Nearly everything I read lately has some sort of chicken reference in it.  This is from Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, the story of an Italian baron who lived in the trees:

One day we heard that he was drinking fresh milk every morning; he had made friends with a goat, which would climb up the fork of an olive tree a foot or two from the ground; but it did not really climb up, it just put its two rear hoofs up, so that he could come down onto the fork with a pail and milk it.  He had a similar arrangement with a chicken, a red Paduan, a very good layer.  He had made it a secret nest in the hole of a trunk, and on alternate days he would find an egg, which he drank after making two holes in it with a pin.