I keep six hens on a strip of back garden in Sheffield and write down what actually happened to them, including the winters when the tally sheet stayed empty and the summer I found mite in the perch ends.

Back Lane Hens is one household and six birds on a terraced back garden in the north-west of Sheffield, about nine metres from the kitchen door to the back wall. The hens arrived in the spring of 2021 as four point-of-lay pullets, and the flock has been six most years since, which is as many as the ground will carry without turning to bare clay by February. The garden slopes, faces roughly north-east, and catches the wind that comes down off the moors past Rivelin. All of that shows up in the notes, because a coop that works in a sheltered yard behaves differently on a slope that drains onto a path.

What gets written down is whatever I would otherwise forget: how many eggs came in each week, how much feed went out of the bin, which bird stopped laying and when, what the coop smelled like on a wet October morning. The tally sheet lives on the inside of the shed door with a pencil on a string, because a count made from memory three weeks later is a guess with a number attached. The older sheets are in a box file in the house, and I still go back to them when I am trying to work out whether a bad patch is normal or actually a problem.

I am not a smallholder, a vet, or anyone with training. I have made most of the ordinary mistakes at least once and a few of them twice, and the notes keep the mistakes in, because they are the part that taught me anything. Nothing here is advice, nothing is sold, no feed merchant or breeder is named, and the neighbours who put up with the noise at six in the morning stay anonymous too. If something here contradicts an earlier note, the later one says so and both stay up. The writing happens in the evening, usually the same week, and it is deliberately dull in places, because the useful parts of keeping birds are the boring repeated ones rather than the photogenic ones.