1 April

​For the first time I captured a show of posturing between Maude and Goldie, the two who most often face off with each other.  It is only the end of it, I didn’t capture the challenge at the start, even though Maude was clearly in a provocative mood – I’d already filmed her dashing after Mabel in a way that might have led to fluffed feathers if Mabel had taken any notice.  I’ve never had chickens who do this before, not even the hens I raised from little chicks, perhaps because the mother hens were present to fight their battles for them, or perhaps it is just Maude’s temperament and the other hens are just keeping up.  I think they are having fun, like puppies play-fighting, their feathers are never ruffled up for long and they follow each other about afterwards and all day long, Goldie sometimes wandering a little further from the others but not out of nerves, just out of curiosity, and because she doesn’t keep such a close eye on the others as Maude and Mabel do, always making sure they aren’t more than a few paces apart from each other.  Wilma has finished her moult and has her new winter feathers in, looking splendid and glossy, and has all her confidence back, which was never a lot, or at least is tempered with the diffidence she always showed, so she still tends to let the others reach the food bowl first, but will give Goldie or Maude a low warning cluck or a peck if they don’t get out of her way when she’s out of patience.  They’ll obediently move aside, mostly, but if she lets them they will all eat together from the bowl, and this afternoon they all dug up the patch of garden where I had been going to plant my spring bulbs and had a bath together, Wilma in the prime spot.  I’ll have to put some kind of netting over this patch if I do put bulbs in there, but perhaps I’ll let the hens keep working on their dust baths while the ground is dry enough.  It really is an excellent location, with room for several separate bowls of dust on different levels, like the most splendid of Roman thermae.  The deck meanwhile is becoming a sort of Roman forum.  The hens are all in the habit now of coming up to the deck when I bring out my books, and hover hopefully about in case I have anything to eat, then if I don’t, or after they’ve eaten it, settling down behind or under my chair, Mabel and Goldie often sitting down on the deck, Maude, today, falling asleep as she stood by the chair, her eyes slowly closing even as she continued to quietly murmur some friendly remark.