My childhood's cannibal chickens and their armor-grade eggs

There was (and still is) a little tool shed in my childhood garden that also had a chicken coop. My parents had built the house before I was born, but had inherited the shed and coop from the previous property owner, who had kept pigeons there. The shed had been given the name "Valeria" (meaning "What are you laughing at?"), because the owner wanted something to match his brother-in-law's very fancy garden but didn't quite match the quality.

At some point, I think when I was 8 or so, I convinced my parents to get some new chickens that I would take care of. Given the size of the coop, they had to be dwarf chickens. They had mostly free run of the garden, and occasionally the neighbor's when they found a hole in the chicken wire fence we had set up. 

Mostly we had them for the eggs. We tried eating one, but since it was not a youngling any more, it was rather tough. My dad and me did the killing together, not sure who swung the axe - probably him. The eggs were great though. We had never seen eggs with such intensely orange yolks, and they were very tasty.

The eggs also hard super thick shells. Out near the river mouth, there was a pile of oyster shells. Those are commonly left over from the stone age, though this one was recent, and we even had to correct a professional archaeologist we knew on that point. We would take some of those to give to the chickens for extra calcium. Now we have a family tradition of rolling hard-boiled eggs down a hill at Easter. It's a fairly steep hill, but grassy. Normal eggs would probably last 4 or 5 rolls if we just let them roll on their own. Great fun for us kids, of course.

A view down into Tinghulen along where we would roll our eggs

These eggs, however, would not budge. After they showed no inclination to crack after the first several rolls, we started throwing them to give them more speed. Nothing. We threw them harder and harder, and eventually just threw them overhand down to the bottom, which was something like 25 meters down. They just happily bounced off the grass! Only when we finally threw them onto rocks did they give up. Impressive little tanks! Later we saw some of our egg shells in an art exhibit containing some items found in nature - we could still recognize our motifs.

Those chickens would eat just about anything, too. They of course ate bugs and seeds from the garden, but would sometimes come up to our terrace and we'd toss them things. Chips were a favourite, probably for the salt. We even one time fed them a chicken carcass that they happily dug into. Fortunately, we didn't repeat that, or we might have started Mad Chicken Disease. They also found it easy enough to jump over the fence to the vegetable garden, where they discovered to our dismay that lettuce was poisonous to them. 

We got the chickens (when we didn't make new chicks ourselves, we only did that part of the time) from a guy in town who was very good with chickens. We would trade for home-made compost-based soil. He would rave about the soil, saying it was so good he could just eat it!

Those chickens were a fun part of my childhood. We had them for two or three years, but unfortunately kids are fickle creatures, and I started losing interest in them eventually. Apart from the lettuce problems, I forgot to care for them for several days running during a particularly cold winter, and we lost them. It hasn't been feasible for me to have chickens again since, but I miss those eggs.