As you may know by now we only have one chicken and Claude the cockerel left (by the skin of his teeth I may add, and Wiglet still looks at him longingly through the fence!)  Read here The chicken may be laying but something is clearly coming into the hen enclosure at night and stealing her eggs methinks. So despite no eggs we cannot put the chickens in the pot (it is just not our way) and they are living out there retirement in the enclosure the Rich made for them last year.   You can read about that here

The new home that we had lined up for them, where we thought they would mingle with other chickens, did not go ahead: as it turns out the odious person who was going to have them was in fact going to eat them! Animal lover? I don’t think so! So the chicken & Claude stayed with us. As always life showed us the way.

So every morning they are fed the scraps of food (no cooked meat as we don’t want to encourage les Ratz!) and some grain. Rich is the main feeder of the chickens and over the past couple of months he noticed that a pretty little blue, grey and yellow bird follows him everywhere, singing to him and sometimes shouting at him if he is late feeding the chickens. The little bird is a blue tit.

At first Rich thought he was imagining it until it started to stand on our steps outside our French windows (or are they just windows in France?!) and shout at him through the glass.

It didn’t care that our house is in fact a house full of predators: with four cats and two Welsh Terriers

At the weekend it hopped around furiously on the patio until Rich succumbed and went out to feed the chickens. As Rich starts to walk across the garden it flies ahead of him calling all of it’s friends: the sparrows and they would all swoop down to eat the rice, pasta and soaked bread.

One Saturday as we were gettting ready to go out it landed on the windowsill outside our bedroom window and proceeded to shout at Rich because he was late!

But now the little thing is like part of our family; worryingly it has become so tame that it sat under one of the sun chairs on the patio the other day singing to us, despite there being a cat sunning itself on the chair above!

I know that i have shared recently that we did not know if we would stay here, or whether it was time for change; and I am open to all possibilities. But right now life is showing us the way: Rich’s work has picked up and he has regular clients now. I have registered to provide a service over here mainly, because my blog is going to hit 50,000 views this month and I am going to self publish: I have too many people contacting me asking me where they can buy my book. (Sorry that is why I have been away from this blog so much.) and things are looking up.

So going with the flow of life showing me the way I stand in my garden, full of trees, including the fallen cherry, and I soak it up: I no longer take it for granted.

This garden is truly a haven for the birds, from the owl in the cherry by the barn, to the woodpecker knock knocking on one if the giant oaks; to the blue tit who seems to have become our friend; and I know that  I am  blessed to live here and have this experience.

I stood this morning in the warm spring sunshine watching the little blue tit and all his compadre’s eating last nights chips, despite me standing there, and I thought: this is a memory to keep Moisy.

Have a good week folks.

Moisy