There is little that gives me more joy than watching the actions of baby animals. It is both mentally fascinating and emotionally rewarding – a combination that is pretty hard to beat.<\/p>\n
Back in the early 1960’s we lived in a tiny little town called Melsetter in Southern Rhodesia.\u00a0 We had to be mostly self-sufficient so every year we’d get day old chicks, which we’d raise for meat or eggs.\u00a0 Anyway one year my dad decided to change things up a little and got day old ducklings instead.\u00a0 He brought them home, safe and secure in a large box lined with straw, laid the box on the kitchen counter-top, gathered us kids around, opened the box and asked, “What are these?”<\/p>\n
My younger sister Sarah, who must have been about four years old at the time, looked into the box with wide eyes.\u00a0 Somehow she knew they weren’t day old chickens, but they sure looked like them!\u00a0 So she said “Chockens!”\u00a0 My dad didn’t correct her 🙂.<\/p>\n
On the lawn in the front yard we had a wire mesh enclosure that we’d always used for the chickens.\u00a0 In fact, for reasons I’ve never understood, we called it the chicken-run. The ducklings were placed in this and were perfectly happy, after all if it was good enough for chickens surely it was good enough for chockens?<\/p>\n
The chockens may have been content, but my dad wasn’t.\u00a0 As he explained things, ducks were water creatures, and as such they needed a pond in which to swim.\u00a0 So we marked an extension of the chicken-run on the ground, dug a decent sized pond, sealed it with cement, filled it with water, and let it sit to ensure it didn’t leak.\u00a0 This effort took days, during which the chockens watched with interest, their little bodies pressed up against the fence so they could gain a better view.\u00a0 The last thing we did was extend the chicken mesh fence to include the pond, leaving the separating fence still intact.<\/p>\n
The big day came.\u00a0 We herded the ducklings… no, I should make an effort to get this right – we herded the chockens up to the far end of the chicken-run then my dad pulled out the separating mesh wall, thereby converting the smallish chicken-run into a spacious chocken-run, complete with built-in pond.\u00a0 We all stood back and waited for the ducklings to make the much anticipated dash for the pond.<\/p>\n
It didn’t happen, they just stayed in the area to which they had been herded.\u00a0 After a while my mom decided to get things moving and shooed them toward the pond.<\/p>\n
And that is when something really interesting happened…<\/p>\n
When the ducklings got to the line where the fence had been they all stopped dead, little bodies pressed up against the now imaginary fence.\u00a0 They were quite unable to cross it, no matter how many times we tried to urge them past it.\u00a0 Eventually we resolved the problem of the invisible fence by carrying them over it and plopping them into the water, where their instincts took over and their webbed feet kicked into action.\u00a0 I’m pretty sure they thoroughly enjoyed their first ever swim.<\/p>\n
In many ways we humans are just like those little duckings, or those little chockens if you prefer 🙂.\u00a0 How?\u00a0 We become so used to the boundaries of our existence that we are quite unable to realize they are self-imposed, artificial, and that we can step over them any time we want.\u00a0 The next time you reach the walls of your chocken-run I encourage you to simply open your mind and fly over them – I think you’ll love the pond you find when you do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is little that gives me more joy than watching the actions of baby animals. It is both mentally fascinating and emotionally rewarding – a combination that is pretty hard to beat. Back in the early 1960’s we lived in a tiny little town called Melsetter in Southern Rhodesia.\u00a0 We had to be mostly self-sufficient […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[80,81,129],"class_list":["post-5418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-chicks","tag-chockens","tag-ducklings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}