A farmer found an Kookaburra’s egg and put it in a nest of a farmyard hen. The Kookaburra hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life, the Kookaburra did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet in the air.
Years passed and the Kookaburra grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among powerful wind currents, placing itself on on the clothesline poised in a state of cackling laugher at the chickens with scarcely a beat of its barely blue feathered wings.
The old Kookaburra looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked.“That’s the Kookaburra, the king of the Australian skyline,” said his neighbour. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth — we’re chickens.” So the Kookaburra lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.