“Thank you,” I whisper to Bernadette and Magdalena as I carry my breakfast out of their house and back into my own.

Bernadette and Magdalena board in my backyard.

They pay their rent in fresh eggs.

I’ve had chooks before them, but not for 20 years.

Those ones were possibly doomed from the moment I named them Zinger and Cajun, but that cunning Mallee fox probably would’ve eaten them no matter what they were called.

Bernadette and Magdalena were 16 weeks old when we got them.

The seller said they would likely start laying between 18 and 22 weeks.

In the meantime, with a good dose of immaturity and reckless abandon, they played with their own lives as though they were cats with eight more to spare.

The night they moved in, they didn’t want to go into their cosy and comfortable hen house we had prepared for them.

As darkness began to fall, they thought their best option was roosting on the fence, dangerously in reach of our Staffy-cross-Dalmatian, who, mind you, wouldn’t care if her chicken was roasted or raw, plucked or laden with the kind of feather-lode that would see her get a few stuck between every tooth.

Horrified at what might unfold, I ushered them down and herded them into their house.

I blocked the doorway until morning, when I could sort something out.

“Just clip their wings,” my mum texted.

What, I can do that myself?

I had assumed, like you need a farrier to shoe your horse and a shearer to shear your sheep, you’d need some kind of chicken whisperer with specialist equipment to clip a chook’s wings.

I jumped on YouTube and learned I could do this with nothing more than a firm grip and a pair of sharp kitchen scissors if I was game enough to try.

But as I held Bernadette under one arm and stretched out her wing with my other hand, I had flashbacks of accidentally pinching the skin on my firstborn’s finger when I attempted to cut his fingernails once when he was a baby.

He cried, I cried, and I never did it again.

Are we sure Bernadette is not going to feel this?

I sucked it up and cut her flight feathers off as neatly as I could on just one side.

Then it was Magdalena’s turn.

Without incident (or manifesting my fear of having my eyeballs pecked out by a defensive chicken), I shut the gate, relieved that they should survive the night now.

No sooner had I walked inside, my son peered out the window and said: “Oh-o, Mum, the chicken is back on the fence.”

Exasperated, I went to clip each chicken’s second wing, completely uncertain if that was the fix.

I only managed to catch one this time before I gave up chook chasing in the dark, duck-walking with ageing hips under a deck.

That was a month ago now and thankfully they’ve not been back on the fence.

One morning, I heard one of them getting mighty vocal.

Could this be our first egg?

Sure enough, it was.

I always wonder how a chook feels experiencing that for the first time.

Complete shock, I imagine.

I wanted to comfort Bernadette by wrapping her in a warm blanket, ordering her some Thai takeaway and offering a whole block of chocolate for dessert.

Like a complete goose though, not a chook, she laid it on a rocky part in her pen while again roosting on a small table, rather than in her henhouse.

Not ideal. Potential for our eggs to be scrambled before they’re even cooked.

It didn’t matter immediately, as I thought the shock of ejecting it from her body had sworn her off producing any more.

A week passed without another egg.

Or so I thought.

One morning, the clucking commotion was muffled.

I could only see one chook in the yard.

Could Bernadette be inside the hen house? In the comfy straw nest? Laying an egg where the egg decoy (a golf ball Dad had put there) had been with the purpose of persuading her to lay another next to it?

I entered, and behold, there wasn’t just one egg, there were six!

Of course, I didn’t know how long they’d been there.

And the mercury had hit 40 degrees for two consecutive days, so I wasn’t prepared to risk eating the tiny prototypes.

But now, like clockwork — or bok-bok work — there are two every morning.

And every morning I grin about it.

“Thank you,” I say to the girls every time I collect the eggs.

“Thank you, too,” I say to the dog — for guarding us and our home — as she walks back to the house faithfully by my side.

There I find the cat, meowing demandingly at me for the first of several times she will yell at me that day about something.

And I wonder what she is contributing to the household other than hair, hayfever and inharmonious heckling.

I don’t dare ask her of course, because while the chooks might have started serving us, we serve her.

And queens don’t have to answer questions like that from their servants.

Benalla Ensign Google News Panels

Thursday, 21st May 2026

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