Me: Good evening, my beautiful gang!
Seli: Julie!
Woodroffe: Julie!
Zaruma: Julie!
Pearly: Julie!
Godfrey: ABOUT FACE, gang, that vroom herder is coming. Quick, get into the yards!
Spring storms
It is the third week of Spring over here in the southwest of Western Australia and we have only had one week of sunshine. Today the winds are whipping up, the rain is relentless and the forecast for tonight includes gusts of 100kms – mmm.
The animals get nervous when it’s like this and so do I!
Yesterday, some guys I’ve never met before arrived to chainsaw and clean up the debris of fallen wattle trees from the last storm. In a couple of hours they did what seemed to me to be an insurmountable task and they didn’t even charge very much. They said that if we had another storm, the remaining old trees at the back might fall over too because they are ant-ridden. There was no sign of today’s storm yesterday – weird!
I think Ming may have organized for them to come (he is very keen to be the man of the house!) but when I asked the main guy, he said, “God sent me!”
I wasn’t sure whether he was joking or serious so I just shook his hand – mmmm!
Looking up
I’ve been asked a few times now about the rationale behind having so many birds when life is already complicated enough with Anthony’s Parkinson’s Disease, the nursing lodge transition traumas, Ming’s back surgery and subsequent life adjustments. So here is an explanation:
Last year, when Anthony was still living here at home and the idea of a nursing lodge had not even been contemplated, and I was already on an extended leave arrangement from my job as a lecturer at the local university, I decided to do everything possible to make our lives brighter. It began with the guinnea fowl because Anthony has always loved them; then poultry; then the peafowl (that was my idea). We had chookyards built, began to reap the delight of fresh eggs and the guinnea fowl (a dozen) made a very interestingly noisy addition to what had become an overly quiet life.
I befriended all of the birds and, to some extent, tamed them but it wasn’t until that first dusk when I watched, amazed, as all of the guinneas and peafowl flew up into the trees to sleep, that I realized I was hooked. Why? Because for the first time in years I was looking up.
Water wars
Me: Zaruma, that is the drinking trough.
Zaruma: I know, Julie. It’s not just me – Tapper’s having a break from her eggs in here too.
Me: But Zaruma, I’ve told you before not to swim in the drinking trough.
Tapper: I’m out of here!
Me: Good girl, Tapper – go and look after your eggs. Zaruma, could you please swim in the pond from now on?
Zaruma: The geese won’t let me.
Me: Okay, I’ll have a word with the geese.
Me: Seli and Ola – could you please let the ducks into the pond occasionally?
Seli and Ola: NO!
Indifference
I read once that the opposite of love is indifference, not hatred, and I think this makes a lot of sense. Indifference has a deceptive blandness to it, but is actually much more effective than hatred which, in my opinion, is a rather stupid emotion but does fuel a multiplicity of wars – within families, within countries, across history and geography. Hatred gobbles itself up in a futile way because it cannot forgive.
Indifference, on the other hand, is a wonderful emotional tool because you can use it to forgive and forget, and it is much gentler than hatred. The only problem with indifference is that, because it is so subtle, sometimes the indifferenced don’t get it. I have learned these wisdoms from the antics of peafowl – ha!
Poor King. He keeps trying to impress Queenie but she just wants him to go away!
Vroom-herding
The other afternoon, I was outside feeding the gang and trying to ‘herd’ them into their yards (I always have trouble with either Daffy or Pearl), Ming came home from milking the cows next door and did it in five seconds flat. He is a much more assertive ‘herder’ than I am.
The birds are wise; they obey his every ‘vroooooom’! If I were a bird, I would too.
Love story 95 – Mother and Son
You know that wonderful series, Mother and Son? If you don’t, it is well worth watching for its tragi-comic episodes.
Anthony and I used to watch it and laugh our heads of because in many ways it reminded us of the days of his lovely, but wiley, mother, Inna. In her 80s when I first met this family, Inna was definitely the boss and Anthony, in his 40s, was the only unmarried ‘kid’ so he looked after her and ran the dairy farm [you can see ‘Love story’ offerings in previous posts].
Then, when Ants and I got married, I was in my 30s and he was in his 50s and there were definitely some hilarious resemblances to Mother and Son in a weird, Freudian way.
And now? I am the mother in her 50s and Ming (our son) is approaching his 20s and some of our scenarios, conflicts and shared hilarity, remind me of Mother and Son, because there are some disconcerting similarities.
Speaking of motherhood – what the hell is Tapper (duck) doing inside the tiny space of the chook house? She has been sitting on a million eggs for two weeks now. Today, I said to her, have some daughters as well as sons please!
Well now I’ve seen everything!
Phoenix 1, our golden pheasant male, was actually flirting with a baby rabbit! Golden pheasants perform their mating ritual by fanning out the feathers around their heads on one side, then turning around and doing the same thing on the other side. When we had our female pheasants, the two males did this continuously (which obviously drove the females crazy and may be why they disappeared!) So now that we only have the one male, he tends to flirt with every bird that is roughly his size – the new hens for instance. And now a baby rabbit!
It was difficult to get decent pictures of this little incident because it all happened so fast. Phoenix 1 had been terrorizing this baby rabbit with his flirting when suddenly the mother rabbit chased him off. Hilarious!
A moment after I took this second picture, the mother rabbit collided with Phoenix 1 and he got a terrible fright and flew into the closest tree. I stood there amazed and grinning.
jmgoyder 