curated bookshop, Mrs Blackwell’s Village Bookshop.
Every shop in Greytown is quite fancy and pristinely curated. If your fancy is for a scented candle, an insanely priced cushion, a bar of soap that costs about 10 times the price of a bar of Lux or any other fancy item you don’t really need, Greytown is your destination. It is as though somebody cut off a slice of Auckland’s Parnell and transported it to Wairarapa.
At Mrs Blackwell’s, there were a lot of books about chickens. I asked the proprietor, who may or may not have been Mr Blackwell, why he had so many books about chickens. He said Greytown was “a very chickeny” part of Wairarapa. A lot of people had chickens, he said.
I’m sure they do, and I am equally sure that their chickens are the fancy heritage breeds rather than those scraggly commoners, the Brown Shavers. Ahem. Our chickens are a fancy heritage breed. Ours are gold- and silver-laced Wyandottes. They are fancy chickens. They are the Marie Antoinettes of chickens. They really ought to be facing the guillotine.
If you are contemplating getting chickens, do not get Wyandottes. They are a menace. They destroy your garden and poop on your door mat. But they are beautiful. And they know it. They come up to the French doors and peck on the glass demanding food. But we are also certain they come up to the French doors to gaze at their reflections and admire their beauty. What they do not do is lay eggs. They are too busy admiring their reflections. A visiting vet said, “So, they’re really garden ornaments.” Brown Shavers are not beauties. But they lay eggs.
Coulthard’s chicken book is fascinating. She has kept, or been kept by chickens, for years. She has had chickens hiding in cupboards and suddenly leaping out. One of her chickens once snuck into a courier driver’s van and had to be delivered back home, like a feathery package.
But this is a serious, and seriously interesting story about how chickens evolved and how, despite not being able to swim because they don’t have webbed feet or waterproof feathers – which explains why our chickens sulk and complain when it rains – they have, managed a worldwide invasion, apart from Antarctica. There are chickens in Siberia. There are days I am tempted to send our evil flock there.
Chickens have not just colonised the world, they have colonised our vernacular. Much chicken talk is centuries old. We are chicken-hearted. Or cock-a-hoop. Things invariably come home to roost. Husbands can be henpecked. We walk on eggshells. We run about like headless chickens. As I write this, the chicken named Jacinda, after our former prime minister, has Bubble the kitten bailed up behind a pot plant. Our chickens are aggressive. They attack, sometimes each other. They chase off the white doves. They peck the cats. They are certainly not chicken-hearted. They are cock-a-hoop.
Answers to a quite interesting quiz about chickens:
1. Antarctica. And if you didn’t get that one right you are as thick as a chicken which is pretty darn thick.
2. Twenty billion. Of which two billion possibly reside in Greytown.
3. The egg, apparently. Some complicated thing involving dinosaurs. I don’t really care. I would just like our Dino-chickens to lay the occasional egg.
