Rural Ramblings 7: Patrick's rooster boosters

12 Sep 2007

By Patrick Vickery

It was four-thirty in the morning, daylight was calling and I woke to what sounded like pneumatic drilling on the window pane. There was a crow silhouetted against the bedroom window, on the light side of the dark, hammering at the glass with its beak.

One stony look from me, however, and he was off to his crows nest leaving the rest of us to deal with the effects of broken sleep, before deciding to return half an hour later and attack the kitchen window, which is just the sort of anti-social behaviour that encourages running around the garden in the dawning morning in garden boots and boxer shorts flourishing a ‘newly bought, still in its box, ready to install the following morning fluorescent light tube' shouting ‘oy, oy, oy' at the rising sun, is it not? Now wouldn't you be doing the same?

Birds can be as annoying as the rest of us at times, and with this in mind I recall a recent bird incident involving hens. There is a hen phenomenon known as the ‘booster rooster' effect that is clearly evident after meal times when we catapult the non-meat left-overs - broccoli, chips, peas, that sort of thing - through the kitchen window for them to feed on.

This requires some speed and manual dexterity on our part as they adopt a kamikaze personality at the slightest hint of a window opening and launch themselves with velocity at the hand that feeds them, instantly transformed from sedentary peckers into turbo charged ‘booster roosters' with reckless enthusiasm. Forget the Golden Eagle or the elusive Capercaillie, splendid though they are, and behold the ‘booster rooster' in full flight. Magnificent.

Now I was pottering about in the kitchen one evening, nibbling on a scotch egg, amending a Rural Rambling about the joys of country living and generally savouring the musical strains of ‘Leaving Stoer' (lovely melody) wafting from the lounge, where our youngest daughter was playing the piano, when I decided to open the kitchen window and sample the summer evening fragrance, completely forgetting that animals thrive on routine and have an intuitive sense of timing.

It was fatal. There was no hand to feed the hens this time, just my full frontal ‘scotch egg nibbling features' sampling the aromas of a peaceful summer evening. What happened next was not pleasant and just goes to show how a temporary lapse in memory can have dire consequences. My scotch egg fragmented, the melodic sound of ‘Leaving Stoer' was drowned by splutters and shrieks and a degree of facial pain inflicted, although it has to be said that my reactions have always been of the highest calibre and I was ok, apart from some slight trauma, minor cheek indentations and a bruise on the back of the head caused by a collision with the window frame.

As luck would have it, though, there was a second scotch egg in the fridge (they often come in pairs, you know, the bigger ones anyway) which I consumed shortly afterwards behind closed windows as I nursed my wounds and prodded my indentations.

Now if you're lucky enough to live in the rurals as we do, lovely spot actually, although the midges can be a bit tiresome (and did you know it's only the female midges that bite?), then such interventions into everyday life are quite commonplace. If it's not rocket-propelled hens, dogs regurgitating on the kitchen floor or crows being chased around the garden in the dawning morning with fluorescent light tubes, then there's always amorous ducks on the patio to contend with (they can be quite ferocious at times, you know, particularly if you interrupt them at the wrong moment).

Yes, rural life is a hoot, noisy to boot, and apart from one particular crow that hammers on the window in the dead of night I wouldn't choose to live anywhere else.

This article first appeared in the Ross-shire Journal and on the Rural Gateway website

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