Feathers are flying

Last week I was having a slightly romatic little supper with Liefie when an Armageddon-like noise and scuffle, errupted on my roof.

Liefie, alert farm boy that he is,  impressively wielding a steak knife, bolted for the front door, stormed out and returned about half a minute later.

"It is your bloody geese again," he said with a rather murderous glint in the eye. (Quite a significant achievement for a very gentle spirited man).

Turns out on further, slightly drunken inspection of the situation on the roof, that a small turf war has erupted between the resident geese and the refugee geese from across the road where people with dogs moved in recently.

See, for a long time we had two families of Egyptian geese living in peace in my little corner of farmland. My geese lived on my roof and the refugee geese lived across the road on the empty house's roof. I imagined them seeing each other in flight and politely tipping their little geese hats at each other every morning. Then the neighbours moved in.

Now the neighbours have so far been perfectly pleasant, apart from the small roving spotlight incident, but due to the large number of dogs that moved in with them their geese suddenly found themselves without a home.

Not surprisingly it turned out that they then decided to move in on the other end of my roof. My geese didn't like it. In fact they protested rather vociferously. The refugee geese temporarily backed down and retired to an old pine tree where they protested their plight rather loudly as well. Suddenly my cottage felt like a Home Affairs office.

Unfortunately the refugee geese has taken many, many opportunities to unseat the resident geese from their little spot on my roof. And they are not lightfooted creatures. Usually the fighting - WWF style - continues on the front lawn. However dramatic it is to watch, no amount of shouting or putting the sprinklers on can dislodged the birds from each other's throats.

I have stopped setting my alarm for 5 am as this, it has turned out, has become the refugee geese's favourite time to dive bomb my resident avian friends.

To add insult to injury the resident hadedas now regularly line up on the roof in the morning either to watch the action or to simply annoy the other warring parties.

It is like living in a war zone. I think I need a dog. Or a shotgun. Or maybe both.