Our First Three Chickens, left to right - Daisy, Eileen and Betty

Now, having got the bug of keeping and caring for chickens, me and my partner decided to explore the world of battery hens. We had seen some publicity about adopting ex battery farm hens via a local Norfolk organisation called Little Hen Rescue. The group had arranged with a local farmer to take 10,000 hens and re-home them. We jumped at the chance to get involved and registered online to adopt three hens. We built a chicken run and were given another by a local school who had three girl pupils build one as an exercise.

After a little confusion we managed to pick up our new hens. It was a very emotional experience as the little birds had hardly any feathers and were shaking with nerves. They had lived the first year of their unhappy and stressful lives crammed into tiny cages piled one on top of each other with no access to sunlight or grass. It makes you very angry when you first see them and it’s hard not to cry.

Rick Lennox and Sparkle having a cuddle

They each came with little fleece jackets on to keep them warm, which makes them look even more adorable. Underneath, of course, they looked more like the kind of chicken that a meat eater might find in the frozen section of their local supermarket.

It’s been just over a week now since we picked up Marmite, Sparkle and Hiccup and the change in them is amazing! /the first thing we had to do was teach them how to drink. They had been used to being drip fed and had no idea how to drink from a bowl. For the first couple of days they stayed nervously inside their hut but on the third day they finally ventured out into their new enclosure. Hiccup doesn’t like sharing food and pecks the other two but we keep our eyes on things and slowly she’s calming down. Hopefully soon we can integrate them with Daisy and Betty.

The hens in their new hut

To see the change from shy and frightened hens to inquisitive little chickens in just one week is so rewarding. They all have their own little characteristics and mannerisms and we can’t wait to get some more. Oh, and of course we now have plenty of boiled eggs for breakfast

A typical empty lot in the Fresno/Clovis conurbation. With a population of more than half a million and growing, views like this are growing less common in the area.

They are relics of the township and range system of land allotment which was devised to share out in a fair way the vast new territories acquired by the United States with the Louisiana Purchase, and which is the basis for the familiar grid system on which most American towns west of the Mississippi are laid out. In this they differ fundamentally from undeveloped lots in European towns, which – as densely overgrown as they may appear – almost certainly have a history of intense human activity going back many centuries. Hard as it is to fathom, these wild acres are pretty much as they were when the first white settlers crossed the mountains to try their fortunes in the promised land towards the setting sun.

Standing on such a parcel of land here in the San Joaquin Valley of central California – especially one undisturbed by the plough – one imagines wistfully the world that the naturalist John Muir encountered when he journeyed from San Francisco to Yosemite in the summer of 1868. He wrote:

…The valley of the San Joaquin is the floweriest piece of world I ever walked, one vast level, even flower-bed, a sheet of flowers, a smooth sea ruffled a little by the tree fringing of the river and here and there of smaller cross streams from the mountains. Florida is indeed a land of flowers, but for every flower creature that dwells in its most delightsome places more than a hundred are living here. Here, here is Florida. Here they are not sprinkled apart with grass between, as in our prairies, but grasses are sprinkled in the flowers; not, as in Cuba, flowers piled upon flowers heaped and gathered into deep, glowing masses, but side by side, flower to flower, petal to petal, touching but not entwined, branches weaving past and past each other, but free and separate, one smooth garment, mosses next the ground, grasses above, petaled flowers between.

Little of Muir’s San Joaquin remains. It was quickly noted that a land which could support flora in such abundance must be fertile indeed, and today the valley is an immense patchwork of fields, providing much of America’s fruit, vegetables, nuts, wine, dairy produce and cotton and all of its raisins. So it has remained for most of the last 150 years, interspersed here and there with small towns and just the occasional larger city – Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield. For while it is an ideal place for agriculture, it is less attractive for human habitation. The San Joaquin’s climate is classified as savanna: dry, flat grassland, with stagnant air that cradles cloying fogs in the winter and extreme, stifling heat in the summer. It rains seldom, so that the air also easily traps haze and pollution, rendering the beautiful, snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains and the lower Coast Range invisible for much of the year and giving the valley an illusory resemblance to the endless featurelessness of the midwestern prairies.

Even with modern air conditioning, it is a harsh place to live. For the early farmers, toiling in layers of Victorian clothes, it must have been almost unbearable. The few older farmhouses that remain are often built on stilts to allow air to circulate underneath and provide some coolness. At four o’clock in July and August – the hottest part of the day – valley cities can seem like ghost towns. Nothing stirs on the burning sidewalks – or anywhere else except in the fields, where migrant workers from Mexico and Central America pick fruit and cotton no matter how high the mercury rises. Even driving is difficult: if you have not found some shade, your parked car will be like an oven, the seats scalding hot, the steering wheel and gearshift intolerable to touch. Opening windows does nothing to cool either buildings or vehicles: you just crank up the AC and hope it works quickly.

A semi-rural scene in Clovis, California in December 2003.

Yet ever-growing numbers of people call this unforgiving environment home. The transformation of the San Joaquin began in the 1930s, with the arrival of thousands of poor farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl disaster of the Midwest, seeking a still-fertile place where they could begin anew. Now the valley is seeing a fresh influx of humanity: but these new invaders are fleeing not an environmental disaster but a more modern and prosaic phenomenon. California’s tourist image of golden beaches, sun, palm trees and the emblematic grandeur of the Golden Gate have driven property prices and the cost of living off the scale in the state’s main population centres around San Francisco Bay, the Los Angeles basin and San Diego.

The same location five years later - now a small business park.

Suddenly the baked San Joaquin Valley, with its high unemployment, inhospitable climate and abundant land leading to relatively low property prices, is looking attractive. People from the megalopolises are selling their million-dollar townhouses and buying big new homes in the valley. Some continue to commute to their jobs in the city, but with the people comes infrastructure and the businesses seeking to serve and employ them. The new housing developments are no longer dormitories but are beginning to house new valley dwellers.

All of this needs space, and with the fields of the San Joaquin still growing much of the nation’s food that space must be reclaimed from those empty lots within the city limits. The view shrinks, the old trees fall, the wildflowers and ground squirrels that lived there must make way for the humans who would now live and work on the land that was their home. Piece by piece,as we watch, the last parcels of John Muir’s wilderness are vanishing under the concrete foundations of the future.

It’s sunny and warm now, and aside from a likely few showers over the next month or so, it won’t rain again until after the county fair in late October.

The reason I can be so assured in this prediction is that I live in one of the world’s most stable climate zones: a Scotland-sized expanse of flat, featureless farmland, stretching from Sacramento and the San Joaquin Delta in the north to Bakersfield and the Kern County mountains in the south, sandwiched between the 14,000-foot Sierra Nevada massif and the lower, but no less imposing, Coast Range. Air masses blowing in through San Francisco Bay and the Delta hit a dead end in this vast basin, trapped by an inversion layer which exerts a death grip on any weather it brings with it. And as the summer goes on, the mountains suck away all moisture and the dry air beneath gets hotter and hotter. Any rain that does fall evaporates long before it reaches the valley floor.

The San Joaquin Valley, California

San Joaquin Valley, one of the most fertile places on Earth

Valley people don’t invest much in the weather. Unless you like to ski or snowboard at one of the nearby mountain resorts, you can get by quite nicely with a wardrobe of spring and summer clothing and a light jacket or two. Go out on even the frostiest January day and you’ll encounter at least one youth walking around quite happily in shorts and flip-flops. Even sunscreen isn’t a major priority, because on those hot July afternoons, if you have any sense, you don’t go outside – you stay someplace where there’s air conditioning.

Being a meteorologist here is a thankless job, especially during the long dry summer. The local TV stations go to extraordinary lengths to try to make the weather interesting, plugging technological toys that claim to be able to home in on the most tenuous of rain showers and plot their paths down to which streets will get wet and which will stay dry. Great significance is extracted from a two- or three-degree fluctuation in temperature, as well as constant comparisons with the record high and low for that date. Local forecasts are padded by wistful looks at distant corners of the country, where things might perhaps be more atmospherically lively.

The climate here may be stable, but it can be, ironically, just as deadly as anywhere else. In winter, local newspapers in Britain run stories about elderly people in danger of hypothermia because they can’t afford to heat their homes. Here, the stories appear in high summer and the OAPs are in danger of heatstroke because they can’t afford to run their air conditioning. Flooding is a worry, too, because it rains so little that the city’s drainage system can’t cope adequately with a sudden downpour or a more prolonged spell of wet weather. Tornadoes are about as common as they are in Britain, but they’re paid much keener attention to here because once they start, there’s very little geography available which might help to slow them down.

Hailing as I do from perennially cool and damp London, it took a while to get used to the effect of weather here, like the way a light shower is referred to as a ‘storm’, or the way the power goes out and traffic grinds to a halt with the first rain of autumn. Old-timers still get mileage from the winter long ago when snow actually reached the valley floor and settled for an hour. In July and August, at the other end of the graph where daytime temperatures can climb above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius) for weeks on end, it’s amusing to listen to the news anchors looking forward to a ‘balmy’ 95 degrees the next day.

It’s a two-way street, of course. Those examples are no less ridiculous on their face than the way Londoners flounder in half an inch of snow and call it a blizzard. And American expat Bill Bryson, in his book The Mother Tongue, recalls his hilarity when the London Evening Standard once ran the headline ‘Britain Sizzles in the 70s’.

We humans are adaptable, and we can get used to pretty much any alien climate. On my first visit to California, I recall a trip to the coast on Boxing Day and how incongruous it seemed to be walking around comfortably in a T-shirt and sunglasses, through streets bedecked with festive lights and past stores piping out Christmas carols. Now, I don’t bat an eyelid if it’s 70 degrees at Christmas. And I can assure you that after weeks of enduring triple-digit summer temperatures, wading through air like hot porridge and risking third-degree burns from touching your car’s steering wheel, a 95-degree day really is balmy.