Up to our necks in preparing for Trail

• Author: Ilona Hanne Comment
• Published date: 03 November 2021
• Publication title: Stratford Press

One place I didn’t think they would take me, however, was to our own shed. But that is exactly where my husband and I have spent many evenings recently, drilling holes in tyres, cutting through old trampoline legs and spending far too many hours turning old copies of the Stratford Press into papier-mâché.

No, we haven’t been indulging in some creative form of marriage therapy (sidenote — anyone who suggests a shared arts and crafts project as a way to strengthen a marriage clearly has no idea how intense a discussion on the correct shade of pink spray paint for ostrich legs can get ... ) but we have been building a scarecrow. A scareostrich to be precise.

Our scareostrich (which is potentially more steampunk than scarecrow considering it contains more metal than straw) is one of 70 such creations entered in this year’s Stratford Scarecrow Trail, which is currently under way.

Now in its fifth year, the trail runs alongside the region’s various garden festivals and encourages people to explore the district on a scarecrow hunt.

It’s the first time our family has entered a scarecrow, let alone a scareostrich (and will probably be the last given the aforementioned paintgate), but the scarecrow trail itself has been an enjoyable reason to get out and explore our district in recent years.

So why an ostrich?

They are our youngest child’s favourite animal, or bird if you want to be specific (even the Greek philosopher Aristotle did not know whether to classify it as a bird or a mammal, so I make no apology for referring to these long-necked, small-headed, giant-beaked creatures as animals rather than birds at times), and he is, quite simply, obsessed with them.

They have featured in his entry for a school speech competition, his miniature scene for this year’s school mission day is a rainbow ostrich safari, he has had ostrich-themed birthday cakes, he owns possibly every cuddly ostrich ever created and his obsession with them has led to some interesting detours in our travels.

While it might not be surprising we have seen them in Africa, where our detour took us to Oudtshoorn, the ostrich capital of the world, his ostrich obsession has also taken us to Solvang, a small Danish city in California’s Santa Ynez Valley.

The city, originally the home of the Chumash people, became home to many Danish settlers in the early 1900s and is now packed with Danish architecture, Danish bakeries, even a half-size bronze replica of Denmark’s famous Little Mermaid statue. And...