Geese, turkeys and hens are not just for Christmas

ANOTHER LIFE:Keeping poultry is lovely in theory, but in practice it is a full commitment with a deathly ring

To kill your goose for Christmas, the “alternative” books said, lower it so that its beak stretches along the ground, set a broomstick across the back of its neck, put a foot on either end, and then . . . I won’t go on, not least because it didn’t always work as it should, leaving me some quite traumatic memories.

Later, we took to buying a goose from a farmer’s wife along the hill. She delivered it trussed but alive, killing being a man’s job. Even switching to a hatchet, while mercifully quicker (for me, at least), there was nothing remotely merry about a self-sufficient executioner. Today we eat guineafowl, conjured from the everyday world that conducts its slaughter by proxy.

Ethna’s mother had a little poultry farm at the foot of Cuilcagh Mountain in Cavan. She kept a licensed turkey cock when all these birds were bronze and very beautiful, with dark but iridescent plumage. They could also mate naturally, a gift now lost to turkeys bred by insemination to provide billowing breasts of whiter, less gamey, meat. Bronze turkeys are now “heritage” birds, prerogative of the organic, greener and premium-rich side of society.

The Cavan family heritage encouraged our early ventures into keeping poultry: hens, geese and ducks, mainly for their eggs. Ethna, however, armed with powerful childhood recollections, made one proviso: man not only killed things, he also cleaned out the henhouse.

Constructing an intricate henhouse of cedar and marine ply was the next best delight to boatbuilding (some, after all, are deservedly called “arks”). Collecting warm, fresh eggs from beneath the fluffy bums was one of life’s great pleasures. Scraping off the droppings board each week was not.

Geese release their droppings as they go – a fresh, green cheroot of half-digested grass every few minutes – and this, in the end, brought our experiment to an end, as geese kept on inadequate stretches of grass do not stay healthy. We were sorry to see them go and so, I choose to think, was the little dairy goat we called Nancy.

The geese, ducks and goats (for milk) all spent much of their time in the big green hollow carved out by the hill stream, a sociable space now quite eclipsed by thickets of rampant fuchsia. The relationship between Nancy and one of the geese was somewhat hard to judge. I came upon them as the goat was tugging with her teeth at the goose’s white breast feathers, pulling the bird this way and that. But far from moving away (the bird was free to retreat, while the goat was on a tether to a concrete block), she seemed not to mind it at all. Released, she stood where she was and it was Nancy who desisted.

On subsequent days it became clear that the goose liked what was happening, hanging around beside Nancy until she pulled at her feathers again. Indeed, I was there when she succeeded in plucking a good mouthful – no easy task – and chewed and swallowed them, while the goose looked on, unperturbed.

As for the ducks – lovely, jolly, noisy Aylesburys, their white wings silky as bombazine – their essentially unruly nature undid them.

Enjoying the stream no end on long summer days, they would follow it under the bridge and up the hill, refusing to come home until the sun had set. One laid its eggs among rushes on the bank for a hedgehog to raid in the night, and there were certainly other nests we never knew about.

Alert, finally, to their ways, an otter picked them off one by one, just as their successors, as chicks in a pen, succumbed to a stoat.

Two generations of hens, too, fell to a violent fate, the first from a roaming dog, the next to a fox that ferried their corpses up the hill and cached them in its den.

Such serial predation became wearing, especially as each affair seemed to seek out some failing of our own. (The fox came at dusk, when Christmas entertaining made us forget to close the hens in.) But honesty compels further reasons why the henhouse now decays, like a crumbling dacha, in the shadows of our densest spinney, and the duckhouse has vanished in the fuchsia.

Keeping livestock of any sort means constant commitment – no nipping off to make films, which happened to be our late vocation. I mention this now, as it’s in the quiet and well-fed days after Christmas that self-sufficient aspirations are likely to take hold at the fireside. Yes, it would be a lot of fun, beside saving money, and there are shelves of good books about how to do anything you’ve a mind to. But when the ducks come quacking outside the kitchen window, they expect you to be there.

Eye on Nature Your observations and questions

Could you identify the type of frost in the photo I’m sending you?

Sean Morgan Abbeyleix, Co Laois

It is hair ice, which grows on bare, dead wood where the bark is gone. It grows outwards from the surface of the wood as supercooled water emerges from the wood, freezes and adds to the ice hairs from the base.

A large wasps’ nest at the end of my garden was still active on December 9th, albeit much reduced since late summer.

Another indication of changing seasons?

Brian O’Toole Stillorgan, Co Dublin

Marvellous to see a huge flock of Brent geese, literally hundreds, floating on the full tide at Sandymount Strand. Then, as if at a given command, the whole flock takes to the sky, not startled or panicked but in readiness for their quest to forage inland. For a few seconds the sky overhead is darkened by their vast presence, then they gracefully fall into their formation of many long lines and Vs. There is no obvious leader, yet they seem to be obeying some ancient order, and every bird seems to know its place.

Rodney Devitt Sandymount, Dublin 4

We found a seal pup tangled in netting at the seal colony just south of Roonagh, Co Mayo. With local help and advice from Ally at the seal sanctuary we covered it with a blanket and managed to hold its jaw closed while we cut it free. It was feisty young male with mottled skin, a line down the back and collar markings. I like to visit the colony at low tide and play the tin whistle or the flute for them.

Guy Carleton Westport, Co Mayo

Last year I dispatched 690 slugs in my small garden. The count for 2012 was a staggering 5,192 – definitely the Year of the Slug.

Roy McNeill Lisburn, Co Down

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or email viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address