Excuse me, sir, there's a goose in my pool...

Er, excuse me, there's a goose in my pool...

I appear to have acquired a goose. Not intentionally mind. It just turned up this morning. I glanced out the window and there it was paddling in the pool. It’s not like I need additions to the menagerie given guinea fowl keet season is upon us.

A mighty fine flap...

I introduced myself to the goose. He said his name was Hubert.

“Hubert?” I asked, “That’s a funny sort of name for a goose. Actually, I took you more for a Humbert. You know, Humbert Humbert, because you’ve got a saucy look about you.”

Hubert glowered at me with a beady eye and rasped, “I fear you have me confused with Duck a la Orange – and we are so not going there. No, no, don’t even say it.”

I didn’t it, but my head was suddenly filled with visions of Goose a la Armagnac – and he is such a nice plump bird…

Moi? Goose a la Armagnac? I think not!

A quick drink, I think, one for the road, you know...

The other recent “acquisition” is a pintailed whydah. The bird in question is a breeding male and a right stroppy little sod.

Attitudinally challenged bird...

When he’s not desporting himself in front of the female and attempting to tickle and tantalize her with his tail feathers (and possible his noodly appendage, though my eyes aren’t that good), he spends the bulk of the day attacking the other male pintailed whydah in the garden. That would be his reflection of course. He’s sworn to a duel until death, though I fear at this rate, all he’ll end up with is a very sore head.

The dance of lurve...

Death to the rival!

I should add, he has also driven practically every other bird from the garden and has no issue at all with dive bombing the doves and guinea fowl. Like a small terrier, he clearly has no concept of his own extremely tiny size.

Ya lookin' at me? Huh? Huh?

Wanna make something of it? Huh? Huh?

As for the squirrels, there has been a War on Suet. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. Suffice it to say, we have finally managed to thwart the little buggers, but that has, in turn, completely reduced the entertainment factor. Oh well.

Can I leap, or do I climb? Oh the decisions!

Climb, I think....

Nommy-nom-nom...

Er, now how to disembark...?

Oh shit...

S'perilous place to be hanging...

There will now be a short blogging hiatus as I go off and do important writer-ly things. See you on the flip side.

Swing Low, Sweet Suet - or - Raiders of the Lost Suet

I was thinking, given I feed so many of the seed and peanut-eaters in my garden, that it was time to look out for the birds that preferred a meatier diet. So I duly trotted off and bought a suet ball and a suet ball holder. For a while it seemed no one noticed my offerings, until one day I realised just about the entire ball had disappeared...

What voracious bird, I wondered, had got so successfully at the suet, that in three or four days most of the stuff was gone? I really should have known, shouldn't I?
And this is how it was done:

The mysterious suet thief... "Who do you think you're looking at, go away, I'm busy!"

Now, I edge along the branch...

Then I swing down...

I lunge to my left...

And grab hold of the basket...

Right, now, this is the tricky bit...

Up and over...

Get my mush stuck firmly stuck into this lovely stuff...and grab a piece

Back up again, there we go....

Ah heaven...

Though it's equally good when eaten hanging upside down.

Well, if nothing else, and even if the robin and boubous went without, it was worth it just to get these shots!

And in other news... I was supposed to be off to the UK this week, to attend a much looked forward to children's writers' conference in Winchester with all my SCBWI-BI pals. Unfortunately ongoing health problems have put paid to that. And am I miffed? You bet! Oh well, there's always next year and now I have no excuse to finish off the final tweaks and tucks to my manuscript.

Still Scribbling

Okay, so still scribbling but also sneezing - hacking, sniffing and coughing. Of course, all of which makes for being a Bad Blogger. (A pretty bad Tweeter too - not that I have ever managed to "get" Twitter in the first place. At least I'm holding my own on Facebook - so if you want to know what I'm thinking, best you friend me...)

Given all that, it's a wonder that I actually managed to scribble something for the Clarity of the Night flash fiction competition - see post below. It's handy when short stories come to you in your sleep though. There are some great stories in the competition this year and if you've got a few free spare minutes - yes, yes, I know, who has these days - do go and take a peek. If you want to have a read of mine, it's here - called Truth and Justice. And it's not too late to enter, though you'd better scribble pretty fast as the competition ends today. Go on, whatcha waiting for, ya know ya wanna...

Oh, and this is my new writing companion...

Popping in for a nut...

See you soon (just don't ask me when)!

The Guinea Fowl Chronicles: Mama! There's a chick in my house!

I have the distinct sense that this blog has been hijacked – by guinea fowl. Every time I’m about to post something non-guinea, nature interferes and offers me a guinea story which demands sharing. I’m thinking of giving up the unequal struggle and changing the name of the blog to The Guinea Fowl Chronicles, on the basis if you can’t beat ‘em you may as well join ‘em. I may even apply feathers to my forehead and starting ba-kaaking, a lot (alright then, more than usual).

The usual source of drama - a small peep...

But on with today’s drama…

Early this morning I was standing at the window, counting my chickens, I mean baby guinea fowl (as I swore I wouldn’t do).
“There’re only three, no, four, no five,” said D.
“Nonsense,” I said, “the rest are around the side of Bo’s cage.”
D wandered off and I gazed at the scene on the lawn.
Then I frowned. I blinked. I frowned again. I rubbed my eyes and peered at Bo’s cage.
“D,” I yelled, “there’s a chick in Bo’s cage. No, wait, there’re two chicks in her cage. No, hang on, there are three chicks in her cage!”
“How the hell did they get in there?” he bellowed back.
“Dunno, but we’d better get them out!”
As we headed outside Papa Guinea was doing his head in, running around Bo’s cage hecking something horrible. The air was positively blue. Mama Guinea had gathered up her skirts and ten other chicks and had vanished into the deep undergrowth of the shrubbery.

Come away, children, quickly!

As I advanced, Papa Guinea charged me.
“Don’t be such an ass!” I muttered.
The chicks ran up and down, well trapped in Bo’s cage, meeping furiously.

Let us out! Let us out! Meep, meep, meep!

Maiden Aunt on Speed, Ms Bo, ran with them – looking a bit like a cavalry horse taking charge.

I'm in charge here - er, only I'm not quite sure what to do!

“Heck-heck-heck-heck-heck!” screeched Pa Guinea hurtling around the cage, feathers up and in a right huff.

Heck-heck-heck-heck-heck! @#$@!! ^&%$#@!!! HECK!!!!

“How on earth will we get them out,” muttered D, in something of a lather himself.
“First we have to get Bo into the front section of the cage,” I said.
“No, we have to get the chicks out.”
“I know that,” I said patiently, as though speaking to a three year old... “But let’s get Bo out of the way first.”
“How do we do that?”
Honestly, men! Why is it that in a crisis the rational ability to think straight, goes all wavy and heads south.
“We’ll do what we always do. You go and fetch some worms, I’ll get the cage divider, we’ll lure her to the front section – as we do every day to get her out.”
“It won’t work!”
“It’ll work,” I snapped, “just go and get some worms!”
I was left watching the chicks and being shrieked at by Pa Guinea. He didn’t mind me as much as he minded the camera. Something about point and shoot, I think, was stuck in the primeval bit of his brain.
“Heck-heck-heck-heck,” he roared charging at me.
I pointed the camera at him. He squawked and ducked around the side of the cage, muttering rude things beneath his breath.
D returned with the worms. Bo was lured to the front of the cage. The divider was dropped. Yours truly went to the other side of the cage, lifted it up (in a manful sort of way despite being dressed in nothing but a satin dressing gown) and the chicks shot out like motorized mini mice suffering from an excess of batteries.
“Heeeeeeeck!” hissed Pa Guinea and rushed one chick across the lawn while the other two vanished into bushes alongside the house.
“How the hell did they ever get in?” asked D.

The usual suspect, looking innocent...

Now see, here’s the problem. The usual suspects, aka the squirrels, have done what squirrels always do if there are seeds and nuts they can’t get to. They find a way in. And this lot has taken to tunneling. And sure enough, there was a hole going under the base of the cage.

The Tunnel

I should perhaps mention that last week we found Bo in a lather as two squirrels, the master engineers, flung themselves around her cage because you know how it goes, having got in, no one can ever remember how to get out.

Who me? Nevuh!

So if anyone has any bright ideas about how to stop tunnel builders, bearing in mind that Bo’s cage gets moved around the garden every few days, do please let me know. For the moment we’ve resorted to bricks around the edge of the base where invasions have occurred, but we’re kinda running low on bricks.

The Tunnel blocked, for now...

Oh and before I end off, let me also add that we have a new predator to contend with. Pickings being scarce on the mountain, the baboons have taken to invading the neighbourhood to trash the rubbish bins, break in and devastate anything they can lay their thieving paws on. They are not nice, they can be very aggressive, they have huge yellow fangs and are far too smart for their own good. Dealing with sparrowhawks and herons was, in comparison, um, chicken feed…

Chacma baboons, not to be messed with
Shot above, taken at the arboretum just up the road.
Shot below, taken at Cape Point Nature Reserve

And now I'm off to make myself a nice, soothing cuppa tea.

The Mighty Stonk

The Goddess Vanilla is in a mighty fine stonk. If it wasn’t enough being hit by pepper spray in the mall – I kid you not – silly *%^$#s – I've also had to deal with Guinea warfare.

But let’s rant in order, okay. (Ha, and there was me wondering what to blog about today…)

There I was in the store (for British readers, the equivalent of Marks & Spencer), paying for groceries at the till when everyone started coughing. As I started to leave the store, so my nose started burning (as if being addled by hayfever isn’t enough…) and I started hacking and wheezing. As I walked out someone muttered, “Shoplifter, pepper spray.” Huh? Since when does a store blast pepper spray because someone’s “lifted” an item? If it was an armed robbery and there were hostages it might have been different. So I came home, still hacking and wheezing, and, speaking with a deeply sexy and husky voice, I called the store manager. He, it turns out, was equally miffed. Evidently the incident had nothing to do with the store, but everything to do with the Blue Route Mall’s security “protocol”. Evidently the perp had lifted an item elsewhere in the centre, the security guards had chased and cornered said perp in the store I was in, and the perp had turned on them with pepper spray. Now from what I’ve been able to ascertain, you never try to apprehend the perp in the store or the centre because you have, no matter how many disclaimers you display, a duty of care to customers. What you are apparently supposed to do is to follow said perp out of the store and then take the necessary action. The store manager said he’d lost R30 000 in business in the 20 minutes he’d been closed and had had an asthma attack.
“I'd suggest,” he said, “that you phone the Centre Management and lodge a complaint.”
So I called up the Blue Route Mall’s Centre Management and asked to speak to the Centre Manager.
“No, sorry, the manager’s gone home for the day.”
Hmm, it was only 17h10. Evidently he keeps union hours. I was transferred to someone else.
“Yes?” barked the woman on the other side of the line, “So what’s your story?”
Story? My story?! At which point the Goddess Vanilla realised she could do righteous indignation, full frontal anger, icy disdain and a variety of other mean things without necessarily feeling any said emotions. Finally, all those years of speech and drama paid off. Yeah! I let her have it in tones that should have sent her cowering.
“Well, a person was caught shoplifting and that isn’t allowed,” replied the woman to my shower of “not acceptables” and clearly totally unimpressed with my display of outrage.
“Uhuh? And your protocol says it’s okay to endanger the well-being and lives of your customers in order to deal with a situation like that?”
What, I wonder, would have happened if the perp had been armed with a gun and started shooting at the guards and shoppers, rather than spraying pepper? Did anyone consider that? I guess not.
“Well, you’ll just have to call back on Monday,” she snarked without a word of apology or an “Are you okay, Madam?”
And call back I will. In the meantime I’ll lodge complaints on several local consumer websites and in the suburban press, because three hours later I’m still coughing and have had to use my inhaler which I haven’t had to use for years. Thank goodness it still works.



As I stalked through to relay the news to D, another situation met my beady eyes. Stroppy Old Fart was in the garden – and causing trouble. Stroppy Old Fart is the crankiest of guinea fowl with an attitude of note. He is bad tempered and cantankerous, not unlike Atyllah the Hen when crossed. SOF was standing at the feed-bin, hogging the whole thing to himself. The Guinea Family was feeding from seed scattered at the edge of the lawn and one small, and particularly tiny, peep decided she’d sup with SOF. Now one might expect SOF to be grandfatherly, you know, paternal. But no, not a chance. He just raised up onto his toes, started flaring his wings and aimed a savage peck at the wee thing. The Goddess Vanilla’s righteous indignation flared.
I shot out the door and stalked towards SOF.

But the trouble with SOF, like most stroppy old farts, is that he seems to think that age goes before beauty… He cocked his head at me and raised an eyebrow as I advanced and then, not taking the matter terribly seriously, he ambled off. I’m afraid it was his attitude that did it. I charged. SOF scuttled, he squawked and took off onto the roof, from where he regarded me with utter disdain. Hmm. I went inside. And as soon as I was “gone”, SOF flapped down and charged the entire Guinea Family. War. I was out like a shot, and damaged ankle notwithstanding, charged at SOF again, squawking in my own inimitable style. I swear I heard applause from the Guinea Family. SOF did a vertical take off that would have impressed the average Harrier pilot. He clattered onto the roof, cast me a glance over his shoulder and kept going. Hope that teaches the old bugger a lesson; harassing my little peeps in that uncivilized way! Tsk!



Oh bugger, now there’s a squirrel on my windowsill…


And the guinea fowl are hecking because it's Halloween and they are so not impressed...

Menagerie Madness

Portrait of a Peep

It had to happen sooner or later. One of the peeps was always going to fall into the pool. And it was a good thing I happened to go outside a minute later. There it was, swimming furiously, looking for all the world like a duckling zooming along the edge of the pool, little orange legs running frantically in the water. The adults, true to form stood around and hecked and ba-kaaked and did nothing sensible.

I trotted over and fished the peep out of the pool and moved towards the flock to return him. At which point I got charged. By Father Guinea. Wings up and hecking at the top of his voice. I stalked up to him, put small peep down and said, “Shut up, you daft bird, anyone else would think some gratitude was in order!”

Father Guinea - a bird with views

But oh no, not a chance, Father G just stood there shrieking at me. I did rather wonder what would have happened if I’d pretended to be scared – would he have chased me across the lawn? Or what would have happened if I’d charged at him? The former would have provided good fun and games and would have totally disrupted the pecking order around here. And we can't have that. I am, after all, the Goddess Vanilla, Provider of Food and Water and Protection.

I just shot a beady glance at Father G, said, “Oh be off with you, you silly bird!” and waved a hand at him. Gone was the cocky attitude and Father G squawked and scuttled, but not before stopping to give me one final and meangingful, “Heck!”

Drying out in the sun

It would be much safer (though perhaps less dramatic), one would think, to rather fall into the waterbowl...

I can see I might have to call on Atyllah’s Granny to instill some order around here!

And just what on earth is this? A guinea jacuzzi?

And oh yes, then there was this… I’ve heard of give a dog a bone…



The squirrels it would seem have finally gone a bit barking.