My Friends #2: Lucy, Fergus, Isobelle, Chook 1, Chook 2, Chook 3...

These are our chooks. They don't have names, but my ducks do. Lucy's the mum, and her adopted kids are Fergus and Isobelle. They are here because we got some eggs from one of my friends and stuck them under Lucy while she was sitting. She squashed one duck, leaving two remaining, Fergus and Isobelle.

Chooks and ducks are cool pets because you get eggs from them, and the occasional offspring. Lucy is sitting again at the moment (she's a great sitter), and she's got about 10 eggs down there so we'll see what happens (wouldn't want to count my ducklings before they hatch.. ahem..).

Chooks and ducks also have some pretty quirky perks: when you go down toward the backyard and yell "heeeeeeere chookie chookie chookie", they all run to the fence to meet you; when Lucy is broody, instead of quacking she squeaks at me; and if you don't close the chook pen door at night you might find the chooks perched high up in a tree. The only way to get them down then is a broom.

Once we had a chook called Allie - she was a buff pekin, and she was so tame she'd flap up and sit on our shoulders. She'd even sit on my brother's head. One day, some kids played rough with her and she broke her leg. After that, she just sat in the corner of her pen and couldn't eat. So we had to put her down. Anyone walking past our house that night would have wondered what on earth had gone wrong - the whole family carried Allie out to the front yard in a box, bawling our eyes out, and tenderly laid her in a special hole we dug in the flower bed. Funny how attached you can become to pets...