With dawn’s first light on my bedroom walls and windows there arrives, too, the first commands of the day.
More a question, the first calls mean, “Where are you?” and sound like “squark, squeak, squark” in a sotto voce voice, sometimes one chook sometimes both of them.
One floor up from these demands I hold off tiptoeing to the bathroom fearing they’ll hear me, know I’m up, too, and crank up their volume and wake my neighbours.
Then comes a shot across my sleeping-in moment; loud, echoing chook calls, operatic whinging bouncing off my neighbour’s and my walls.
“Fxxx, fxxx, fxxx . . .” down the stairs I go, nude in these warm spring nights, a servant, just awake, too soon put to work.
• Never a backward step, this one. Pesky.
Dingle dangling I go out to the feed bin, scoop up seeds and put them into their feeder.
Peace!
Even though there’s a feeder there with grain in it, its not enough. They want their morning top up.
Somehow, bit by bit, I’ve spoilt them, given in too often to their calls.
Pesky (black) and Blanche d’Alpuget, (white), two Australorps. Commanders in Chief.
• Blanche d’Alpuget (L), Pesky (R)
Their chook run is outside the kitchen window, about 1 metre wide and 12 metres long. The neighbour’s house is another metre away on the other side of the boundary fence.
Why allow this morning chook cacophony?
Well, I don’t know how to undo the way the chooks have trained me except by ignoring their morning demands. I may try that if I think the neighbours can put up with the early morning demands until they shut up.
Work in progress.
In the meantime, they get their food, I’m helped out of bed, and I get a free meal of heroic suffering.
• Two eggs a day about 9 months of the year - thanks
And they give me fresh, delicious, healthy eggs, no chemicals.
There’s another thing they give me. Like most of us in rich countries I tend to eat three times a day. I love to cook, and no food waste has left my house since I bought here in 1978.
The more I cook the better I get at it.
What the chooks do is ‘help’ me cook and, best of all, remind me never to waste any food. When I trim veggies (I’m vegetarian with some fish each week) I keep the trimmed off butts of broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, stale this and that to make soups, stocks, sauces.
(Always close at hand in my kitchen is the terrific, easy to use and so imaginative and simple cook book, Use it all – The Cornersmith guide to a more sustainable kitchen by Alex Elliot-Howery and Jaimee Edwards)
Pesky and Blanche d’Alpuget hear me in the kitchen and demand their tithe. I throw out finely chopped veggie ends to them; the particularly old butts and vegie bits or spoiled food and plate scrapings go to them through the kitchen louvre windows. (And peace breaks out, replaced by quiet chook conversation about the newly-arrived tucker.)
• “Where’s my food? What’s going on? Don’t muck around with me”, Pesky
A final word of thanks to my oppressors; feeding the animals before I feed myself is a way to start the day with thoughts of something, someone else and putting that first.
”Cluck”.
(Find out more about keeping chooks when you take a tour of my house - information and bookings, here.)