Farewell Mildred

If you are of a sentimental disposition, I suggest you look away now, for I am afraid the news is not good.

A couple of days ago I nipped down to check on the girls, and discovered Mildred, our Cuckoo Maran sparked out in the hen house. On further inspection it transpired that she wasn’t just having a sneaky kip… The prognosis was worse than that… She’d carked it.

I had noticed she had a bit of blood on her comb the day before, but as she had seemed quite perky in herself, had assumed one of the others had simply got a bit over-enthusiastic near the feeding bucket. Obviously it was a tad more serious than that.

We adopted Mildred and Maud from the RSPCA a good while back. I’d dubbed them ‘the evil twins’ as they were inseparable and always appeared to be hatching cunning plots and plans from the back of the coop. They were a good deal more skitty than Winnie, our other bird, and if you tried to get near them or pick them up, they screamed blue murder.

Aside from that though, they laid cracking eggs…

So, we duly removed Mildred’s stiff little body, wrapped it tenderly in black bags, and she is currently in the chicken morgue otherwise known as ‘the black bin’.

The other two didn’t even seem to miss her: Maud simply dashed into the nesting box to squeeze a quick egg out. It was as though she just couldn’t concentrate on the job in hand with her prone twin stretched out before her.

In other news, our omelette intake is down.

A nice shot of Mildred, Winnie and Maud

Mildred is on the left. so called because when we first had her, she came with a red tag around her ankle. Mild-Red… see what we did there?