Fenimore B. Buttercrunch

Hey Splodgies!

so this was my commute home. No biggie: 

Anyway, onto the real topic of the story today, Fenimore B. Buttercrunch. 

When I was little, we had this book called "I Will Not Go To Market Today" About a chicken called Fenimore B. Buttercrunch, who found one breakfast time that there was a serious jam shortage in the house. But various "reasons" - usually more like excuses, stopped him going. Reasons such as "its too hot today":

...or "there was a fierce looking dinosaur in the front garden" :

Or  "There was an earthquake"

So in the end, after having waited many days to get out of the house, Fenimore got to the market, where a super suspicious wolf who ran the jam shop asked Fenimore if he wanted raspberry or strawberry and Fenimore decided he wanted both. 

...I dunno about you, but I'm reading deeper issues in this story- issues like battling agoraphobia, and the possibility that dinosaurs are still living among us, but the government is covering it up. 

...maybe I'm going to deep into this.

Anyway, not long after we read this book, we got our own chickens! They were all Black Rocks, which to those who don't know is a rather plebeian breed of chicken. They were called Tikka, Billa, Masala and Fluff. Which looking back on it were also strange names for chickens. Unfortunately we were careless and that lot of chickens ended up getting foxed. 

We've never had a fox incident since, but the next lot had among them a chicken that looked a bit like Fenimore B Buttercrunch.... so we called her Fenimore, obviously! 

Fenimore is the red and white one at the back. For anyone interested, the black one is a Black Rock. She's called Roxy (Who also goes by the name of "the running, jumping, chicken Houdini, owing to her proficiency at escaping the pen and running very fast). 

Fenimore was also the most maternally inclined of any chicken we've ever had, and has raised a number of chicks from different clutches of eggs, one of which, her son Milhouse went on to another family and had chicks of his own! She's a Grandma Chicken! She ruled the roost! 

Recently though, she'd not been having such a great time, she'd been losing feathers and she'd gone blind in one of her eyes. She was an old lady chicken by now. One of the other chickens, a MASSIVE grey one called Artemis (previously mentioned on Daily Splodge, I think) was not very nice and decided that she ruled the roost now. So Fenimore was no longer the top chicken. But she wasn't at the bottom either, that was reserved for the two new NEW chickens, Susie and Sheena. 

Eventually even Sheena, the smallest, spottiest chicken we had was starting to pick on her, and she was losing a lot of feathers on her back and bleeding, and because she was getting bald patches, she was getting sunburned too, poor thing. So I sprayed her back with some "purple spray" (which is literally just called purple spray- its an antiseptic) which would help her heal up and stop the other hens from pecking her, because that's what they do when they see blood. She seemed to heal up and her feathers started growing back. 

...So it was very sad today when I received the news that she had died. She was very old, we worked out that she was at least 8 years old, but I think it was probably closer to 10, which is very very old for a chicken. And to be fair, she'd spend the majority of her life at the top of the pecking order. And she'd got to raise some babies- she's the only one of our hens to successfully do so. And she laid lots of her own eggs, and outlived all the other hens since the foxing occurred. She was the last of the original post-fox chicken cast. They're all super free range in our garden, so she had a pretty sweet life for a chicken.

I asked my mum to sing a chickeny lullaby for her. Rest in peace, Fenimore. Or whatever chickens do when they die. 

Today, this is me: 

See you tomorrow

-Rosa

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