You might think that "free-range" hens, can even mean that the bird is not all the time locked in its wire cage, but is allowed now and then to walk and flap around in the huge shed where, it is believed, many of them are kept. Long before the word organic was heard and long before people began to question closely how their food came to them, it was normal in farms and even suburban gardens to keep hens, with considerable freedom to roam.
One unusually large garden was situated on the edge of the city, and, said a friend, his mother, while having a good shed for them to shelter in at night, gave them, largely, the freedom of a rambling garden which contained bushes of blackcurrant, whitecurrant, redcurrant and gooseberries galore. Not only that, but loganberries and raspberries, a score and more of apple trees and at least two plum trees and a damson.
For hens - or so it seemed to the mother - were far more interested in the insects they could scratch out of the ground than any berry or other fruit. They were fine eggs but then, it seemed, so were all the eggs kept by amateurs anyway. Later, when the family moved to a house where no hens could easily be kept, on holidays they stayed with a household where hens had the run of four fields and even then, felt the call of freedom enough sometimes to hop over into other pastures, eventually leading back to the house, a string of small chicks - the result of their "laying out" as it is known. (In the same way, the tomatoes were treated in what might seem a primitive way, for the father demanded of his son that he go out with shovel and bucket regularly to collect cow-pats which were dumped into a tank of water, to nourish the plants.)
All this because The Daily Telegraph ran an article the other day telling us that a poultry farmer in England planted 4,000 trees having been advised that his freerange hens needed more shelter. He pointed out that, after all, the birds' ancestors came from the jungle. Under the influence of the new environment, he says, the birds are happier and lay more eggs. And he has 9,000 of them. He is pictured in among his trees with a couple of hundred birds, with a smile on his face. Y