Photo Phriday: Leftovers

When the dogs started digging around in the snow in the parking lot at training last week, and then brought me ... remains ... my kneejerk response was to curse the redneck who had cleaned his kill on his tailgate and dumped the leavings where he stood. Common enough in state gamelands.

Yeah -- no two-legged mammal produced these leftovers. (Click photo to embiggen.)

Hawk or owl? I'm sure someone out there knows the agent of Thumper's demise.

Whoever it was, she likes meat and is not too fond of tendons or bone.

Refugees

Got a call this morning from Mary Mary, a regular commenter over at the Pet Connection blog.

Apparently, after years of being widely known as the Dog Lady, I am now the designated Chicken Lady.

A senior prank on the last day of school at a suburban high school left ten* young chickens in need of a refuge. (I did make it clear that we aren't a farm sanctuary, and don't guarantee cockerels a sinecure.)

Mary's young friend and her Dad delivered them this afternoon, and I set them up in the now-disused foster dog kennel. (New poultry need to be quarantined from the resident flock.)

There appear to be four cockerels and six pullets. Maybe about five weeks old? What kind is a mystery to me. They appear to be white at first glance, but almost all of them have some brown splotches here and there. They aren't leghorns, nor, thankfully, Cornish crosses.

They were delighted with their new temporary digs and immediately went to work scratching and pecking. They know all about using a roost, and are very lively.

Any ideas about what breed(s) these guys might be?

(Edit: Mount Healthy hatchery has agreed that these appear to be Amberlink hybrid layers, which are only sold by Mount Healthy. Many of our local feed stores deal with Mount Healthy for chicks. They are characterized in the catalog as active foragers and productive brown egg layers with nice temperaments. They should fit in well here and do well under our kind of husbandry.)



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* So we can be very grateful the Class of '99 didn't think of this one.

Drop in Any Time

Last fall, while we were racing to get the new roof on the barn, and songbirds all over the hemisphere were racing to get south before the food supply dried up, we had a visitor briefly drop in.

What happened was this. Ken and Matt and Bill were up on the barn. Jake and I were passing metal sheets up to them, fetching tools and materials, etc. There was a thunk on the new metal roof. Something slid down it and hit the turf with a duller second thud.



It was this guy. Haven't ID'd him (probably her?) yet. I bet someone here knows what kind of LBB she is. Some kind of thrush? A female red-winged blackbird -- thanks to Megan for the ID.

So I went and picked up the limp little panting birdie, and demanded to know WTF the guys on the roof were doing to the local wildlife.

They swore that the critter had just dropped like a stone out of the clear blue sky.

I put her in a box, intending to call the wildlife rehabber in Mars and drive her over as soon as we finished for the day.

But when I took her out for photos, so I could tell Beth what kind of bird had been flung from the upper atmosphere onto my barn, she seemed to have perked up a lot from the nap.

I relaxed my grip ever-so-slightly while I was taking a burst of photos with the sports setting of my camera, and captured this in the last frame:


Remember, on long solo trips, pull over and take a nap before you crash onto someone's roof.