Well, it looks like I have now whole-heartedly embarked on poultry keeping. Last Saturday, I picked up three more chickens from the poultry and pigeon fair in Masterton: another silkie (just because they are so cute and fluffy, and this one is blue), whom I have called Feng – and two silver campines, Buten and Binnen. They are an old-fashioned breed which is now rare and threatened, from the nook of the world where I spent much of my rock’n roll youth. To me, they look exactly like chickens. I mean, like chickens ought to look like.
Then Piwo, my perky black Polish pullet, started to crow – possibly brought on by the recent influx of new females – so I took the wee transgender chicken back to the breeder, and swopped him over for a proper pullet, a blue this time. I’ve dubbed her Lody. Now I have a designer flock of fancy chickens all in bright whites and subtle silver and blue-grey.
Getting into the swing of things, I almost got a peahen as well – I’d been planning to look into acquiring a pair of peafowl sometime next year, but then I saw some advertised locally, and put in my bid. But the owners somehow decided to sell the bird to someone else instead, which did not make me very happy! I already had a name for that bird, too.
So, no peafowl just yet – but that doesn’t need to keep me from dedicating this blog post to this cosmic bird. Turns out that there is a whole religion involving the worship of a cosmic peacock: Melek Taus, the “peacock angel” of the Yezidis, a religious community of Kurdish people in Iraq. You’d never know where poultry keeping could lead you. One lives and learns!
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