Make no mistake, hens are vicious: UPDATED

"Daddy, something's wrong with Penny."

It was more the way the words were delivered than the words themselves that filled me with dread and made me put down the wet thing I was about to hang on the clothes line and head for the chook run.

Penny is one of our chickens.  As it happens, she's at the bottom of the pecking order.  When the big, tough chooks want that scrap on the ground, she gets out of the way.  From time to time she cops a peck on the way out.  So, there being something wrong with Penny will almost always have more to do with being bullied than anything else.

Ups and downs

A vast improvement.  Or, "Avast!  Improvement!"

It's been a roller-coaster few days in the Good Plates house-hold.  A birthday dinner with my Dad for the first time in a very long time, some housework and a pretty cruisy Mothers' Day.  But the highlights were watching our youngest minion make a breakthrough at karate and building a better wardrobe.  The lowlight was definitely responding to the realisation that one of our dogs had eaten a lot of rat poison.