Daughter F.(14) and daughter C.(11) wanted to come with me to the Street festival. Especially C. , she wanted to pick out the chickens. And the duck.
We walked around a bit to see if the Chickenman was there and luckily for us he was. He had all kind of different chickens and ducks in cages with him. The cutest, of course, the little ducklings, on top. Oldest trick in the book and yes, we fell for it.
C. made a drawing of the chickens she wanted to have. One brown, one black and one white. And a little chick. Or duckling, she sure wasn't fussy about that ;-)
When we looked in the cages with the chickens there were a couple of beautiful black ones. You know, the ones that have a luster about them. One of the blacks had an almost emerald shine upon its feathers and C. knew for sure that that was the black one we were going to buy. One down, 4 to go.
The white one she had in mind, was unfortunately not available. Not a white one in sight and C decided that a grey one could be a good substitute. Lovely feathers the grey one had. Different shades of grey and I liked it much better than a white one.
The Chickenman also had a lot of brown chickens. We decided to buy one as well because of the drawing C. made. So that made three.
We wanted five chickens though and the Chickenman noticed that. He told us that the brown ones were good layers. As that was the main purpose for buying chickens, we decided to pick out another couple of brown ones. We tried to pick out three different shades of brown but I never knew it was this difficult to see the difference in chickens. I'll probably end up knitting shawls with their names on it to be able to tell the difference ;-)
Then, the little ducklings. C. pointed out a duckling and the Chickenman put it in a box. When I asked him about the price of all the animals he shook his head. He asked me why I wanted a little duckling. I told him that I learned about the pecking order and that ducks could be a good influence on chicken with that. He shook his head again and told me I was going to need an older duck for that. That the duckling needed quiet time and a nice temperature and that she was going to be lonely when I only took the one because she needed to be kept separated for a while from the chicken. As to demonstrate he picked up another duckling from the cage and put it back in again. Immediately the little one ran straight back to the others and crawled underneath. C. and F. were moved and said to me it was pathetic and they didn't want a duckling anymore. They decided on a light brown, lovely looking older duck.
The Chickenman had put all the chickens in a big bag and the duck in a box. C. carried the box to our car, I carried the chickens. They were really quiet. You could hear a little soft cackle now and then but that was it. The duck was nervous in her box and moved around a bit but she was quiet as well.
When we came back home we let them out immediately in their shed. They (and we) had quite an adventure.