Life and death of feathered friends keeps me in the present when grief threatens

Irish Examiner

30-04-2025

In these pages last month, the CEO of Global Action Plan Ireland Hans Zomer wrote about how we, as a nation, need to create a lifestyle that is not only more sustainable but also 'more rewarding, taking satisfaction from growing your own food, reducing waste, and living in harmony with nature.' I was reminded of that piece shortly after clocking on for work at 6.30am recently when I got an immediate reminder about my own relationship with nature.
More specifically, my relationship with the six chickens in my back garden, who at that very moment were clucking and squawking to be let out into the crisp spring air to have a nosy at the world.
Such is the routine for either myself or my parents since we rescued them from Little Hill in Kildare in June of 2023.
When they first arrived back to the home-built henhouse, they were as you'd expect battery hens to be: utterly terrified of most things, unsure of what grass was and largely hunched together.
Psychically, it was a reminder of just how sad and awful their lives had been up to that point.
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None of the six had anything close to resembling a tail, they lacked feathers, their wattles were flat, and they were just miserable.
There were some early problems where it looked like one or two would not make it through the move to their new life, including two occasions where one hen had to be brought inside the house and kept in a warm Epsom salts bath soak, which is apparently as healthy for chickens as it is for humans.
One of David Kent's chickens exploring his home.
Another simply refused to roost indoors as the weather got colder, leading to one of us having to go out in the dark and move her from where she was sleeping in the corner underneath the henhouse, up the ramp and into it.
However, with time, coaxing, and bribery, they grew in confidence. Pretty soon we ran into an early problem of telling the six of them apart.
Enter tiny coloured ring tags which were placed on their legs and the adoption of names — Brenda (blue), Bernie (black), Olive (orange), Peggy (purple), Gertie (green), and Nellie (neon), collectively known as 'the ladies.' Seeing a chicken run is one of the funniest things you'll see (as well as an excellent movie from the early 2000s) and make no mistake about it, they notice everything. I could be one step outside my back door putting something into the recycling bin and you'd hear the thud of six pairs of legs scurrying over to the gate, in anticipation of them getting a treat.
Those treats usually come in the form of mealworms or porridge oats alongside their usual food, but it has led to the odd conundrum.
If Google did a Spotify Wrapped type top 10 searches, they'd have seen that most of mine would begin with 'can hens eat'.
Pineapple? Small bits and pieces. Apple seeds? Absolutely not. Eggs? Even though it's a bit cannibalistic, yes.
Speaking of eggs and returning to Hans Zomer's point on sustainability — in the 18 months or so since they arrived in the back garden, they have produced more than 1,000 eggs, which is magnificent.
But it's also not like my parents and I are protein fiends. My mother doesn't even eat eggs, so a lot of our neighbours, friends and local teammates have received an anonymous eggbox on their front porches.
Their droppings have been used as fertiliser in the garden, and the section of grass in and around their henhouse has been flattened off because of their pecking, with hopes for a wildflower area to replace it in the summer with a bit of luck.
The sextet are also incredibly crafty as to where they lay — often, it's not in the nestboxes specifically built for them.
David Kent's chickens were in a sorry state when they were first rescued.
There was a brief period last year when they went from producing five or six eggs a day to one or two. It confounded us and there were concerns that there might be a virus of some kind affecting them. Not to worry — they had instead found a hidey hole in the polytunnel set up beside their house where it was lovely and warm and, lo and behold, we found 16 eggs piled up there one morning.
They've become popular with some of the neighbours too — the family next door provides boxes and cauliflower for them, while their young grandchildren are fascinated any time they pop in. Equally as fascinated is my sister's big friendly retriever, who bounds over to them with the same level of curiosity as the toddlers.
They owe us absolutely nothing — which makes it all the sadder that we're now starting to lose them. Natural causes saw both Brenda and Olive pass away in April, the former on Easter Sunday, ironically enough. Death and the fragility of life had been on my mind the entire weekend and not because of the obvious (although raised in a Catholic household, I'm agnostic), but because Easter Monday marked nine years since my paternal grandmother passed away.
At the time, she was my last remaining grandparent. My maternal grandmother had died one year earlier, and both my grandfathers had died within a few weeks of each other when I was six years old. I have no real memory of either grandfather bar what I've seen on old camcorder tapes (for any Gen Zers reading this, look it up, it was all the rage in the early-to-mid 90s.) That makes me even more appreciative of my grand-aunt, who celebrated her 103rd birthday last summer in her convent in Youghal. You read about her in these very pages.
And yet, grief can hit at any time. A haymaker to your stomach when out on a walk. A left hook when you hear a certain sound that transports you back in time to when you can see what you've lost so clearly in your mind, you can smell familiar smells that are no longer there and haven't been in years.
As I go about my morning routine on Easter Monday, I am bowled over by those feelings momentarily, until I hear it once more; The clucking and squawking. I'm brought back to the present, where nature waits with its arms wide open and life continues, in a cycle that sometimes appears broken, but really never is. There are still four hens awaiting the opening of the house, the collection of the eggs and the inspection of the polytunnel.
Between those eggs, the honey being produced by my father's beehives and the polytunnel's yield, we're doing our own little bit for sustainability. It is incredibly rewarding and our peaceful harmony is captured in our own back garden. Life, in all its brilliant circularity, is here.
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