4.1.13

Woke at about 5am with the dawn chorus. Sounds nice doesn’t it. To a Kiwi the dawn chorus signifies a healthy population of native birds giving it what for in a loud but melodic way. Music to a tree huggers ears. Sadly this dawn chorus was a territorial battle between what sounded like several hundred roosters, they were going for it and now at 10pm are still telling us about their territory, with less vigor finally. The island does have a large population of free range chickens. I asked a local lady in Aitutaki about the ownership of the chickens there, when I visited for a conference in July, and she said they belong to no one, so if you can catch one it is yours. Clearly they are fast chickens as no one seems to have caught them. As I frustratingly could not get back to sleep I continued to read the book that I am reading at the moment “Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer, about memory, and to add to the chicken theme he was describing the process of chicken sexing, which takes an indescribable skill of analyzing the appearance of the cloacal area in chicks. It is not obvious but there are apparently about 1000 features that chick sexers are trained to recognize. In the end they become so fast that they can sex up to 1700 chicks per day, but are not able to describe how they do it, as the recognition becomes intuitive. This is because male chickens do not lay eggs, and do not taste good, and the cost of keeping them alive until the sex is obvous at about 4 weeks is uneconomic. They are discarded. Coockodoodyl-doo! And they are annoying.

Lazy morning at home with Di and Ben still feeling unwell. After lunch everyone was getting cabin fever, so I took the kids out for a swim, and Di rested at home (to the tune of the weed eater on the driveway apparently). We headed down the coast road looking for a sheltered spot as it is a bit windy and found a nice spot just before the Rarotongan resort. Ben had planned to sit on the beach as he is not feeling well and he is traumatised by yesterdays snorkel vomiting episode, but once he saw the water he was into it with a big grin on his face. Olivia wasted no time today and couldn’t even wait for me to get into the water before she was off. I remembered the gopro camera this time, with the new dive housing and fresh battery, so we had some fun getting video of the fish and kids. Big schools of fish had a fair degree of excitement going on and the kids found a heap of treasure, mostly shells, but also a lead weight off a weight belt.

Cruised home for afternoon tea, the kids got into some movie making with acting that would get them onto Shortland street. We had a cook up of vegetarian butter chicken (!) then another competitive game of scrabble to end the day.