Thursday, August 25, 2011

Stealthy work


I said in an earlier post that we managed to offload one of our roosters.  This was only a short-term solution at best.  We still had nine roosters left.  There’s not exactly a huge market for live roosters.  They needed to be “Hopped”.  More on Hop later.

Time for action.  We finished off dinner and fortified ourselves with a few glasses of pinot noir.  It was cold and dark out there.  And we had wild roosters to deal with.  There were five of us.  My wife and I.  Our German au pair.  And Lydia and Henning, two German backpackers staying with us.  Nine of them.  Five of us.

We had shut up the hen coop before dark.  So that meant our foe were roosting in the trees. We have some magnificient trees.  About a dozen totara (Podocarpus totara).  Our ones stand about 15m tall and have a wonderful spreading shape.  Great to look at.  Not great to climb in the dark.

We identified the roosters from looking up at them from the ground.  We recognised them by their tail feathers.  Knocked them out of the trees with a stick.  Grabbed them and locked them up in the coop.  We managed to catch six of them.  We didn’t always get it right.  There’s probably a few hens in our flock that are still cross at us.  But we got the job done.

Hop was arriving the next day.

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