Andy Ninja has started crowing at dawn. Well, too early in the morning anyway. It’s a reasonable hobby for a post-menopausal chicken without a flock to keep her entertained. However, I fear those living nearby may view poultry crowing at daybreak, regardless of equipment, as in effect a rooster and invoke the “no cockerels in […]
A good couple of years after apparently going through the “the change” and only a few months since she was regularly crowing at dawn, Andy Ninja’s back on the lay. They’re not particularly beautiful eggs – sometimes crimped like they’ve been extracted with forceps or she’s stopped for a breather mid-lay; sometimes exceedingly delicate; often […]
The chooks have abandoned Palm Beach, my upcycled mid-century vernacular modernist masterpiece of a hen house. Its retro roof line and evocative beach-shack colour scheme wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of Vogue Living with Chickens but it seems these days, our girls feel out of place inside it. I feel the overwhelming […]
Long ago, Andy Ninja the ISA Brown laid an egg a day, regular as clockwork. The laundry, attached to the back of the house, was her chosen spot. The eggs started appearing on the tiled floor, so we put out a straw-filled cardboard box, to stop breakages if nothing else. For Snowball the Silkie bantam […]
This blog starts and ends calmly and peaceful as we consider lush grass growing. In the middle there’s some horrifying interspecies violence – I’ll tell you before it happens so you can look away if you need to. When we first into our place nearly a decade ago, there was plenty of grass in the […]
There’s aren’t too many workplaces that have their own bird list. Or offices that you can use as a hide for stalking coy marshbirds. On the 5 k walk that bookends my train commute from Berowra to Epping, I might see a tree creeper or a figbird, a scrubwren or a fairy wren, a flock […]
The untimely death of our favourite chicken Shyla has generated unaccustomed scenes of activity in our backyard. We are not a dynamic household. We are a posse of ponderers and ruminators, hoarders and procrastinators, ever ready with a “let’s not rush into things” or a “perhaps we should pause to examine this problem from all […]
It’s not often that I find myself on same page at Tony Abbott, Australia’s climate change denying PM. But having exhausted the potential of their previous three word slogans, the conservative government recently moved on to a new one: “Kill the Cats”. After this week’s events I think I could find some common cause with […]
Andy Ninja was always a chicken with a mission. She arrived at our place, in the company of her rather macho sister Harley, already in possession of a name that perfectly captured her special qualities, thanks to the penetrating insights of my chicken-wrangling nieces. Within a year she’d made her first break for freedom. A […]
Cucumbers will go to desperate lengths to flee an attack-flock of brush turkeys, eh? So is it better to die fighting than live in chains? I’m not sure where my zucchini would stand on this one. I’ve managed to keep the plants alive under an ancient perforated veggie net, held up by a rusty drum […]