There is never a dull moment at our house, especially in our yard. With 2 roosters, 4 hens, 3 chicks, 2 doves, and 3 dogs...it can get a little crazy at the most unexpected times. We all have had some good laughs over the past week and I wanted to share about our life with the birds.
When we returned to Zambia, our friend gave us two doves. At the time they were so young that they couldn't fly so they just walked around the yard and fluttered to the low branches of our fruit trees. Now, they are busy flying around the yard and making homes for themselves all around our house. They find that the best place to be at 5 a.m. is on top of our gazebo that has a tin roof. The screeching and scratching of dove nails is such a lovely sound in the morning. When the sun is setting they make their bed right above our back door on the top of a post. They chatter in their dove language until they go to sleep. We often find them in the chicken's water taking a bath! It's pretty neat to have doves as a pet!
Now for the drama starring our rooster and our neighbor's rooster. One nice evening, we were enjoying our dinner when all of the sudden we heard two of our dogs fighting. Kendall and I jumped up and ran out the door to find out what was going on. Summer and Shadow (the dogs) were not fighting, but our rooster was! WHAT IN THE WORLD?! Came flying out of my mouth and Kendall stood and watched what was taking place. The neighbor's rooster had flown over our wall and come to pick a fight with our rooster! Nice. I picked up a shoe and threw it at the rooster to get it to stop, yeah, that was a bad idea, didn't do anything. Kendall wanted me to wait because he was going to sneak up behind the "visiting rooster" and grab him. I spoiled that plan with the shoe thing! Very quickly we realized that our rooster was kicking tail and feathers were flying! Visiting rooster is a lot bigger and we thought he would have dominated, but no way! Our rooster was going to protect his hens, chicks and family! BOO YEAH! Then the fun started. (Remember that we have just eaten dinner!) Kendall and I started running around the yard trying to catch this rascal. We called Zeria to help us pin him into one corner of the yard. After about 5 minutes of near catches, Shadow ran him into the corner of the house and took a nice chunk of feathers out of him. Kendall grabbed him and took him to the wall. Zeria and I just told him to throw him back over the wall, when Kendall did, the children next door shouted, "THANK YOU VERY MUCH!" I am sure that they made the rooster come over just to see the mzungus (white man) run around his yard like a chicken with its head cut off! We laughed very hard that night and were proud to be the owners of OUR rooster!
 |
| One of Easton's favorite jobs is keeping the chickens out of the flower island in the backyard! |
A few seconds after I finished snapping the pictures of our birds for this post, another "bird" flew over the house. It was the presidential helicopter. The President of Zambia, Rupiah Banda, was in Nyimba that afternoon campaigning for the upcoming election (September 20). He had finished his visit and was heading back to the capital city of Lusaka! Never...ever...a dull moment!
No comments:
Post a Comment