After almost four years during which my attempts to persuade Mrs Crox that having dinosaurs chickens running around your garden will turn it into a desert have come to naught, she has finally – FINALLY – realized that the best thing to do with chickens dinosaurs is put them in a chicken run secure enclosure.
So, here it is.
For the molecular biologists among you, one of these chickens is in fact a rabbit.
Most of the chickens haven’t really noticed the new enclosure. However, the three likely-looking birds at the front have formed an Escape Committee. I’ve seen them standing on piles of bricks, eyeing the top of the fence to see if it’s within flapping distance. These creatures have intelligence. Problem-solving intelligence. The ringleader appears to be this one
Clever Girl!
who got out several times without conspicuous use of either gym equipment or a unicycle motorbike. It turned out she was squeeeeezing herself beneath a gap in the fence which I hastened to block. However, I have since plugged other gaps, and the fact that the bunnies seem to go in and out without any trouble suggests that the chickens might be turning to them for advice.
The rest of the Jardin des Girrafes, meanwhile, is beginning to recover. It’s so nice to be able to walk down the garden path wihout slipping in a slick of dino-poo. The soil, however, bears witness to the constant input of nitrogen. After making the chicken run I replanted some shrubs. Any and every hole I dug was just full of worms. Big, fat, juicy, squirming earthworms. Above the ground it’s Jurassic Park – below, it’s Tremors.
I know rabbit tastes rather like chicken, but is it a good layer?
Of course rabbits lay eggs. Remember William Harvey and Ex Ovo, Omnia.
Talking of Escape Committees, by serendipitous coincidence the Aust-sprogs and I were just watching the wonderful Chicken Run earlier this evening…
…and I was watching Jurassic Park: Lost World on Sunday.
Thanks for the caption aimed at us mol biologists, Henry – very helpful. The two species look identical at the eppendorf level.
@Aust @Cath. Morphic resonance. That’s what it is.
Henry or Cromacrox- Now you’ll have to do a little work to put grass in the garden, maybe the solution is plastic grass.
Believe it or not, we’ve actually thought about this…
Hey- you pokin’ fun at us nucular biologs? I’ll bet that rabbit, or chicken wouldn’t know an endosome if it bit him in the arse…
Endosomes couldn’t catch our rabbits, or hop into branches after our chickens. So there.
Lysosomes could.
Have the chooks ever escaped from the garden? We’re thinking of getting some chickens out at my friends’ ranch, and the consequences of escape would be pretty dire (and immediate) out there: coyotes, raccoons, hawks. I think we’ll have to put a cover over most of the existing enclosure.
Also, if you had those lengths of pipe in a chicken pen here, you’d likely invite something very nasty and truly reptilian. We use PVC pipe for jumps and poles for the horses, and I always give each length a kick before picking it up.
A chook did escape from the garden once, but was rounded up by a small boy. we are fortunate in not having raccoons, hawks or coyotes. Although Cromer does have the occasional fox, it’s not really urban enough for the Foxes Of Today. The PVC pipe lying around are relics of the EcoMo(TM), my environmentally friendly guinea-pig-powered lawnmower.
I am not certain of your diagnosis, and will spend the rest of the weekend devising a Terribly Expensive Genome Sequencing Experiment to determine whether that rabbit is, in fact, not a chicken.
Well, I would, wouldn’t I?
The offices of your favourite professional weekly science magazine beginning with N shall quake with anticipation in advance of the receipt of your vast multi-author paper on the subject, complete with thirteen billion trillion pages of supplementary information.
Ah, I see you’re familiar with the kind of study in question. I recommend refusing all requests for blood, feather, or other tissue samples from the chicken/rabbit in question.
I saw a rabbit fly in the claws of an eagle, but maybe it was a Griffin- rabbit.
Sounds terribly Mexican, Alejandro. And wasn’t it a snake?
is probably, the heights deceive me.
Oh! Damn, is a Chicken-raptor wit rabbith in the claws.
Reference: “Dinosaurs” by Alberto Saurio in Twitter #lolbarary
Sorry, rabbit.
How do you keep the giraffes from kicking down all the fences?
they never alight from their unicycles.