About Chooks.

Here we are looking after Big Fluffy while his humans go gallivanting overseas.

Big Fluffy is a dog and as such he's needy: he needs walks, people time, food, someone to chase him inside when he morphs into Barky McBarkface, etc etc  We've looked after dogs that couldn't be left outside and needed a human to let them out every couple of hours to do business which humans (us) then had to pick up.  

Obligatory Big Fluffy photo.

Big Fluffy is not a cat.  Cats exist on a higher plane, deigning to grant to humans the privilege of attending to their needs and accepting with graciousness a lap to lie on, regular food, and preferably a little outside time and a warm spot in winter.   Given a water bubbler, an automatic feeder, and a decent kitty litter setup a cat could be left alone overnight or even for a weekend.  "We don't care," cat owners chirp blithely, "Just leave some food and head out for the weekend."  Which, being the responsible little house sitters that we are, we've never done..

Which brings us to chooks.

Via the magnolia tree, because it's pretty.

Chooks are the pretend pets of the house sitting world.  On automatic feeders and water systems, they can be left for a week at a time.  Not that we've ever done that, being responsible house sitters etc etc

We are, in addition to Big Fluffy, looking after 6 chooks who live in a cage, a hen house, and a meadow (that's what the owners call it.  It's really just a fenced off area that once was a vegetable garden.)  The chooks are happy and healthy, pumping out eggs at a much greater rate than we can either eat them or give them away.  Every night I pull up a drawbridge on the hen house due to the risk of foxes breaking out from the Torrens linear park and dining on fat little chooks.  5 of the chickens perch precariously on the roof of the hen house and one roosts happily in the straw-filled nest boxes where she enjoyes a comfortable night and leaves enormous chook poops for me to find in the morning when I go looking for eggs.

Goodnight, girls.

Every morning I let down the drawbridge and stand back to watch the full range of chook intelligence (or lack thereof) on display.

Chook #1 is out in a flash: into the hen house, up into the raised section, down the draw bridge, and out into the wide world of the meadow to scratch dirt and catch grubs under the orange trees.

Clever chook.

Chooks #2 and #3 follow in quick succession.  Chook #4 takes a little while, she can't figure out why the other chooks are just there on the other side of the wire and she can't work out how to get to them.  Eventually it clicks and off she goes to the meadow, followed by chook #5 after a brief bout of running in circles like, dare I say it, a headless chicken.

That leaves us with bird brain #6, spinning in a maelstrom of indecision, resisting nudges into the henhouse, pressing up against the wire in feathery panic, squawking miserably as her cronies happily scratch for grubs until I give up and leave her to her bird-brained distress.  I've got better things to do than babysit a flighty bird with severe fomo.

She must figure it out eventually. When I go out to collect the eggs at lunch time there are 6 chooks out in the meadow.  Do  the other girls eventually come in to guide her out or does she quite by accident discover anew every day the way out to the meadow through the hen house?

I don't know. 

If you think that not much has happened in the world of whilenotworking recently, you're right.