Before I realized this Aracauna chook was a rooster, I called him Tina Turner because, well … you can see why.
He just reminded me that this is, primarly, a bird blog!
The pecking order
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!
The girl with the bleeding eye
About twice a week, during the night, Husband used to see the girl with the bleeding eye. She was always lying on her back in the single bed adjacent to his, even though that’s where I sleep now. Her left eye spurted blood in a projectile way, up towards the ceiling, then – like a waterfall in slow motion – fell, the droplets somehow evaporating before they reached the white counterpane underneath which she lay silently.
Husband used to say that this particular hallucination didn’t bother him because he knew that the girl with the bleeding eye wasn’t really there.
“What do you do when you see her?”
“I say hello.”
“What does she do?”
“She just smiles and the bleeding stops.”
BTW hallucinations are often a symptom of Parkinson’s disease and/or (paradoxically) the medications used to treat this condition. Husband has developed an heroic ability to dismiss his hallucinations as hallucinations. He’s become clever at telling the difference.
Husband also knew, from when we first got him, that Tina Turner was not a hen, but a rooster!
“Those thieving birds”
Silverchair’s song, “Those thieving birds” is one of my favourites and I was tempted to call this blog “Thieving birds” but I thought that might be just as obscure as the weird metaphors in this beautiful song (check it out …. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCQ-TWipBhc )
For me, the idea of thieving birds, despite its darker implications, means this: These birds have stolen tidbits of my heart then returned them to me like nuggets of gold. Yeah, I know that sounds a bit cliched and twee but hopefully the pictures will do the talking here.
Top left: Pearl, our first Sebastopol gosling
Top right: Tina Turner, the rooster I thought was a hen
Left: King peacock competing with white peacock
Right: Emery, the emu chick at two months of age!
jmgoyder 