Chooks

Okay, I have a huge confession to make.

I hate birds and more importantly I hate my chickens. They are ugly animals and they make my skin crawl. They are all brown, except for the ugliest white bird I have ever seen. You see its not that the chickens have done anything wrong, its just that they are birds.

When I was younger I had an incident with a packet of chips and an emu and that has lead to this insane phobia of all birds. I keep thinking that they are only thinking about ways to peck out my eyes and that in a mob that would be easier than anything that they have ever tried to do before.

But it gets worst, since the kids are not happily with their dad for a while I am now expected to be able to look after these animals. Feed and water I can do, throwing the food in as quickly as possible and filling up their water containers from outside the cage. But we have run into a problem, egg collection.

You see all through summer they have not been laying. Something about it being to hot and not getting enough of something, god only knows what though. But I think that now that their primary carer has left for a while, they have started again. They are making all the right noises and they seem to greet the morning with more gusto then they ever have before. One thing can only be happening in that cage each morning, egg production must have started again. Ahhhh…………………how am I going to get them?

You see Im all right with the idea of throwing food at them and watering from the outside, but stepping into that cage, please pluck my eyebrows with a hot poker. A cant at the moment make the time to go into the cage and as I said their primary carer is away. What am I meant to do? Im not ready to over come my phobia just yet, in fact I want to cling to it like a stranded passenger on the Titanic clinging to a lifeboat.

So that is the latest dilemma on the farm, realistically it’s the only dilemma on the farm at the moment. That and trying to work out which part of the fence the dogs are escaping from now.