Housing crisis in Thamuang. Today we built a chicken shack!

The Chicken Shack - made from re-cycled materials (or what was left lying around!)

One day last week, Khamma nipped out to the shop at about 10am on the motorbike for some yogurt and orange drinks. She returned five minutes later having met a man carrying three large cardboard boxes strapped to the back of his motorbike. Inside the boxes were chickens, I would say about a week old. After a brief inspection, Khamma bought thirty chicks! There had been no previous discussion, or even inkling, that she would like to add to the eighteen chickens (minus two recently eaten) already occupying the two hen houses in the garden. This is Khamma at her impulsive best behaviour. She even forgot the yogurt and the orange drinks.

Chicken's eye view of the, err, chickens

The chickens seemed healthy enough, not that I am expert. They made glorious chatter, looked lovely, but where did she think she was going to keep them?

Swift re-arranging of accommodation was required and the chickens from hen house two were transferred to hen house one and in the process given a little more freedom to roam around the garden. It seemed they had come of age and could be trusted a little more; but in reality, they are one-step closer to becoming a tasty meal, poor things! This is Thailand, remember!

Hen house 1 - under the rice house

Hen house 2 - at the back of the rice house

The new clutch was Khamma’s new babies and she watched over them most of the day. One of them was weaker than the rest so she decided to give it some extra tender loving care by isolating it in a sort of chicken intensive care unit. Dehydration was taking a grip on the poor thing, but after drinking from its personal water supply fashioned from a throw away plastic bottle with half its side cut away to make a miniature trough, restoration to normal chicken life was complete. Remarkably though, the mother hen, who was looking after six of her own chicks in hen house three, adopted the ailing chick. By dusk all the chickens were merrily ‘cheep, cheeping’ away accompanied by frogs, toads, lizards and goodness what else, in an improvised musical cacophony that was a symphonic masterpiece of rural Thailand.

A duck's eye view of the, err, ducklings

Soon enough life re-adjusted to a new routine of feeding the animals. Nevertheless, not content with thirty chickens, Khamma could not resist the offer from a neighbour of twelve ducklings also about a week old. These are lovely little birds with the softest yellow duck down and darkest eyes you can imagine. I can understand why she wanted them, but it did present a bit of a housing crisis for the bird population of Owerrrouse. Summing up the situation, we had sixteen chickens in hen house one and twenty-nine chicks in hen house two and eight baby chicks (including the adopted chick) and the mother hen in temporary hen house three. This is fifty-four rapidly growing birds. Oh! I forgot the eleven ducks roaming free in the rice fields and staying in the duck house about fifty yards from the back door. A grand total of sixty-five birds, most of them destined for the cooking pot.

Eventually this became duck house 2

I found Khamma sat on a footstool gazing at the birds and contemplating the crisis. She had partially solved it by adding the eight baby chicks from hen house three to the twenty-nine birds in hen house two. The twelve ducklings were now resident in temporary hen house three. However, this is not a long-term solution, and so the next day she started to build a chicken shack next to the duck house. By the time I arrived, she had cut various strips of bamboo into poles to support the walls. She then split more bamboo poles with a machete, into half-and-half again, to make thin strips that were to become the walls. It was my job to weave these strips in to the first set of poles and make sure the gaps were not too wide for the chickens to escape. It was a pleasant way to spend Sunday, and I even had the feeling that Ray Mears (the survival expert) would learn a trick or two from the bush people of Isaan (Khamma and me).

Duck house 1 on the right and new chicken shack on the left

Intricate bamboo lattice work is the main feature

The chicken shack is a temple to re-cycling. All the materials had previously been lying around the yard and they lashed together with bits of thin wire and string. The exception was the roof, which is the ubiquitous corrugated iron sheeting, and cost about 20GBP. The final appearance has a ‘permanent temporary’ feel about it, but I am sure the chickens will appreciate their new shack. They move in tomorrow, all fifteen of them.

The concept of 'permanent temporariness'

PS: If you have calculated the maths and think this should be sixteen, not fifteen, Khamma is cooking the missing chicken as I write.