The Good Life Michele Hewitson
Experiments in animal husbandry, and appreciative readers, bring joy to life in the country.
Blimey. It is a new year, and the promised petting zoo is still under construction. All I can say is that one has to be patient when one intends to construct a petting zoo worthy of accommodating the Greatest Sheep That Ever Lived (known to some as Xanthe, Greg’s lamb, but we will see about that). In the meantime, the latest money-making scheme here at Lush Places is to raise pheasants.
This would never have occurred to us, but we have been told it is perfectly possible. Even better, we would not actually be raising the pheasants. The genius of the scheme is that we can trick the evil chickens into raising the impostor chicks.
A nice man from the Wellington Regional Council, who is testing the aquifer that feeds our bore, has told us that this is what he does with his broody chickens: he orders pheasant eggs, puts them under broody chickens, the chicks hatch and voilà! Happy chickens and baby pheasants. I thought there might be a glitch, though: the rabbit-brain-eating cat.
I asked, as I often do, for advice from Miles the sheep farmer, who, as a past president of the local Ornithological Society, knows a thing or two about birds, as well as a million or two things about sheep. I said: “Won’t the cat eat the pheasant chicks?” He laughed. Had I never encountered a hen with chicks? They are, he said, ferociously protective. The cat wouldn’t stand a chance.
The money-making side of this project is that we can hold pheasant shoots for the local gentry. The flaw in that plan is that we don’t know any local gentry – although here in the country, that guy in the 20-year-old Stubbies shorts and the gumboots held together with gaffer tape may well be as rich as Croesus. That I can no longer do up my tweed jacket poses more of a problem.
Still, serendipitously, and in perhaps what is a good sign sent from the Gods of the Countryside for Hare-brained Schemes, the day after hatching this plan, Miles spotted a cock pheasant in one of our paddocks.
The cock pheasant is quite magnificent and struts about as if he is well aware of his magnificence. His scarlet-capped, iridescent blue head bobs up and down among the sheep and through the long grass. I want one, or possibly quite a few more than one.
We have been sent a lot of lovely responses to the Good Life in the year gone by. In another life, I used to interview people (as opposed to sheep and chickens) and I was sent a lot of unlovely responses. To the really rude missives, I would sometimes respond: would your mother like to read this?
Now we get emails from people who seem to find our exploits with lambs and chickens, and the often-farcical lengths we go to to turn our city selves into country people, as much fun as we do. This is both heart-warming and encouraging: I can already envisage the queues at the farm gate for the petting zoo.
Our new country life has been enriched by the entertaining collages, involving cut-out pictures and quotes from our columns, appended with funny speech bubbles, from Clare of Wellington. These are beautifully made: what else are the columns but collages of our country life?
And in the week before Christmas, a wonderful oil painting arrived from Ann Percy of Taumarunui. She has painted my Uncle Nick’s Clarice Cliff vase, full of daffodils and grape hyacinths. We have it on the kitchen table, next to the vase.
Thank you to all our readers and those of you moved to write to us, and to the people whose lives cross with ours here in the country and who don’t mind that we pinch bits of their existence to write about – in particular, sheep farmer Miles, shepherdess Carolyn, sheep dog Red, The Artist and The Gardener. Happy New Year to you all from us and the menagerie.
In the country, that guy in the 20-year-old Stubbies and gaffer-taped gumboots may well be as rich as Croesus.