We sold our chicken coop not long ago. My wife mentioned that the yard looks better without it. I told her it was a painful reminder of my recent mania and psychosis. She said to look at it more positively. “Not many in London have experienced poultry as you have.”

For some reason London doesn’t allow backyard birds. I was certifiably certain the bylaw was about to change when I purchased my birds. In my mania I ended up with five ducks and ten chickens. That’s a slight exaggeration as one of the chickens was actually a rooster. In hindsight I think he was my undoing.

The first month I thought I had lucked out and had a rooster without the ability to crow. It was a delusion. He was however the most beautiful bird I have ever owned. When I picked him up from another Londoner and brought him home I opened the cardboard box and he flew straight to the top of our aluminum shed. My first thought was how to get him down in broad daylight but then, I just watched him.

We had sod in our backyard before all this but with rains my free range flock quickly turned the backyard into a mud-hole. It was too muddy for the chickens and soon they were living on our elevated deck in full view of the neighbourhood. The bylaw enforcement officer seemed quite intrigued with the five that were Jersey Giants but less so than the rooster.

I was warned several times but my seven white rabbits were basically feral at that point. My neighbours don’t speak to me but I cant wait to ask them if they thought they had lost their minds when they kept seeing white rabbits. I found the rabbits a home about 80 bucks too late but I can still hear flapping wings and the knock of a meat cleaver my buddy used to dispatch the ducks. I didn’t see it but I think the effect was about the same.

Now our food scraps go in the garbage and I have no fresh eggs to share but I did not surrender. I now have three Eastern Cottontail rabbits to eat the complaining neighbour’s rosebush. I also own several Canada Geese, at least four Mallard Ducks, a pair of pigeons, about a dozen Morning Doves, some swallows, half a dozen Goldfinches and flocks of Starlings and sparrows. We live in a new subdivision and there are two huge mud puddles right across the street. I walk over there once a week and spread cracked corn. Location, location, location.