Stone the Crows

A neighbour rang (no, not that neigbour) to ask if I would do her a favour – collect her eggs while she was away during the day this week. I didn’t need to feed her hens, or clear out the hen house, or even give her any of the eggs – she just wanted them collected. The problem, you see, is that the crows around her have learnt that hen houses contain tasty treats and have taken to following the hens in and pinching the eggs. So all I had to do was nip in when the hens had done their business, as it were, and get the eggs before the crows did. She reckoned that would be around 12:30 or so

Sounds simple, no? Well that’s before accounting for the fact that crows are fairly bright and we are – well, it turns out, a bit poor at time keeping these days. Normally being a few houses up the road at a particular time every day during the week would be no problem, but this week I happened to be fairly busy and couldn’t quite make it on the dot of 12:30. To be honest, I didn’t realise crows could tell the time quite so accurately. Or maybe they just count the number of times the hens go in looking pensive and come out looking relieved and choose their moment to strike. Either way, the score for the week is crows 2 and humans 3, although I’m not convinced the crows didn’t sneak in and pinch one on Thursday…

Still, the upshot is that we have a nice stockpile of freshly laid eggs, albeit not as big a one as it might have been. Frittata tonight, I think. And poached eggs with everything for a while…