Daylight saving: It’s one way roosters will be crowing later
THE CHRONICLE readers might recall my recent Johno’s Say about a dear friend who gifted me six fine-point-of lay hens in return for the odd dozen eggs I give him occasionally.
Apparently point-of-lay means you can anticipate an egg or two when your feathered friends reach 18 to 22 weeks of age.
As the months rolled by there was nary an egg to be seen however, in recent times supply has been plentiful.
What was significant about the group was that one was considerably larger with a fine comb and tail and a proud, broad chest.
You guessed it, we had a rooster on our hands.
The wonderful thing about being old is that you can’t hear, so I slept night after night in perfect peace.
On the other hand, Mrs J started complaining about being woken at 4am with “Rocky’s” crowing and before too long she threatened to call Toowoomba Regional Council to complain.
I could see my reputation was under threat and having not dressed a rooster for the dinner plate since I was a teen, I turned to social media for a prospective owner, but none was to be found.
Desperate, I contacted good friend Bek Knudsen at Wyreema’s Bracknell Lodge, and she agreed to add the pest, I mean pet, to her burgeoning menagerie. Problem solved, or was it? My thoughts turned to fellow Queenslanders and the pain they must endure, morning after morning, as hundreds of thousands of roosters get up for their 4am cock-a-doodledoo.
But wait, if they’re crowing now at 4am then surely they’ll be crowing at 3am before too long.
As Australia’s most easterly location, Queensland welcomes the sun considerably earlier than the rest of the nation.
There is an easy solution at hand in the form of daylight saving.
If we were to push our clocks forward one hour like New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Norfolk Island and New Zealand then surely those feathered friends would start crowing an hour later.
What a splendid idea!
That must be the reason folks from eastern and central parts of Australia, and New Zealand always seem to be so much calmer when the topic of daylight saving emerges twice each year, whereas some Queenslanders can be absolutely hostile.
It’s not that those good people are nasty, it’s just that they are dog-tired because of noisy roosters.
Certainly there are other minor inconveniences we have to put up with here like $4 billion in lost productivity annually, missing planes/trains/telephone calls/orders, and generally being unaligned with the nation, (yes I know about Western Australia), for six months each year.
Oh, and daylight saving starts at 2am on Sunday.