Doing Bird

<p>Thousands of people are keeping chickens as pets for the first time. There are plenty of books that will show you how. <i>Doing Bird</i> tells you what it''s like, charting the highs and lows in the year of an amateur hen keeper and his flock.<br><br>Split into months and seasons, <i>Doing Bird</i> is an extension of Gurdon''s highly successful <i>Sunday Telegraph</i> ''Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance'' column, and brings out the characters and idiosyncrasies of the birds themselves.<br><br>Highlights include Bombay the Indian runner duck''s unrequited and very non-platonic love for Bella the chicken. Sven the rheumatic, pensioner cockerel''s last stand against a marauding fox, and his son Svenson''s sometimes awkward transition from teenaged pretender to putative Alpha male with a dodgy aim. We see the power play between flock old stagers Peeping Chicken, Anne Summers, Brahms, Meringue, Bella and Nude to new arrivals Squawks 1 and 2 and the pair of birds initially known as ''the other two,'' until one of them tries savaging the author''s hand and is re-christened Slasher -leaving her colleague with the sobriquet of ''Too''.</p>