OUR cockerels are feeling outdated and old fashioned. Their look very much last season. Appeal on the wane. The reason? They have been just joined by three fancy Polish chamois banties.

East European migrants are not only powerful contingents in the national work force, but also in our poultry flock. These are not the only usurpers in the local chicken population, friends also have a Polish chamois bantam in their flock of chickens, Slawek, and he too exerts a powerful attraction on his ladies. As my mum said of the American GIs in the war, “They’re over sexed and they’re over here”.

The trio originally belonged to a doctor friend. The bantams had been bought on an optimistic whim that not only would they provide ornamentation in his garden, but also eggs. Instead their raucous cockadoodledoing soon revealed that the three of them would never lay, despite the tempting placing of dummy eggs in empty nest boxes.

With their fetching hairstyles I am very tempted to attach a small powder room to the hen hut. Currently they are keeping themselves very much to themselves, perhaps shocked by the butch ways of our two Maran cockerels.

Today, although the three Polish chamois were happy in their group, I did notice several of the hens had decided to hang around the orchard where the hen hut is rather than go exploring as they usually do.

Communication may have presented an initial problem. I suspect the Marans, a French breed, may have originally overwhelmed our stalwart British hens with their Gallic charm. But now the three Polish chamois are beginning to mount a charm offensive with potentially devastating consequences.

But as there is no way I want five cockerels on the farm, at least one of them will join Slawek. Top cock in his flock of ex-commercial laying hens. Lucky ladies.

But Slawek does not deign to go into their hen hut at night. Instead he chooses to roost on the roof. That way he can keep an eye on whichever hen he has determined to favour with his charms, and yet maintain a distance and air of Slavic mystery. But he’d better start thinking of a new cluck-up line. His marital rights are about to be threatened by Henryk; formerly known as Henrietta.