This was originally written in 2009 in response to an acquaintance’s piece in the Globe about his pursuit of decorative owls while abroad.

Loved you piece on your pursuit of owls throughout the world, in part because it brought to mind our pursuit of roosters throughout the world.

When we bought our farm in 1992, we quickly realized that we had a great deal of space on the top of kitchen cabinets, window sills and mantels to fill with something. We used a wooden rooster we brought back from Thailand a few years earlier to fill at least a small bit of the yawning gap. And thus began our great search for roosters. There is now not a square inch of the first floor of our farm house that is not adorned with a rooster. We even have a rooster weather vane on the roof.

I wouldn’t say ours has been an extravagance. I think the most expensive one, a very liberal interpretation of a rooster by a Quebec artist that we bought in the Gatineau, cost $265. Though my wife thinks that our Santa Fe rooster, which is also some artist’s very liberal interpretation of a rooster, might have been on the extravagant side. However in both cases I think that there were extenuating circumstances why we went over our standard “rooster” budget. As I recall, they were both bought in restaurant gift/art shops after enjoying a fine lunch with much wine.

But for many years we became quite obsessed with ensuring we returned from each trip with a rooster. In some cases our search was a matter of choosing from many alternatives because wooden, ceramic or metal roosters were part of the folk art of the country, but in some cases there seemed to be no roosters on sale and our trips became clouded by the threat of returning home without one.

I scoured a flea market in Kiev searching for a Soviet era, Russian ceramic rooster similar to the one my friend, with whom I was staying, had in his living room. When I left he was kind enough to relieve my obvious anxiety at failing to find one by giving me his.

To our surprise there was a dearth of locally crafted roosters in Cornwall, so we had to settle for a “tacky, mass-made-in-China” bird, but how can you come home from Cornwall without a Cornish hen if you are a rooster collector?

Sometimes a little lateral thinking helped. Our Russian rooster is a tea cozy stuffed with paper. A wicker basket from Costa Rica. A soup tureen from we’re not to sure where, though I suspect that it might have been a treasure that I brought back from a walk along exotic Queen Street West. While we found a rooster carved from a chunk of coal in West   Virginia, we also brought home a tea-pot, napkin holder and salt and pepper shakers decorated with roosters.

Most come from afar, but some come from closer to home. Our local Mennonite furniture maker threw in a wooden rooster as a bonus when we bought a cabinet from him. And our pair of stylized South Western US roosters, which stand proudly on the sill of our dining room window, were actually bought in Hazelton Lanes.

We know where most of them come from, but there is one tall, quite aristocratic metal one that neither of us have a clue where it might have originated. Though I have the distinct memory of wrestling with how to fit it in my suit case so I suspect that it is foreign-born. For some totally unsubstantiated reason I think it’s from Normandy. Getting one’s find home is not, of course, something that you think about when you spot the perfect rooster in some shop or flea market.

And then there is the issue of what qualifies as a rooster when there are obviously not any indigenous ones to be found. Does a pair of stylized, clay guinea fowls that were on the mantel of our lodge room in the Drakensberg in South   Africa qualify as “roosters.” They now sit on our mantel. (And I’m sure that the hotelier still talks about the weird Canadians who wanted to buy the decorations off his mantel.) Condors from Peru? Though we came home empty-handed from Malta when we drew the line at having a “Sydney Greenstreet Maltese falcon” infiltrate our rooster collection.

When I read your account of your great owl hunt, I pondered our intellectual rationale for selecting roosters over other possibilities, but realized we had none. I’m even not sure what traits they are supposed to symbolize. We selected roosters simple because we already had one. Which is probably why we feel free to wander from our fixation on roosters from time to time. In fact, the other day I realized there was an owl atop a book shelf. Indeed quit a fine ceramic owl crafted by our son when he was about eight. As a connoisseur of owls you might find it wanting, but his natural artistic abilities, he now makes his living as a graphic designer, seem to have created an object that bears some resemblance to an owl and definitely reflects their wisdom.

While we keep our eye out for a fine rooster, I think our compulsion to find a rooster is abating. We have now come home from Belize, Alaska, Montana’s Big Sky Country and India without one.

But for you, a wish that you find the perfect (inexpensive) owl in some Shanghai market.