If you join in over on Facebook, you’ll already know that the little chicks we hatched each turned out to be more he than hen. One morning we woke up to crowing! And I was so sure that our chicks were waaaay past the ‘is she or isn’t she?’ stage (they were 26 weeks) that I turned to Bart and said, “our poor neighbours must have got a dud rooster.” Oh, beware the gloat, I tell you, it leads to nowhere good…
Remember this?
Look what happened!
Our council doesn’t allow roosters (despite the fact that the morning song of their kookaburra and cockatoo neighbours would drown out the noise of a 747). A friend mentioned the rooster night box solution, but as she started to explain the whole set up I just thought, “I’m not those people.”
It’s a little tricky to know what to do with a couple of roosters you can’t keep when you’re not prepared to… you know. It’s moments like these that I realise that it was probably a good thing that my dream of being a farmer’s wife was ploughed down by my city slicker husband. See, it’s not just the head-chopping business that has me queasy. Truth be told, I’ve been scared of Gnasher and Holiday since about day 10 when they suddenly started growing bigger than any chicken I’ve ever seen in my life. It was like having two Shetland ponies free-ranging on your lawn.
Once the crowing became established, we looked around for a solution. My mother-in-law, who grew up a farm girl in rural Campania in Italy and spoke fondly of killing chickens for dinner as a girl, turned out to be all talk, no pantaloni. She’s all urban-Australian these days.
My sister thought we could take them to the vet to be “euthanased”, but the very thought of euthanasing a chicken sent us into such hysterics that we knew it wasn’t an option.
But what to do?
Enter New Leaf Nursery – our favourite place in the whole of Sydney. One quick phone call and they agreed to take both boys off our hands for $25. Done!
So we packed Gnasher and Holiday up in the ironing basket (sans ironing, with newspaper – lots of newspaper) and shipped them off to the nursery.
As always, the staff there were wonderful, clearing out a pen for the roosters and putting them into their ‘holiday quarters’. Bart and I both knew that they really meant ‘retirement quarters’, but we might be wrong as Marty the nursery guy was talking about keeping them for breeding and selling fertilised eggs.
“They are such fine roosters,” he said.
But we knew that already: when we went to the Easter Show I briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a Light Sussex breeder because our birds were so much bigger and shinier than the Champion birds. Of course, that was back when I was unknowingly comparing roosters with the hens. I would have made a great chicken breeder…
In any case, Gnasher and Holiday were in heaven in that pen. They’ve been on the bottom of the pecking order at our place their whole lives and you could just see them checking out this new, empty cage and thinking, “hey, this is a bit of all right, this is.”
The birds were fine, but we were all traumatised to a level that only a hot cocoa could fix…
Whatever their future, we’ll miss those scary, giant ponies… cheers to that.