Snapshot Sunday: Chickies Have Two Mommies

These two hens went broody within about five days of one another. I gave each of them a private nest box filled with eggs in a large unused stall in the barn. I knew that I'd have to move the first clutch to hatch quickly, as the still-setting hen was likely to try to kill them when they started running around.

The morning after they hatched, Broody Prima was in the nest box with Broody Dos, setting on those eggs, while the chicks ran around the stall and popped under either hen indiscriminately.

Sigh. Buff Orpingtons. The golden retrievers of chickendom.

The two ladies raised their clutches communally; within a couple weeks, it wasn't even possible to tell the older chicks from the younger ones. They were very successful, bringing up 19 chicks together. They lost two to a barn rat that grabbed them at night, before the cats took care of him. The two Mommas were seldom more than ten feet apart. I never saw them quarrel.

They have, of course, both earned blue broody leg bands, which exempts them from the crock pot. I'm eager to see whether they sync up their broodiness next year.

Broodiness is a genetic trait, not a learned one, so I am saving eggs from each of them come spring.

Not Your Stick

Ernie about to be introduced to a
hitherto obscure Law of Nature

Cole has taken on our latest foster, young Ernie, as an interesting project.

There wasn't much for him to do in the first week Ernie was with us. The New Guy was living a very restricted life -- tied to me, on a long line on walks, kenneled, in a crate, or gated into a room with me where my eyeballs were always on him. This is how it normally starts with fosters here.

Ernie got opportunities to play outdoors a bit, after dark, when the poultry had gone to bed. He and Cole played keepaway in the front, running round the landscaping bed that is overgrown with mint. In our house, only fosters wear jingly tags -- helps me keep track of them.

Without a sound cue, Ernie appeared to believe that every time Cole disappeared around the other end of the mint island and froze, he had disappeared off the face of the earth. He'd stand and whine until Cole would sneak around into sight and recommence the game.

On Friday, I took the leash off during daylight for the first time. All the dogs were hanging around near the two big maple trees above the house. No poultry close by, so I was confident I would have time to intervene if Ernie forgot the chicken manners he'd been learning while on the long line.

After a short romp, Cole settled down to enjoy chewing a stick.

Or so it would appear to the casual observer.

What he was actually doing was writing and executing a lesson plan, conceptualized in the form a game.

The name of the game is Not Your Stick. The rules of Not Your Stick are simple: That stick? Not yours. That other stick over there? Also, not yours. The stick so small you think I can't see it? Nope, not yours. (Click the little speech-balloon icon lower left for captions.)



To a decontextualized observer, what this looks like is just Cole being a little shit. And he is certainly capable of being just that.

Since Ernie landed in foster largely due to his previous failure to appreciate the twin principles of Not Yours and Keep Your Mouth off of Not Yours, I was more interested in seeing where this would go. I'd had several opportunities to correct Ernie for putting his mouth on things that did not belong to him in the house, and he'd taken the correction well, seeming to contemplate this new information without being overly worried or sensitive. And Cole not only stopped short of overt bullying; he gave the impression of conscientiousness in his titration of timing, pressure, and display.

After Cole explained the Not Yours principles to Ernie using four or five sticks in order to achieve generalization, he allowed Ernie to pick up a stick and retired a short distance away, and benignly observed him enjoying a good chew.

This lasted only a few minutes. All the during the lesson, my flock of curious, friendly, and exceedingly naive turkey poults had been working their way towards the field of play. This would be Ernie's first off-leash encounter with poultry.

He took the bait.

Just as I opened my mouth to correct him, Cole ran forward, blocked him, and sent him in the other direction. Cole is my turkey hound -- he not only herds the turkeys, drives the turkeys away from forbidden areas, plays a silly game with the adult toms, and brings the turkeys home when they stray, he protects the turkeys from predators, cars, and their own suicidal stupidity. Turkeys are his special responsibility.

Cole decided that young turkeys needed to stay in the shrubberies and were not to come out and mingle with dogs in the mowed area. He trotted the boundary until the turkeys relented and moved back into the weeds.

Ernie did not challenge the rule that these were emphatically Not Your Turkeys. He came back towards me and fawned on Pip and Rosie while Cole moved the flock.

He not only absorbed the lesson, he passed the pop quiz at the end of class.

Photo Good Phriday: Eoster Greetings

This weekend we will search the farm for hidden nests of eggs, and the leporaria for more nests of new rabbits.

We will eat flesh and candy and drink wine.

There will be fire.

There will likely be some new additions to our herds and flocks.

The pear tree will burst into flower.

Nothing to see here. No Goddess arising. Move along, return to your churches, have a cracker, and feel sorry for all the sins you've done while all around you Nature is flowering, fucking, hatching, kindling, kidding and generally bursting forth without apologies, restraint, or any sense of decency. Remind yourself relentlessly that it's a Very Solemn Father and Son thing. No Girls Allowed.

I feel compassion around now for browbeaten "Christians" who work so hard to avoid being Pagan that they forbid themselves to be Human.

But She is there for you, anyway.

Rural Gods II: The Sex-Change Fairy

The Sex-Change Fairy and her peeps Y-Gor and The Mighty ZedWu

Y-Gor and his sister The Mighty ZedWu determine the biological sex, and sometimes socially-constructed gender, of livestock, governing mammals and poultry, respectively.

If the farmer is raising Thanksgiving turkeys for a customer pool who mostly want giant celebratory tom birds to wow the inlaws, ZedWu will arrange for 80% of the "straight-run" poults she bought to be dainty little hens. Y-Gor will will do the same for the beef producer hoping for steer calves from his cows.

But if the farmer is working to build a dairy herd of goats or cattle, or a productive laying flock of chickens, these gender daemons will bless her with a neverending bounty of male offspring.


The farmer who has pinned his herd improvement hopes on a fine and expensive purebred ram or bull or buck may find that he's gone and bought a gay stud. Y-Gor is nothing if not playful.

ZedWu and Y-Gor always aim for balance. If they have blessed your henhouse with an entire hatch of leghorn roosters, you can be sure that your next litter of production pigs will all be gilts. They are nothing if not fair.

If their efforts fail to to impose this balance, the Sex-Change Fairy will step in. Her powers are mostly limited to rabbits (as well as pet rodents) and all poultry.

Save the four does from a litter of meat rabbits, make hassenpfeffer of the bucks, and one month later you are sure to find three of the "does" fighting amongst themselves, trying to bite one another in the ... testicles? Where the hell did those come from? The fourth bunny will be underaged-pregnant by one or all of her new brothers.

Noticing that your hens are looking bedraggled and put-upon, you eat or sell most of your date-raping roosters, drakes, and toms.

Look into the poultry yard a week later. When did that hen turkey start strutti ... is that a beard? Goddammit. Did that pullet just crow? What the ...


When the Sex-Change Fairy does not work her enchantment on the gonads (and combs, hackle-feathers, beards, spurs and attitudes) of your flock, she enlists the help of her corporeal minions, mobilizing the raccoons, owls, and Jack Russell terriers of the world to slaughter only female poultry, preferably those that are sitting on nests.

Being the second in a series of revelations concerning the powerful deities who govern rural life. Iconography by the inimitable Kelly Bahmer-Brouse.

Happy Thanksgiving

Dad...?

Twitterpated

What? Walt Disney got the biology of critters wrong? Say it ain't so!

Spring is not the season of twitterpated. At least it isn't around here.

As the plant world and the invertebrates* die or tuck themselves in for the year in the forest and farm, the local tetrapods are getting busy. Late fall is the time for making babies. When I say you can smell the sex on the air, I'm not being hyperbolic or metaphorical. I'm hoping the wind doesn't shift from the goat pasture towards the house.

Rosie is in season, which makes her pushier, snarkier, cuddlier, and generally underfoot. She harasses the eunuchs and has her way with them. Neither Moe nor Cole got the memo about their testes, so they are happy to oblige. It's hazardous to turn a corner suddenly around here -- always a little disconcerting to walk in on a couple of dogs in flagrante delicto.

I've had bitches who became uncharacteristically stupid or wacky when they came into season, and were unreliable in their work. Pip and Rosie just add energy and intensity to their already driven performances. Rose has done a bang-up job on her last two trails; her estrus is a good time to throw extra distractions and new challenges her way. Canine sublimation?

Next estrus is put up or shut up time; we'll be deciding soon whether she will be a mother.

The deer rut means that I see more of them, as caution takes a back seat to libido. Six paraded through the south pasture at dusk; I think it was five does and a buck, but there may have been two bucks. Their rubs are particularly shreddy this year.

Our new rabbit herd got off to a slow start. The first doe that my original buck bred, back in September, did not "take," though she seemed to have. It's likely that his swimmers' soup was overcooked by the summer heat. The second doe had a litter of six, around the same time that the buck sadly succumbed to (what turned out to be) a urinary blockage. I got a new unrelated young buck from a different breeder, and have just integrated him and a new doe in the colony. Within two minutes of being released, New Guy had scent marked ten places in the stall, bred one of the younger does, and gotten his ass kicked by the dominant doe. With five does in the colony, I expect an early winter population explosion.

Gollum the barn cat, fearsome slayer of mice, voles, rats and chipmunks, has taken to sleeping amongst the rabbits. No shit. He ignores the babies, which are hardly larger than a large rat, and I've spotted him nuzzling with more than one of the does. Gollum said buh-bye to his little friends at a tender age, so I don't think he's joined in any Samhain barncat orgies, but he did get into a fight recently, which for a cat is much the same thing. His face wounds healed up fine, and he kept claiming that I shoulda seen the other guy. His sister does not corroborate his account, however.


It's not just dogs who can† discriminate between "ours" and "other" without explicit instruction and control their predatory impulses accordingly.

Meanwhile, I have to remind myself that our baby chicks and turkey poults were also freaking adorable, and grew up to be delicious.

Speaking of bucks, and urine.


Jefferson the he-goat is visiting from Rachel and Stan's farm.

He's got a lovely calm temperament. Pity about his personal habits. I do everything I can not to touch him. There's burdock in his beard and on his rump, and he's just going to have to cope, because there is no way I'm combing him out. Also, I know just how far backwards he can reach; he could groom that burdock out if it was a priority for him.

His job here is to settle Patsy and Edina. Lovely term that. Knock them up.** We'll know in a couple of weeks whether he's succeeded.

He courts the ladies by applying Capraxxe body spray, waggling his tongue, blubbering, flaunting his flehmen, and -- well, now I know what inspired the odd-looking phalli on all those vases depicting Bacchanals.



The wethers swear that he's been hanging around the playground wearing a trenchcoat and talking about a lost puppy. I'm monitoring the situation.

Jefferson gave me some crap about the gate his third morning here. Cole, who is deathly afraid of the electric fence around the goat pasture and never willingly approaches it, came flying off the back porch, through the gate, and straight at the he-goat's nose. Cole doesn't think much of visiting he-goat, and he interpreted a little stroppiness as a genuine threat. And now I know what he does when he thinks I'm threatened.

Good to know.

Finally, a weirdly untimely ray of hope in our disappointing heritage turkey breeding season.

Three or four weeks ago I noticed that the Bourbon red hen who had not succeeded with a clutch this year was not coming in to roost or running with the flock. But I would sometimes spot her for a few minutes in the morning around the feed trough before she would dematerialize.

Far too late in the year to be setting a nest, but the signs were unmistakable.


I finally found her Tuesday morning, close to the barn and setting a dozen eggs. She'd already pushed out three eggs -- a good sign, actually, indicating that she was paying attention to their viability and keeping the live eggs protected -- and this nest and eggs were clean, unlike her previous nests.

It is now far too cold and snotty for her to set outside, and I lost two shrubbery-setting hens this year to a raccoon, so in she came, whether she wanted to or not. The answer was Not. A twelve-pound bird can be surprisingly strong when she Does Not Want, but in she came with her eggs to a private stall. I candled them Thursday, and found squirming embryos in seven of them. Fingers crossed. It's a ridiculous time to raise turkeys, but I cannot say no to her.


The broody hens work so hard. It breaks my heart when things don't go well for them. Such devotion demands fulfillment. The only thing harder than brooding a clutch is the hero's journey of hatching out of an egg. It's hatch or die, and if anyone takes pity and helps the little warrior, it's likely to kill or cripple him. We mammals know nothing of birth struggle.

Spring may be the time of vegetative abundance and enthusiasm, but as the death and dormancy of Winter looms, the animals flaunt their eternal optimism. Snow all you want, we'll make more.

******************

* Including the hornets, wasps and bees that make life exciting and possibly brief, and the $#@^$ stink bugs that make it annoying.

** For the dairy-animal uninformed: A goat (or cow) can produce milk for about a year after giving birth (kidding or calving), provided she is nursing offspring and/or milked regularly. To continue to get milk, the farmer must breed her every year. The onset or resumption of lactation is called freshening. She'll lactate just fine while pregnant. It's the usual practice to dry her off a couple of months before she's due again. So I'll stop milking the girls, and wean their 2010 kids, in February in preparation for April kidding.

None of this applies to the "Happy California Cows" of agribusiness fairy tales who calve and freshen, then receive hormone injections to keep them continuously lactating until their udders break down and they become hamburger. (The cows. Come to think, the udders, too, both metaphorically and probably literally.)

† Can. Can. Not necessarily will. And an absence of formal, or even conscious, training does not equate to a guidance vacuum or magical thinking.

Well Enough Alone

I just won't leave it.

For one thing, I need to provide some entertainment for Randy at the feed mill.

For another, I'm cheap.

But mainly, I don't trust conventional wisdom when the "wisdom" comes from a multinational agricorp and the "conventional" is the convention of the compliant customer.

We're talking about a woman who personally salvages whole cow tripes -- innards so vile that the slaughterhouse workers refuse to touch them -- for her dogs. Because they are that good for them.

When I got my first chickens I bought commercial chicken feed at Tractor Supply or Agway, in fifty pound sacks. The food is in pellet or crumbled pellet form, its constituent ingredients unrecognizable. It is "complete and balanced."

You can guess how long that lasted.

When we bought our first flock of meat chickens, our friends Rachel and Stan encouraged me to have feed made up at Zanella's.

Nineteenth-century technology, still going strong at Zanella's and mixing my chicken feed; photographed with a five-year-old cell phone camera that is already obsolete.

This is the sort of thing I do on principle -- buying from a local small business that sources most of its supplies from local small farmers. It was also significantly cheaper. Our local, local mill, Knauf's in Harmony, a few miles away, has been shuttered and for sale since before we moved here. I remember buying a few dog supplies and garden things there years back, when we lived in the sprawlburb to the south. They were phoning it in then. I wish someone would buy the mill and do something with it. John Zanella says the mill equipment is probably not salvageable; I still think the building would make a keen brewpub. It's a great location, but parking would be an issue.

Randy, the animal-feed guy at Zanella's, ground up the standard corn/soy mash for broiler chickens, and I drove off with a half-ton on the trailer. Did the same this year, and while I was kvetching about the high cost of layer pellets, Randy pointed out that the broiler mash could also feed the hens, as long as they were getting oyster shell.

Derrrr ....

But later this summer I started reading and talking to people and thinking (always a mistake), and then buying sacks of whole grains and experimenting.

How locally can a chicken eat?

What are the optimum protein, calcium, fat contents?

Are the whole grains better for the birds than pulverized?

How can I keep egg quality and hen health up during the winter, when pasture is snow-covered or just dead?

I goosed out a recipe that we'll try:

cracked roasted soybeans
rolled corn
wheat
oats
milo
(All the above grains are local)
sunflower seeds
soybean oil
dicalcium phosphate
brewer's yeast
mineral pre-mix

ad lib (in separate hoppers):
kelp meal
oyster shell

add in winter:
alfalfa meal (as rabbit pellets)

Soybeans and corn need to be cracked for the chickens; the other grains are served whole

Pasture all year when it isn't encased in snow, but the food value of the pasture starts dropping off to negligible levels around now (the psychological value is indisputable -- just ask the chooks who were snowed in for much of last winter).

Scraps from wherever I can get them -- our kitchen, friends. I'm going to try to work with some local restaurants on recycling scraps this winter. I hate waste even more than I'm cheap. Chickens eat anything. The commercial diet is deficient in animal protein and fresh green stuff, and they can't make that up on pasture in the winter. I'm interested to see how much difference the rabbit pellets might make.

At the moment, store brand layer pellets (think chicken kibble) are $12.89 per 50# bag at Tractor Supply, my closest feed store. 25.8 cents per pound, or $516 a ton. Purina Layena is $13.99 a bag, or $559.60 a ton.

I paid $275 for this latest batch of feed, which came to about 1150 pounds. $20 for rolling and mixing, $255 for ingredients, including the kelp which will also be fed to goats, cats, and dogs. (But not rabbits. It is "not recommended for rabbits." I do not know why this is.) 23.9 cents per pound.

Not the huge savings I got with the off-the shelf formula broiler feed, but the quality is just not comparable to the industrial hen kibble. This is primo chicken feed. My hens, and everyone who eats their eggs, deserve no less.

Since I was planning to add ad lib kelp to the chooks' diet regardless, and I'm not yet sure how much of it will be fed to chickens and how much to my other critters, it's reasonable t0 subtract that $35 and 50#, making the figure 21.8 cents per pound or $436 a ton. Eighty bucks saved looks a lot better than four cents a pound saved. Plus I expect to save a lot by not schlepping into TSC -- or for that matter, Zanella's associated hardware and farm supply store -- and picking up odds & ends that I could probably do without. I make feed runs every week or so when I'm buying bagged, and that adds up just for the gas.

I reuse my woven feed bags from Zanella's, bringing them back to Randy when he rolls and mixes my next batch. Or I forget them and get my chops busted until I threaten to tell blog readers worldwide which key ingredient he forgot to mix in to the last batch of feed. Most bagged feed is in paper bags, which are useful for trash, but one can only use so many. Tractor Supply and Purina are now using some pretty nifty-looking woven poly bags that can be re-used for other things. I've used some of them as shelf backing in the barn, and am experimenting with remaking others into reusable shopping bags for sale. But again, one can use only so many of these.

So far, so good. The poultry have been eating the custom mix for about a month. Egg production is up somewhat (it normally drops off in the fall, and some birds are still moulting) and shells seem stronger.

Photo Phriday: Move Along

Nothing magnificent to see here. Return to your homes.

Photo Phriday: Don't Screw With The Broody

One of the ornery Daughters of Henery disappeared for a few weeks in late Spring.

Well good riddance, Owl Bait, I thought to myself. Her sister had just become taco filling after murdering three of our scant crop of turkey poults, and her personality had not been notably better.

Three weeks after she dematerialized, she reappeared out of the shrubberies with thirteen gorgeous chicks in tow.

She declined to take them back to the coop, and instead raised them as she had incubated them -- as wild chickens. Wild chickens that got fed corn and soybeans twice a day along with the meat birds and flock of guineas, up by the summer goat shed.

The meaties mobbed their feed troughs pretty completely, and were each quite a bit more substantial than the little half-Hamburg biddy.


But DoH's kids always got their own trough.

She may be ornery, noisy, and barely domesticated, but she raised all thirteen of her brood to full-feathered "fledging." No other hen has done so well, and with such little care. I didn't do as well with my first incubator experiment this year. She has earned tenure.

Photo Phriday: Oviduct

One doesn't normally deliberately kill a productive laying hen.* So when Dale McNugget departed this mortal coil last week and I dressed her out for the dogs' dinner, there was something other than the usual giblets inside.


I was surprised to see so many egg yolks, lined up in her oviduct and clustered around her ovary.

Chickens (all birds) have two ovaries when the are born, but only the left one (right one in some raptors -- don't ask why because I don't know) develops and produces eggs.

This is a lot of good-sized (i.e. fairly developed) yolks, but apparently not outside normal limits. I asked around.

_________

* The ornery Daughter of Henery who drew blood while I was gathering eggs last week may find herself an exception sealed her fate by breaking into the turkey coop and killing several hatchling poults; she had fewer eggs lined up than Dale, but was more interesting, as one was in the chamber getting shell laid on when I converted her to curry ingredients.

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.)



______________

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

RIP Dale "Supersize" McNugget 4/14/09-6/6/10

Dale McNugget passed away peacefully and rather suddenly in the sunny barnyard, surrounded by her flockmates, this afternoon.

The proximal cause of death was pulmonary failure. This was secondary to what I would have called morbid obesity -- except, on necropsy, she really had very little body fat. She was just one enormous chicken.

Hybrid broiler birds are not designed by artificial selection to live long, healthy lives. Had Dale been a conventional cornish cross hen, she would have been unlikely to live four months, much less fourteen. Because she was a "freedom ranger," she was a little better equipped to live in the world. But she was still too heavy to flutter up to the roost with the other hens, spending her nights on the coop floor with the ducks and the two auxiliary Dales -- hens who escaped capture on processing day last July. She laid eggs under the nest boxes* after she became too large to fit inside one -- or rather, too large to get out once she had squeezed in. Later I installed a large covered cat litter box as a floor-level nest box for the former McNuggets.

I started limiting the plus-sized girls' access to feed a few months ago, gating them out of the coop during the day by installing a creep on the pop door that the smaller chickens could slip through, but kept the three big girls outside to forage on pasture rather than hog down layer feed. It didn't seem to make a lot of difference in their weights, but they did become more active.

Of course I'm ambivalent about the very existence of hybrid broiler chickens, let alone the lives they usually lead. That those will be short is a given; knowing this and feeling a bit guilty about it, we endeavor to eliminate nasty and brutish from the list of options. There are currently fifteen Cartmans living in a chicken tractor in the pasture; they'd have grown just fine in a stall in the barn, but a chicken should breath fresh air and eat bugs and grass. They'd also be fairly content confined to the tractor, but I open it up during the day so they can shuffle around a bit, and sack out in the tall grass along the old fenceline when they want to, and dustbathe. To the extent their genetics allows, they get to be chickens during their very short span on this earth.

There are 76 new McNuggets growing feathers in preparation for their own move out to pasture, where they'll live behind electronet at night, range free for much of the day, and have even more chicken-like and slightly longer lives.

But their genetics dictate, always, that those lives will be short. Not even an internet rabble with money in their teeth will convince me to hold back any meat birds from this years' flocks. I do not believe it is kind.

I think of the short lives of giant breed dogs, and how their hearts so often give out. The incredibly plastic canine genome can produce 200 pound dog bodies, but not the hearts to run them.

One of the two auxiliary Dales died a month or so ago; her heart was at least four times normal size.

I didn't weigh Dale after my mom found her still-warm body this afternoon. But a necropsy on a chicken is another way of saying "dressed out," with a little more haruspicy. She makes at least a dozen dog meals -- feeding five English shepherds and one hollow-legged German shepherd -- in other words, you could easily feed an English shepherd for a week on one chicken. She must have been at least sixteen pounds alive.

I took her skin, head, and intestines out to the Fox Stump at the far end of the south pasture, where we leave offerings to the vulpine neighbors in exchange for respect for our living flock. Think of it as a sky burial.

____________

* She had no fewer than eight eggs at various stages of growth queued up in her oviduct.

Snapshot Sunday: Don't Try This At Home

Photo not staged. I'm not kidding.

Today I moved the fifteen spring Cartmans outside to a chicken tractor for their last couple weeks before they leave for freezer camp. This freed up their stall in the barn for the 101 McNuggets that have been stinking up the house while living in two Green Giant potato boxes in the basement. And the nine replacement layers that I hatched out last month.

Pip has a particularly strong English shepherd nurturing instinct. When she was still a virgin bitch, she tried to appropriate and nurse some kittens we were fostering for the shelter. The kittens had a perfectly competent -- and unbelievably tolerant -- lactating Momma Cat, so this ended with a compromise that was amenable to all. Pinky the cat curled up against Pip's belly and nursed her kitties while spooning.

Pip thinks all our babies are hers to protect, including chicks. The chicks obviously get it.

We've taught Rosie and Cole "Baby -- gentle." They get it too. A few seconds after I kicked them out of the brood stall, they were serving it up to the two rutting, strutting, ill-natured free-range tom turkeys in the barnyard. Entirely appropriate, and emphatically not gentle, but not a feather damaged.

Folks, please do not try this with your Jack Russell terrier.

Also not staged, except I asked them to stay as I moved out of the stall to get the shot

.

Photos Phriday: Tiny Cheeping Evil

The Zelie postmistress called me at 5:45 this morning to tell me that a cheeping box had arrived for me.



Oh sure, they look like adorable little striped chickies.

Don't be fooled. I missed catching them trying to eat one another's toes, but that's the first thing they did when I put them in their brooder.

The color is odd because they are under a red heat lamp. Or else that's the glow of the furnaces of Hell from whence they were spawned. One or the other.

Guinea fowl experts assure us that these vile creatures can be tamed with daily handling, but then add "We mean hours a day."

Our last flock of guineas was heavily slanted towards cock birds, and they quickly became nasty. I don't mind aggression towards humans and dogs, because, what, we can't deal with a three-pound bird? But they were mugging my chickens and kicking them off their roosts. The stress was seriously cutting into egg production, but more important, the hens were frightened and miserable. Not. Cool.

We ate most of the males, sold the remaining mated pairs. But not soon enough.

If these behave, they can stay over next winter. If not, they make a superb coq a vin. This batch is the larger, meatier French guineas. No accident.

Why guineas again?

They have one virtue. They eat ticks. And the ticks have suddenly taken off here. They'll go outside in May -- I'll house them in the woodshed, away from the chickens -- and start earning their keep.

Six More Weeks? The Deuce, You Say!

The Weather Service would not commit yesterday. You might get a foot of snow. Or maybe about four inches. Who can say?


You bastards.

So, turns out, it might have been a good idea to bestir ourselves after Perfesser Chaos' last fire call last night and plow out the driveway when we had only 11 inches.

Because Tractor-San is a game little thing, but we cannot even raise the blade high enough that it does not act as an anchor.

A man might come tomorrow to extract us. I'm not sure what it's going to cost us. We've actually jumped the queue on account of PK being a firefighter. Even though his substation is only about a quarter mile away, he can't get there fast enough on snowshoes to make the truck when the pager goes off. Depending on where I sink the yardstick, we've got between 18-22 inches, and are going nowhere.

Meanwhile, we still have power, there's oil in the tanks, wood in the shed, plenty of toilet paper, half a case of home brew, a whole case of Mexican Coca-Cola, two bottles of rum, 80 pounds of beef scrap for dogs, and a couple new Netflix on hand.

Four pairs of snowshoes, two pairs of skis, a case of toe warmers, and a gallon of gatorade.

Two feet of fresh powder sounds wonderful. What it really is is a shitload of work.

Sophia actually did some of the trail-breaking, but she is not particularly skilled at route-choosing, and tends to porpoise in aimless circles. Mostly it was up to Perfesser Chaos. The English shepherds were happy to hang back and let The Help perform this function.


Even where the trail was broken, the smaller ES had to porpoise to get through.


I only fell once. It's actually pretty hard to fall when the snow is over your knees, but the concealed tripwire brambles in the pasture finally had their say. Getting back up is not a straightforward exercise when one's skis are five-foot snow anchors. I got plenty of helpful advice on how to manage this task from the non-ski-wearing Peanut Gallery.

I think Cole might be carrying half his weight in snow dingles here. He also got to relive the testicle experience in gigantic ice form. It wasn't as good as he remembered.


Interesting that Barry White, who braved the same drifts, collected nothing. I think he repelled the dingles with force of will. He's never going to suffer that indignity again.

There were few game trails apparent, and only in protected lee areas. I'm hoping our trail-breaking will be a boon to the wildlife -- except for the tiny tunnelers and the hibernators, a snow dump like this one makes hard times for wild creatures. Our route coincidentally connects the deer bedding area in the pines on our north boundary with our neighbor's unharvested cornfield to the west. I figure that by February, that corn is forfeit to the local Bambis. I filled two feeders with safflower seeds and black oil sunflower, and hung out some more suet.

I opened the window for the turkeys to come out. Yeah, I was just messin' with 'em. They knew it, and did not take the bait.

Interesting that wild turkeys manage to survive even though their feet sometimes touch snow.

One hour of porpoising through snow higher than their backs has given us a houseful of very quiet dogs tonight.

Kick Me

The turkeys have been bullying Sophia.





She's the largest dog here. She's the only one who has ever seriously injured another animal. (Forgot about all those murdered groundhogs for a minute there ...) Her people routinely take down bad guys, both for fun and for real. Yet the birds see a giant "Kick Me" sign on her ass.

Last week they got her cornered on the front porch; we looked out to see her cowering against the door, hackled from occiput to tail-tip, growling and snapping. The birds were not impressed. We had to let Rosie out to serve them, as she does in this clip.

Yet tiny Rosie, and even tinier Cole, easily drive or gather the turkeys, put them up in their coop, and generally keep order in the flock. The turkeys don't even think about giving any crap to any of the English shepherds. Notice the space they give Pip and Rosie in the clip.

At the moment they are cooped most of the time -- not for stalking the German shepherd, but for their serial acts of vandalism and hooliganism up in the village.

The neighbors didn't tell me about the "visits" -- or the turkey crap on their Weber grills, broken porch tchotchkes, stolen pet food -- until they'd been at it a week and developed a habit. When my neighbor came to tell me about the attempted theft of his Christmas lights, Rosie, Cole and I had to drive them home from over half a kilometer away.

This a long way to chase a dozen turkeys.

Now I only let them out for about an hour before bedtime, when I can keep an eye on them.

Photo Phriday: Whew -- that was close

The turkeys are all still with us. Proof:


Dale thrives. She is so fat she cannot cluck (she grunts) and I periodically have to extract her when she gets stuck in a regular-sized nest box. As the slowest hen, she became a "favorite" of the adolescent former cross-dressing, gang-raping roosters. Roosters don't mind fat chicks.


What, you say something is wrong here?

"You know, there are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office -- and then, there are moments like this, where I pardon a turkey and send it to Disneyland."

-- Barack Obama

Photo Phriday: Quaaaaak!

No ducks were harmed in the gang-creaming of this German shepherd.

Flows downhill

This Spring, when Professor Chaos had the bionic implant done on his chubby, flat, right foot, I had the privilege of playing Step-n-Fetchit for him, then a few weeks of four-hour-a-day rush-hour unpaid chauffeur duty, and a couple of months of managing every farm and household chore single-handed.

Which metaphor I never appreciated properly until we got the farm, and had a hundred-times daily lessons on how a given chore or repair that would take two people two minutes takes one person a half hour and a small storm-cloud of profanity.

A dog may be far better than a hired man for helping with livestock, but they suck at holding the window frame while I screw in a new hinge. Also, cannot lug a five-gallon poultry waterer.

The by-catch of all this, aside from a persistent vile temper in excess of the baseline, was the near-destruction of my upper back and neck.

A new physician, presented with the primary complaint of neck and back pain and severe paresthesia in both hands, questioned whether my insomnia might not indicate a need for antidepressants, and ordered up a a few fuck-you radiographs and a butt-cam for good measure. Neither revealed anything of interest. So, ipso facto, nothing wrong with me, thankyoucomeagain..

(Anyone know a decent internist/GP in the North Hills of Pittsburgh? Someone who, you know, actually practices medicine? Still looking ...)

The chiropractor strung me along for about six weeks, and I still couldn't feel my hand.

Finally, in July, my witch-doctor friend flew in as close as Dayton to teach a clinic. I drove out the night before, and a half-hour after deplaning, she got into my back, made me do things that made me cry, and essentially fixed me. Within four days the parasthesia was gone, and it has not come back.

Today Professor Chaos is having his left paw sliced, and I no wanna repeat.

So last month, I spent a couple days devising a labor-saving gadget that is, after a four-week trial, safe to say, the cat's ass.

The most tedious chore on the farm has been keeping the poultry supplied with plentiful, clean water.

First of all, there isn't a single commercial poultry-fount design that I would kick a duck in the ass with. We have at least six different designs, and each one of them sucks in some different way -- fragile, tips, leaks, won't open, won't close, hard to clean, clogs, breaks. And none of them are cheap, at least, for what you get.

So I bought some parts and made a poultry waterer that is easy to keep clean, does not leak, does not clog, does not tip, and never leaves my birds without plenty of water -- and I've only refilled it once since I installed it. It takes less than a minute a day to clean, and there is no heavy lifting involved. The heaviest work is pulling the garden hose up about 12' with a string.

First, I bought a self-filling dog water bowl. About $12 on sale somewhere.

I already had a 55 gallon plastic barrel that had served as a rain barrel for many years at our former home. It had cost me $5 -- I see them on Craig's List for $10 all the time nowadays.

I installed a new plastic spigot near the bottom. Spigot cost about $3 at Trader Horne.

I had some good-quality hose that I'd salvaged from the curb quite a while ago. Someone ran over a long, expensive hose with his lawnmower, and rather than cut out the damaged part and repair, he pitched it. My gain.

A shut-off valve for the downhill (in-coop) end -- about $3.

Male and female ends for the hose, about a buck and a half per.

My poultry are cooped in the lower level of our bank barn. Upstairs is hay storage and gear/equipment storage.

So I moved the empty rain barrel into the upper part of the barn, directly above the chicken coop. Positioned it over a strong beam near the foundation, and set it up on some cribbing so that the spigot isn't so close to the floor that the hose kinks.


Ignore the wood detritus around the barrel -- it rained down during roof repair last week.

Drilled a hole in the floor. This was harder than it sounds. The floor is oak, and 1 1/2" thick. Fortunately that is two courses of boards, so I was just able to pull this off with a hole saw and a chisel.

Fed the hose through the floor, and down into the coop.



Secured the bowl to the wall so that the chickens have to reach a little in order to drink. Shorter chickens can stand on the ramp to the pop-door. This way, less junk gets into the bowl.

The bowl is mounted on four screws with its keyhole mounts. It is secure on the wall, but easy to lift out to clean.

I just bring a bucket into the coop in the morning, lift the bowl off the mount, slosh the dusty water into the bucket, wipe the bowl off with a damp rag, and make sure that the new water glugging in is clean.

The drip you see at the shut-off valve in the photo is because I had just cleaned the bowl and inadvertently loosened the connection a little. I've since cranked it very tight.

I could have just as easily placed the barrel outside and uphill of the coop. This would have made filling it even easier. I bring the garden hose from the house up into the barn with a string that dangles down through a siding board that isn't nailed down at the bottom, and gives the barn swallows an entrance when the door is closed. But since the barrel is white, I wanted to keep it out of the sunlight so I wouldn't have to contend with algae. I also have some terra-cotta colored and blue barrels, and those would be better for an outdoor installation.

If I lived someplace level, I'd have built a frame/platform for the barrel that raised it to about chest level, and placed it very close to the coop.

Someone asked why I don't just run a hose straight to the coop from the house.

Last year, a hose that I left on burst while I was out for the day. Came home to a well cistern that had actually been sucked dry. Fortunately our well-pump has a safety shutoff and didn't fry, but we were without water for a day.

This single innovation has cut poultry chore time by about 75%.

Come winter, we'll probably have to go back to hauling water on the coldest days. I could heat the reservoir, but keeping the hose flowing overnight, when the birds don't drink, would be a bitch. Still, unless we have another apocalyptic winter, this should be about a month of water-hauling total.

Snapshot Sunday: Guest Blogger

While our plans for a simple, one-day, finish-by-sunset-and-grab-a-beer roofing job on the barn gang aft agley on Saturday with the discovery of rot in the base, our emphatically non-farmer nieces had to find ways to entertain themselves while Dad, Uncle Ken, Aunt Heather, and "Uncle" Bill bled money and profanity all weekend.

Fourteen year-old Brady borrowed Bill's camera, and came up with these:

Cole and Rosie: Vicious and Dangerous

Bwaaa haaa -- just kidding

Still-life with dew and turkey feather

Pokeweed after frost

Narragansett jake strutting

Fleabane

Ameraucana cockerel. Rooster voted least likely to end up as coq a vin this year.

The new generation of young photographers is going to be a fearless bunch -- liberated from the expense of film, able to get instant feedback on what "worked" and what didn't, and open to experimenting and accepting the happy accident. I envy them the freedom of digital, even as I'm nostalgic for the stink of developer and the pall of the red light bulb.

That said, the kid is a better photographer at fourteen than I am after almost three decades of on-again, off-again efforts -- the last six with decent quality digitals.