Up until now I have written nothing about our hens. Nowadays we only have three; at one time we had about seven, I think. The last survivor of out first batch died last year (they live for roughly six years). These two are our most recent hens: Cloudy and Jockey. They are from a breed called Salmon Faverolles, which is now my favourite breed (very friendly, good eggs and feathered feet).
They soon turned into this:
Below, the one in the foreground is a Welsummer. called Regnbuestråle or Rainbow-beam. I’m including the link so that you can see what our finest cockerel, Leopold looked like. Leopold was a Welsummer who died defending the others from a dog that got into the garden, a chow. It made p.3 of the local newspaper, and not just because nothing much happens around here.
Chickens the world over perform the same action. They scrape the ground with the claws of one foot, then they take two steps back and look to see if they’ve unearthed an insect or a worm. Then, if they have, they eat it.
Here is Regnbuestråle with Blackie and I think Gulegg (a Buff Orpington), Blackie is a very nice, timid hen, I think an Australorps (i.e. Australian Orpington), who is still with us.
What else? This is Cloudy again. Hens are the nicest pets and they give us fresh eggs and excellent manure for the garden.
A Bad Guide 
Hat Tip to The Right Coast, by the way.
The Wikipedia article on Faverolles says “The Favorolle was questioned for Kashruth because of its differences from the regular chicken.” I hope they didn’t use enhanced interrogation techniques.
If that’s Bambi in Spanish, I think they’ve changed the ending.
And, anyway, how did you get a 90 min. feature to fit in the Comments? I’m going to have to investigate how this works. I may want to insert The Sound of Music at Language Hat.
I found this on the Wiki halal page:
I’m not the world’s greatest speller, but when the time comes for The Great Leap Forward on Wiki’s chicken articles they might want to add an S to ‘Faverolle’.
“Halal” when entering a mosque? That has to be a joke. The proper greeting is “salam eleikom”. But they do say “ah-lo” when answering the phone. I even have an “Alo” pay phone card left over from my adventure there.
You might think it’s a joke, but have you been to the Lenton area of Nottingham? I think not.
The Lenton season is over, as is Ramadan.
It is a religious thing to wish someone peace, we do it in church too–“the passing of the peace.”
My husband used to say “gangrene’ ” to people when he wanted to get past them. They always let him past very quickly too. It sounds something like that. I hope not in the mosque though. It sounds flippant, and it will never do to be flippant about religion, even if it’s someone else’s. Perhaps the wiki entry will be changed again in a few days to something a little more kosher.
I have just received my new netbook via UPS, figured out how to enable internet, and I’m ready to travel. I sent a message to Hat, inviting him to coffee once I’m in Massachusetts. Is that too weird? I can’t hope that he would actually read Russian poetry to me or anything like that, but it would be a kick to meet him.
And tonight, inshallah, I will sleep in a quiet tent under the moon and stars.
From naked capitalism: goats and cats get on, apparently.
I wonder if that’s a Mexican production. The commentator sounds like a Mexican, although since I have rarely heard any variety of American Spanish apart from Mexican, I could be wrong about that in a big way. Anyhoo, I remember that kind of unremittingly melodramatic, almost-hysterical diction from Mexican TV channels available in the USA. It’s still used in a big way in all kinds of contexts there, as I heard when I was last in Texas. It’s associated in my mind with blood-and-guts, suffering, raucous colors, and Catholic rituals.
It’s always seemed to me defiantly self-mocking. Very different from the relatively demure, God-and-country, cerebrally redneck, Wasp treatment of the same subjects. Rush Limbaugh ain’t a patch on that commentator.
Forgot an important point: at the very end of the piece, the commentator modulates into a calm reminder that the eagle is just getting food for its young-uns, and that people do similar things. Very like a fire-and-brimstonce sermon, with a little reassurance at the end so people can go home and face their Sunday roast without indigestion.
Our hens and the parrot are quite wary of other birds. The parrot, Tango, turns his head and looks upwards with one eye, as if he thinks it looks like rain. The hens roll over on their backs and play dead if a hawk flies over. We had a very nice parrot called Kiri who was eaten by an owl one Christmas Day, poor thing. Later that winter the owl sat next to our chimney, succumbed to the fumes and fell in, unconscious. We found its feathered remains when we tried to light a fire.
Thanks, Grumbly. I don’t speak Spanish, but I was wondering why it sounded so melodramatic.
Lucky you, if you get to meet Language. I always associate Massachusetts with tea.
So when you say that hens are the nicest pets and friendly, what exactly do you mean? Do they like to hang out with you? Do they like to be petted? I thought chickens were kind of, well, boring, like guinea pigs.
For some reason hens have a very bad rap nowadays. I don’t know much about guinea pigs — they’re called marsvin in Norwegian, close to ‘martian pig’, although the name comes from German Meerschweinchen, sea-piglets, and on Norwegian wiki it says they were eaten on ships crossing the Atlantic and tasted like pork — but my guess is hens are more appreciative of attention. Hens like being stroked and will fall asleep. They don’t really hang out much except during dinner when we’re eating outside. I’d say they’re closer to cats than to guinea pigs. They’re very undemanding compared with the other animals. The ones we’ve got now are quite passive, but Jussi, one of our cockerels (he was Leopold’s assistant), used to chase my daughter round and round the house.
Unfortunately he’s busy. I expected as much along with a socially acceptable excuse, but his regrets went way beyond obligatory politeness. At least he wasn’t offended. In Lake Wobegone we always worry about being too intrusive.
I think Massechusetts is more associated with being anti-tea, since that time they threw all that British tea in the harbor. My frined I know is a big Starbucks fan, and always has yerba mate in the c9ffeemaker. (sorry I haven’t got my character set working on this new competer yet for the accent on mate). I am traveling with my own teabags, Arabic writing on one side–it tastes batter with the Arabic. Once there my friend has a Jordanian mint plant growing beside the front door that I put there some years ago, so I should be able to survive Massechusetts no problem.
My wife drinks only coffee and my daughter uses teabags, but having tried them both and having tried tea without milk, I drink only Assam (in the morning) and Earl Gray (in the afternoon) — teas made from leaves, with milk.
An update on the Mariachi Saga: The tenant upstairs from me with the loud stereo and the gunshot wound has now moved out leaving nothing but an easy chair in the side yard and a beer bottle in front, which he managed to run over with his own car tires. Oh, and a huge burn in the middle of the living room floor. In the meantime, his brother has been shot to death in a bar somewhere on the other side of town.
I’m am SO relieved to be sleeping out in the forest where the only thing to worry about is whether a deer might try to run over the tent.
Photos at my blog, if you want to see the state park in NY where I slept last night.
Well, that sounds nice — although you have the wrong idea about cats. (Mine demand attention constantly.)
One more (tactless) question: when your hens succomb to old age, do you bury them or have them for dinner?
marsvin means “guinea pig”? not “porpoise”? or does it mean both?
Having grown up with cats I knew they require masses of attention, so I’m not quite sure what I meant by that.
We don’t have them for dinner, but others do. I think it’s the local gang of badgers: a scruffy lot, who live up the hill, one year they set up a badgers’ toilet in our garden. We bury the hens in a different part of the garden. Leopold got a hefty wooden cross with a eulogy inscribed by Alma in black indelible marker. We put stones on the burial spot, heavier ones as new deaths occur, but the badgers don’t care, they just dig around them.
In Wiki, for ‘porpoise’ it says:
are you thinking of that?
We’re a bit hazy in this household about porpoises, hence my looking them up (I’d always thought it was merely another name for a dolphin). My wife doesn’t know the word in Norwegian, any more than I. We’re fairly confident that marsvin =guinea pig.
‘Hamster’ has been made into a verb in Norwegian, å hamstere meaning to stash or to store — similar to to squirrel away in English, but much more commonly used.
German hamstern. From such examples of yours over time (Brause was another one), it appears that Norwegian is a kind of German, so I figure I could easily learn it. Unfortunately, my keyboard doesn’t have an å (this I had to copy from your post), so it may be harder than I thought.
Or perhaps German is a kind of Norwegian, and the å got lost on the Viking trek southward. In that case, maybe I can find one by digging in the right places, and so make a mint.
Yes, it sounds like Leopold deserved a fancy resting place and a burial with all the honors.
BTW — more (perhaps boring) Russian lore. Your description of how hens scratch the ground and step back is why Russians consider it bad luck to have poultry on New Year’s Day — they scratch and walk backwards (into the old year). Instead it’s good luck to eat pork, since pigs push forward (into the new year) with their snouts when they are looking for food.
Badgers, eh? They are supposed to be nasty creatures — strong and mean. My dacha has lots of rodents (that the cats happily bring to me in bed — usually alive) and hedgehogs, which the cats have learned not to touch to the point where they seem to occupy another dimension. A hedgehog will be waddling about and the cats won’t even look at it.
According to Wiki, the Norwegian for porpoise is niser. Obviously the French cochon de mer is a bit of a faux ami, as it may make you think that the literal translation marsvin is the same thing, but it’s not. I believe the French for guinea pig is cochon d’Inde or cobaye.
I didn’t think to look it up on English Wiki and translate — well done. Actually, it looks like porpoise is nise, and porpoises is niser — very close to nisser, who are Christmas elves (Santa is the julenissen).
You can always just use aa for å, it’s the same (like oe for ö auf deutsch — and, of course, ö = ø in Norway & Denmark, but in Sweden it’s still ö (the Swedes also use ä, but not ü).
Leopold deserved a fancy resting place
Yes, he did. He was one hell of a chicken, was Leopold. Very smart.
(perhaps boring)
Yes, right mab, this is oh, so boring… I’m going to pin it to the fridge and maybe I’ll use it for our Christmas card. And if you’ve got any more boring stuff like this, do please bring it here.
How incredibly cool to have your own dacha.
They say here that if badgers bite you they don’t let go until they hear a bone crack, so people put pieces of coal in their boots so that if a badger bites them it will think that crunchy noise is bone. I’d almost rather get bitten than put coal in my boots.
While chickens are undoubtedly the best, guinea pigs improve a lot if you think of them as miniature capybaras.
I will certainly commend this post to the Countess’s attention; you never know…
Dutch “hamsteren”: supermarkts are prone to “hamsterweken” when they can’t think of anything better to do.
Can we split the difference and put it down to the Hansa?
I didn’t think to look it up on English Wiki and translate
This is the dominant idiom of my wikipediing, although I have also never thought of trying it with porpoises. (I rarely think of porpoises at all, if it comes to that; I don’t think we could keep them even in the many local canals.)
Apparently they’re very small, that’s if you consider “under two metres long” to be small — but then the Dutch are so tall they have to get special leg extensions for their hotel beds, so they probably do. I’d say try it in the canals, it would be fun if they can jump over the lock gates. Do they say Schleuser in Dutch? It’s such a good Hansiatic word, ‘lock’ doesn’t have as many meanings.
I try to think of them as capybars, but they seem like poor relation, the black sheep of the capybara family. I’m not going to eat one, though.
Welsummer is a good Dutch breed of chicken. Leopold, our cockerel was a Welsummer. He was outstanding.
Norwegian is basically German words with English grammar. Really easy to read.
The hard part is that people sound like they’re talking backwards — although they aren’t as hard to understand as the Danes, who in addition only pronounce half the letters (but which half?).
Well, I rent a dacha — actually two rooms separated by a kind of terrace. Privy at the end of the lot (very healthy — you take a walk every time you need to use the facilities), but bathing privileges in my landlords’ house. Old Academy of Sciences dacha community, which means huge (by Russian standard) lots, filled with tall old trees and little houses where still owned by scientists. The New Russians raze the lots, put in grass and brick turreted houses (think ye olde English duke via Disneyland, with a bit of Italian flash thrown in). We hate the New Russians, although they are sometimes good for a laugh. The banker behind us has a kid who had a big fat bunny rabbit kept in a cage. One night the bunny escaped, and I had a wonderful time watching the banker’s armed security guards chase the thing around the yard.
It sounds like a dacha you see in old photographs.
What is a New Russian? Is it a nouveau riche old Russian? A nye landsmann, ‘new fellow-countryman’, in Norway is a euphemism for an immigrant.
Yes, the New Russians are the ones who made a killing out of air and now have millions and millions of dollars that they don’t know what to do with. Literally. Having not grown up around wealth, they don’t spend money well.
I am about to move out to the dacha for a long, long time so I can empty my apartment (built in 1956 and never remodelled) and fix it up. A huge amount of basic work needs to be done: redoing the wiring, the plumbing etc. My big problem with the remodelling guy is persuading him that I WANT to keep the old moldings and parquet, because anyone with money here just rips the hell out of it and puts in boring Euro-standard stuff. I keep saying, “Wait 20 years and people will be paying top ruble for original details.” But no one believes me.
“cochon de mer”? This is new to me. The word is marsouin, an obvious borrowing.
“cochon d’Inde” and “cobaye” are both right. “cochon d’Inde” dates from the time when “les Indes” was a rather vague concept for “exotic Southern countries” (like “the Indies” in English), and I assume that “cobaye” is an adaptation of a native word from where the animal originates.
“cochon de mer” is the oldfashioned word for marsouin not only according to wiki http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phocoenidae
but also according to the Encyclopédie Diderot et d’ Alembert http://portail.atilf.fr/cgi-bin/getobject_?a.73:121./var/artfla/encyclopedie/textdata/IMAGE/ and to this http://www.rabaska.com/super/chroniques/2000/11/20001106_go.htm (see number 3).