Chicken to Go

Now I’ll bet you thought I was advertising some takeouts or takeaway foods as they’re referred to here in New Zealand. But you’d be wrong about that title above. It’s just more about my little clawed helpmates that dig up my soil with those tractor-like feet of theirs. Why, they’re regular little excavators any miner would be pleased to have around for those hard to reach corners where the ore might be hiding. And they persist in digging out all of the grubs that might be right under my greenery that protrudes along pathways, which is good if you like dirt strewn everywhere along with pieces of dying organic material that’s been decapitated from its source plant.

So when they’re industrious during the day, I try to keep up with their progress but usually just find the residue of their ‘work’ as I follow where they’ve been. My new goal is to beat them to it next time, but that’s been my ongoing goal for years now and they’re winning. So everyday I find myself swearing out loud about the sweeping I’m doing   daily to make the pathways presentable again. But invariably it’s a thankless job since my ‘work’ is undone as soon as they grace that area again with their beaky presence. Hmm. Maybe I’ve got it wrong and these are their beaky presents. Perhaps I need to speak more slowly as some of my vocabulary words are hard to understand for a bird-brained animal of mixed up genetics. But they can be sweet and very entertaining and if we could find the eggs I’d really feel a whole heap better. We’re currently onto our 2^nd lot of store bought eggs, in those trays of 20. That’s probably because I don’t spend my days waiting at the beck and cluck to retrieve their freshly laid ones since they never exactly tell me where the hell that is. Instead they cluck before they lay and after they lay and then walk around in big circles, so I don’t know where they were laying anyway or more simply if they’re going to lay soon or they just have laid. They like to find the perfect hideaway under a towering grass hedged in between other towering grasses, that are all so large that it’s close to impossible to walk between them…or at all. Or if they lay in the woods area, well all bets are off. Unless I hire a gnome to search vigorously through the ivy covered ground and under every shrub the size of trees or around the various trunks that are hidden under the advancing ground covers that cover what used to be a pathway now swathed in between somewhere in the green-ness. We used to walk through there but that’s all just a thicket now and quite inpenetrable, unless you like tripping on unknown stumps and fallen branches hidden by the persistent ivy.

Oh such is life at the House of Cluck-Cluck. I do try to run outside if I hear that familiar sound of the hens announcing a new arrival. But then they lead me away from where they probably fulfilled their obligation of egg provision in exchange for the tons of parings and greens and bread and wheat and seeds and scraps of our food and cat food and dog food we give them in the hopes that they’ll lay. And lay they do….but where?

So I’ve been forced to use a messenger service with my youngest, adolescent rooster, Rupert, being the messenger. Only he’s not listening. But he is practicing his crowing, although croaking might be a more apt description of the noises he makes. But that’s why I picked him to be our messenger to deliver my message. He’ll certainly get their attention.

“Okay Rupert. I want you to tell each hen to please lay in the nesting boxes that are everywhere around the place. That way we can find the eggs every day. Do you hear me Rupert?”

Dead silence follows and the rooster appears to want to just sit on the hay bale and stare (for the first time ever I might add).

And all I can think of is where did I put my Coq au Vin recipe? Hmm.