Daisy, Ditsy, Dottie, Doris and Dorinda the ducks have joined my ducks Belle and Dickie and they seem to have taken to each other like… well, like ducks to water.
A week later at the market where I went to buy some apples, I ended up buying two more hens and a cockerel (I need Chickens Anonymous) to join the Spice Girls – my naughty chickens. My friend Annette (who is responsible for me getting more ducks) is a bit of a chicken expert and told me that if I put them in the chicken coop at night with the existing chickens they would be fine as “chickens can’t count. When they get up in the morning – whoever comes out of the coop is accepted”.
This was a critical requirement since the Spice Girls as we call them, a bunch of misbehaving chickens, had to be separated from the rest as they are so mean.
It worked – I am amazed. Those Spice Girls have bullied all the other chickens I’ve introduced and even peck at Fred and Flo the geese but they are following the new cockerel Luther Vandross around and chirping happily at him. If they had eyelids I think they would be batting them.
So, I’m thinking – all is rosy in the world of the birds at the bottom of the garden.
I am wrong.
Of course.
First of all Daisy Duck turned into Houdini Duck. She suddenly appeared at the back door. We clipped her wing and put her back. Ten minutes later, she was at the back door – I took her back to the pen. After that she was out of the pen all day and trying to get back in the door to her friends, at one point the Spice Girls were up on top of their coop watching me run about trying to get her back in – I could swear that they were cheering her on. I just couldn’t work out how Daisy was getting out. I checked the fence – no holes, she wasn’t flying out, how was it happening?
After two days of this I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and took a glass of wine down to the bottom of the garden and sat quietly watching the bird pens.
It was like “Night at the Museum” down there.
Luther Vandross the cockerel is in one pen with 6 girls and Kendo Nagasaki the cockerel is in another pen with his 6 girls. The pens are opposite each other and separated by a path. The two of them lined up at the fences and had a crow off. Then Kendo Nagasaki became incensed and climbed up a tree in his pen and dropped down into the Spice Girls pen. He then chased Luther and pinned him in a corner and I had to go and rescue him and put Kendo back. All the other birds were squawking and watching – it was like a fight in the school playground.
After that it calmed down for a bit – but Daisy made no moves. Fred and Flo the geese got fed up with Scary Spice and chased her up a lilac tree; Dickie Duck sat on the ladder of the chicken coop demanding a password or money to let anyone get by; Kendo was at the fence crowing at the crest fallen Luther and Dickie was being Dickie – he has an insatiable appetite for the ladies. All four of my cats were in the pen at one point, ‘Enry Cooper likes to sleep in the coop, Lou Lou likes to use the pens as a short cut to the fields at the bottom of the garden, Winston and Ginger Roger are very careful of the geese who are extremely intolerant of their presence – it was a bit of a cat among the pigeons moment with birds chasing cats and cats chasing birds but no harm was done.
Suddenly I saw a flurry of white at the gate of the duck pen – Daisy was working her way out under the gate, bobbing her head up and down to move the wire and then popping out the other side. I think she put the wire back when she was done because you’d never know it had moved.
I got her back, nailed a piece of wood under the gate and all is now calm – at least for an escaping duck, as to the rest of what goes on down there when they think I’m not around, who knows…
A bientôt
Janine
