My secret fantasy

Have you ever tried to photograph chickens?!

Do you have a dream, a wish, something you’d really like to do with your life? Travel the world, climb a mountain, become a rock star?

Mine: I’d own chickens.

I’d have a chicken house – nothing fancy, just solid and safe from the weather and predators – and plenty of room for the chickens to scratch and forage and have dust baths to their hearts’ content.

I’d wander down on a sunny day (not a cloud in the blue sky) and collect a rustic-basketful of fresh eggs – maybe daubed with a little poo, a-flutter with a downy feather – for the morning’s baking or my evening omelette. I’d feed the girls – only half a dozen or so; some chocolate brown in colour, some speckled ginger, others pristine white with black necklaces – I’d feed them wheat and silverbeet and fruit and table scraps. Talk to them and listen to their cackles and calls, and feel calm
and contented.

I would love chickens but I have a suburban backyard that I don’t think has the space chickens deserve. My vegie garden takes up probably 40-50% of the land; I cannot conceive of a good area for them.  Also, there are neighbourhood cats; I’d have to build a huge protective enclosure for them, and where’s the romance (or freedom) in that? It would be like Alcatraz; depressing.

Finally, I get rats every autumn – I don’t want to further entice these nasty vermin in with a year-round supply of chicken feed.

I went to a chicken show with mum and dad recently and my fantasy chicken life flared up again as I wistfully admired the pretty hens and fierce roosters. I picked up brochures on how to keep chickens in suburbia.

But I realised later that night it was just not practicable.

So I content myself with chicken shows, and visiting mum and dad’s chickens (as I did this weekend), saying hi to the girls and collecting their adorned eggs. And thinking, one day.
My mum's chickens. And mum.