Angelina: What are these things?
Phoenix 1: I’m not sure, but they look rather delicious.
Queenie: They’re chicken eggs, you morons. Well, I think they are … they dropped out of the woman’s bag of cabbage. Don’t touch them – they could be from the shop!
Tapper: How do you know they’re not duck eggs?
Tina Turner’s arrogance is breathtaking. Not only does he dominate the picnic table where I chop up the cabbages for all of the birds, he constantly attacks me. He waits until I have my back turned and then whammo, I have a rooster attached to my leg. What I find mystifying about these attacks is that when I shake him off, he then takes bread or cabbage from my hand.
So I have decided to teach Tina a lesson in humility:
Hahahaha!
I had intended to write a moving and poignant account of Son’s homecoming today.
Then, when my mum came over, I thought I’ll simply post a picture instead. Unfortunately it keeps going sideways no matter how many times I correct it!
Then, because his splint or jacket or whatever they call it, reminded us all of a corset (which, like shoulder pads, is apparently the latest ‘thing’), after Grandma left and Son was having a nap, I googled ‘women in corsets + pics’. Well, that was a bit of a shock! I am probably now on some police list of suspected pornography addicts – hell. So I quickly added ’18th century’ to my search phrase and, even though some of those websites were also a bit suss, I finally found this:
Then, I went outside to discover that one of the long lost hens had reappeared! I’m not quite sure where she has been or where the other hens are and I keep expecting to see multitudes of baby chickens but I can’t find any evidence of a nest. Later, when Son woke up I told him she’d returned and asked him where he thought she might have been.
“You don’t know much do you, Mum,” he said, looking down at me from his new height. “She is one hen and we have three roosters; wouldn’t you have a hiding place? You are so naive!”
We are back to normal!
Tina Turner (Araucana rooster): Don’t come any closer, Phoenix.
Phoenix (Golden pheasant): It’s okay, I’m leaving!
Phoenix: Hi guys!
Peacocks: Hi Phoenix, ‘bye Phoenix.
Phoenix: No problems – I get it; I’ll just dance away on my own.
Phoenix: Don’t come any closer, Julie.
Me: I know what you mean, Phoenix.
This morning I looked out the window to see three perfect moonflowers! I thought we would have to wait until next year (see my ‘moonflower’ posts), so this was a fantastic surprise. In the middle of the photo below you can see the brown shrivelled remains of the previous moonflowers. And, by the time it takes me to finish this post, the three late bloomers will have begun to close up, droop and fade. Their lives are so short and yet so full.
When I was younger and more prayerful than I am now, I used to look for signs all the time – like divine signs I mean. I soon discovered that if you spend all your time looking for divine signs, you end up tripping over your feet a lot! Nevertheless, these three late blooming moonflowers do seem like a good sign.
The fact that there are only three seems like a good sign is rather lovely too – one for Husband, one for Son and one for me. Well, why not!
We have another late bloomer here too – the Malay rooster. As you may or may not recall, he is the offspring of the Malay hen who was given to us months ago. He is now almost full grown and hangs out with the other two roosters, Tina Turner and No-name. The reason No-name doesn’t have a proper name is because, after the fox massacre of so many of our chooks, I stopped naming them.
No-name has a hell of a crow on him – he never stops crowing, day and night, and is much louder than Tina. Perhaps he is trying to prove that he deserves a better name than No-name because he will also sit on my lap and likes to be patted.
I was assuming/hoping that all of the (recently) missing hens were hiding somewhere, sitting on eggs but it’s now been way too long since I’ve seen any of them which can only mean that they have been ‘foxed’. I live in hope however that one day a zillion little chickens will emerge from underneath one of the many sheds. After all, I never expected to see another moonflower this year.
I’ll leave you with a picture of Malay. Isn’t he beautiful! I have decided to call him Moonflower. It’s worth the risk….
Little Chooks 1 and 2, our two identical Araucana hens, went missing weeks ago and, even though I thought that the fox might have nabbed them, I hoped they were sitting on eggs somewhere.
So, you can imagine my relief when Son told me he’d seen one of them emerge, rather bedraggled, from underneath one of the sheds, the other afternoon. This means that she is definitely sitting on eggs deep under that shed and, hopefully, we’ll soon see some offspring.
I haven’t seen either of the Little Chooks myself, and it isn’t the same shed as the one where Sussex and Malay produced their chicks (see a previous post). With them, we could at least see underneath the shed and watch the progress, leave water and food etc. The shed that Little Chooks have chosen is impenetrable, so I will just have to wait and hope.
Hope can be risky.
I love watching the birds at play. Even though they spend most of their time pecking around for food – grass, grubs and so on, each breed has its own version of fun:
The guinnea fowl love to dig themselves into any grassless patches and roll around in the dirt. They have also formed a choir and their performances are frequent (about once every hour or so). Their music is a bit of an acquired taste which visitors often refer to as ‘noise’ but we are used to its strange echoes.
The peacocks, of course, love to dance the ‘fantail’. Now, even though it’s only the males who do this, the females find it enormously entertaining (occasionally!) They also play a game called ‘scare-the-hell-out-of-Julie’ which consists of blood-curdling screams which never fail to stop me in my tracks, as they are so piercing.
The chooks love to play hide and seek in amongst the bits and pieces of farm debris. The hens are particularly good at hiding which is probably because they don’t like the roosters’ idea of play which I think is better left undescribed here.
The turkeys love a game called ‘peck-the-duck-until-it-wakes-up’. Even though the following picture is of one of the Bubbles (turkey) and Tapper (duck) when they were young, they still play this game with varying degrees of success.
The golden pheasants used to play a war game that turned out to be not a game at all but a war, with the loser banished to an adjacent property and the winner remaining here, victorious and splendid. And lonely. War games are no longer encouraged here.
The Indian runner ducks love to run around, pretending to be fast and, yes, before they met the emus, they thought they were fast. Unfortunately for the Indian runners, most of the timed races have been won by the Emerys, but the ducks are very dignified losers. The Emerys do concede, however, that they have the distinct advantage of loooooooooooooonger legs!
The best game of all here is waterplay and, since the following photo was taken, we have added a pond so that it isn’t just Godfrey who gets to play.
Oh, I nearly forgot – Buttons, the weiro, likes to boogie on my shoulder. He seems to be able to turn his head all the way around, then does this nodding thing really fast, then he shakes himself, then the whole dance move repeats itself. Since he is on my shoulder more than he is off my shoulder lately, this means that I am constantly covered in a sprinkling of tiny feathers that look like dandruff, as well as, you know, weiro waste (the excitement of the boogie seems to affect his little bowel – oh well!)
The following youtube of a crow snowboarding is accompanied by a rather serious little article about whether birds like to play in the same way humans do. I don’t think it matters.
The title of this post derives from the Gilbert O’Sullivan song of the 1960s and reminds me that, no matter how many people surround us, we are, fundamentally, alone. For some this is terrifying; for others (like me!) it is refreshing; for all of us, it is a reality. We are alone in the birth canal and in the death canal and that is a fact.
I have noticed, over the last several months, that if a bird has been injured, all of the other birds will leave it alone. There seems to be this instinctive compulsion in birds, and perhaps in many other animals, to get as far away as possible from the suffering or dying of their breed. Actually, it’s possibly more of a revulsion or a fear thing – I’m not sure.
We humans, on the other hand, sometimes feel as if we are supposed to gather around the injured or stricken of our breed, to empathize and commiserate, when what we really want to do is fly away. But we are good at pretending. Birds, on the other hand, don’t pretend, and I admire this unwitting honesty, this commonsense ….
…. this conundrum!
This chook is gone now and I will miss her so much.
In the life-death-life-death-life cycle of birds I have now seen it all, had my heart broken then re-put-together, and dealt swiftly with the kind of suffering that is evidenced by the frantic fluttering of wings. As you know, we have a fox problem; in fact this whole district has a fox problem, but I didn’t realise how much of a problem this was until we suffered our first casualties (this was before we lost our first emus).
It was months ago now, back at the beginning of our bird adventure and I will never forget that morning.
It was very early and the sun was just crawling out from behind a cloud when I heard a dreadful chorus of squawking and quacking, so I leapt out of bed and ran out of the house to the back yard and, only metres away, there was a fox with one of our male Indian runner ducks in its jaws. I shrieked and ran towards it and it let the duck go and ran away and, thankfully, the duck survived.
I called all of the birds – and gradually, silently, the chickens who hadn’t been killed came towards me. I have a food bin out the back, so I got some bread and they livened up a bit but, when I did a head count, I only counted six when there should have been 12. And I couldn’t find our two roosters. Then, I realised that the Indian runner I had saved, was all alone; his female mate was gone too.
There were feathers everywhere, but no bodies, and I learned later that foxes (specifically vixens feeding their cubs), bury or hide what they kill for a later food source. But that morning, not knowing what I know now, I sat down on the ground and cried while I fed little bits of bread to the survivors. There was an eerie silence and I looked up into the wattle trees to see that all of the peafowl and guinnea fowl were still there, staring down, scared and quiet.
I stopped crying and called up, “It’s okay, you can come down now; the fox is gone,” and, one by one, they vacated their branches to land softly near me and to share the bread with others.
Someone said to me today, ‘You’ve obviously always loved birds’ and I had to admit that, no, I have never loved, hated, liked or disliked birds. In fact, I have never even noticed birds (except the occasional bright blue wren), in much the same way that I have never noticed plants, trees, flowers or anything outdoors-ish and I absolutely loathe the idea of gardening. So I guess that’s what you call ambivalence.
Husband has always been the nature-boy and he has, over the last half century, created a beautiful garden of palms, camellias, orange trees, silver birches, maples, flame trees, wattles, cacti, wormwood and the list goes on … (as you can see I’ve been making notes and gradually learning to appreciate the different ‘breeds’.)
As a child and teenager I was very nature-boyish too, especially when we lived in Canada and then in Papua New Guinnea but, once I grew up and became a nurse, and then a university lecturer, I got over all of that (not just the nature thing but the wanting-to-be-a-boy thing).
So I don’t exactly know what triggered this birdiness. I don’t think it was the guinnea fowl; I think it might simply have been Isa (our first hen) who, by the way, is laying multiple eggs now! Initially, I was nervous to pick her up because her wings scared me but now she sits on my lap, lets me stroke her and so do the other chooks, rooster and nearly all of the menagerie!
It has been a bit like entering C.S. Lewis‘s Narnia (my favourite book series of all time, especially when I was a child); the birds have bewitched me in a very, very good way – beautiful!
Husband has been loving the birds and Son is getting there, but for me this is absolute magic!
Oh yes, re gardening – well, now that the gang have vacated the greenhouse, my plan is to plant tomatoes in there. Surely these are easy to grow? I love tomatoes.
jmgoyder 