My evolution into crazy chicken lady.
I always thought I'd be a crazy cat lady, and yet here we are.
The first thing I noticed when we exited Fa’aa airport for the first time were the roosters. Pecking around the closed cafe, crowing (despite the late hour) and searching for food.
Everywhere you go in Mo’orea and Tahiti you see them, the wild chickens and roosters, sometimes followed by tiny fluffy chicks. They crow at all hours of the day and night, walk brazenly into cafes, and nest high in the treetops.
We have plenty of chickens, roosters, and periodically their tiny chicks in the backyard. They eat well with the coconuts we throw onto the grass, even better when they sneak onto the terrace and eat the bananas, avocados and papayas stored there.
We also have the house chickens.
My mother and father-in-law are next door to the main house in a gorgeous bamboo fare (the Tahitian word for house), right next to the chicken coop. While they were away on an extensive holiday, Martin and I slept at their house and took over the job of looking after the brood of 8 chickens, 2 roosters, and 2 unidentified adolescents.
They’re very cute and funny, and I started looking forward to feeding them every day and having them rush around my ankles when they saw me emerge in the morning. One lady would enter the house via the window to lay her egg in a special bowl. If you didn’t close the door quick enough, you’d get the whole lot of them wandering around the house looking for food (and pooping on the floor).
At one point they were giving us 7 or 8 eggs a day. One time the production stalled and we looked everywhere for a secret spot, eventually finding 8 eggs in a planter box!
I gave them all nicknames, which is how we came to have Alpha Waymond the rooster, Claudette (who was later renamed as Claude when we discovered she was a he), and Daniel Day-Lewis (the chicken with the twisted left foot).
We then became chicken parents!
We incubated two rounds of chicks. The first was not the most successful, only getting 2 out of the dozen. The next was much better and we hatched 7 little fluffy babies.
On the day of our wedding, we watched through the little window as egg after egg started rocking, a tiny crack appearing, then a beak, chirping growing louder and louder as each chick emerged, wet and trembling.
The next challenge is getting them to adulthood. Unfortunately we lost a few to disease and an accidental drowning after a big rain.
The rest we diligently moved from inside to sleep, to outside for fresh air and back again, until they were adolescents who could sleep outside, and then eventually adults who could join the flock.
Unfortunately that was when we discovered majority were roosters and not chickens.
What happens when you have too many roosters?
I watched Claude, formerly Claudette, mess with my favourite chicken one too many times. So Claude, formerly Claudette, got a whole new name.
Dinner.
A good looking guy, but too aggressive. Plus we already had a lot of roosters… Claude was unnecessary. I didn’t feel super bad about the decision to ‘soup him’, as I’ve seen other forums refer to it.
Martin caught him and we took him up the hill. I carried the machete. Martin slipped a rope around his legs and another around his neck. He asked me to hold the legs.
With no warning, the machete swung down. The head separated from the body in a spurt of blood. “Fucking hell,” I heard come out of my mouth. I kept a tight hold on the rope as the body twitched.
Back down the hill we went with the body dripping bright crimson blood. Claude went into a pot of boiled water and we ripped the feathers out. Then Martin cut him open, removed all the bits, butchered him.
We marinaded him and cooked him on the stove. A little tough but still delicious.
Coq au vin for dinner
Occasionally there are way too many wild chickens and roosters in the garden and a culling becomes necessary. That’s when the boys set up a cage, and one after the other they get the chop, feathered, butchered, and into the freezer.
Once you have 6-8, there’s enough for a stew. Slow cooked on the stove for hours and hours and best served with even more wine!
Watching, reading, thinking about…
Flight Facilities x MSO
I’m not usually a fan of live albums, but this Flight Facilities live with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (which I saw at the Sydney Myer Music Bowl) is great for baby dance parties:
Getting back into yoga after baby and finally able to do cobra without my giant belly getting the way! There’s a whole month of new YWA videos waiting for me.
It comes around every year and every year it’s the same old stuff. I previously did some sketch notes of talks from this website tackling the hypothetical day we will not need an IWD to talk about issues facing women (although I’ll admit some of it feels a bit fluffy when we’re looking at some of the bigger issues facing women globally). Find more on my website.
