Too Many Animals

I've been really down since realizing on Monday that the kitty was in a downward spiral and we needed to make that vet appointment. So instead of being all sad and weepy here, here are some pictures of the chicks enjoying a little outside time and stuff.

Here we have them in the first few days, playing with a piece of the shipping crate they came in. I used it to test whether they were ready to have wood chips down as bedding (which you have to be careful about, since they might eat them to the point of illness).

Then we went outside.

I think we will be keeping this chick, and I am provisionally calling her Dolly (for Dolly Parton).

We tried some experiments with the dog and chicks (apparently it's very hard to focus a camera with one hand while trying to make sure the chick doesn't fall off the dog's head). This chick is the Silver-Laced Wyandotte, and we will be calling her Janis (for Janis Joplin, because she spent her first few days stumbling around the habitat and falling over her feet).

I've given pet names to the two Barred Rocks who will go to the neighbors. They are Spot and Dot. This is Spot, who has a big white spot on her head.

Here's Rosie admiring the little chicky butts.

This is one of the easter-eggers, which the neighbor's kid calls Stripes. I think this will also be our chick, and I'm not sure what her name will be.

The little outdoor excursions are to give them something to think about that is new and interesting. They had a pretty good time easting weed seeds.

I'm pretty sure that this chick will be going to the neighbors. The neighbor-kid calls her Cornpuff and seems to love her best. She really liked sheltering under Rosie; I think the chicks have decided the dogs are their mommies.

We tried out putting Dolly on Rosie's back to see how she would do:

Given that the chicks hardly ever sit still even without being on fur, she did a decent job of holding still, and Rosie did even better.

This is how I took the chicks out for their first exercise hour: a big canning pot. Lots of jokes about chickens in the stewpot.

Here they are in their habitat with fancy wood chip bedding and their feeder and waterer up on bricks for their convenience.

Another exercise hour, Dot poking around in the dirt:

And Dolly growing out some butt feathers:

You can really see Dot's smaller head dot (smaller than Spot's, of course) here:

I thought the canning pot might be uncomfortable, so we tried out the shipping box they came in for the next visit outside:

Clockwise from top left: Janis (Silver-Laced Wyandotte), unnamed easter-egger, Dot (Barred Rock), Dolly (easter-egger), Spot (Barred Rock), Cornpuff (easter-egger).

So there's really only one name we need to come up with, and in part that has to wait until we're sure which easter-egger is going to the neighbors.

This morning we had Ana put down. She had stopped eating and was moving with great difficulty, and had stopped purring. She was not as angry as she used to be. She was still drinking but was clearly not going to last.

She was 18, which is not bad for a barn cat.

Here are some photos of her. It's all very raw right now because she was my bestest friend for 17 years.

Here she is napping in 1999 or thereabouts. I was forever coming up and trying to get a photo of her asleep, and just as I would hit the button her eyes would pop open and she would glare at me for waking her.

With her co-cat Mikey in 2001. Mikey died in 2003 and is buried under our Cecile Brunner.

Scowling at me to get the camera out of her face and leave her alone. Ana was a very angry cat.

Coming out of the greenhouse window in our kitchen in Berkeley. When you saw this you knew some poor plant had been chewed within an inch of its life.

We buried her by the side gate, next to the clematis. I put a bed of grass in the grave because she liked getting out and eating grass until she puked, and a bouquet of flowers over her head because she loved eating cut flowers and puking them up on the stairs. We planted a yellow miniature rose over her, sent by Noel's parents for our anniversary. I miss her already.

Edited to add: By popular request, this photo of Ana being introduced to Rosie in December 2001. She got up there and arranged herself on that doily without any hinting or helping from anybody else.

Today we got a magical package in the mail.

You can watch my unboxing video:

And perhaps a tour of the contents? Some for us, some for the neighbors, but we will raise them together until they are old enough to live outside. Do they have names yet? No, they do not. We'll be casting around for female singer names for a bit, I think.

Here's a Barred Rock (neighbors):

Another Barred Rock (also neighbors):

Silver-Laced Wyandotte (us):

And 3 Easter-Eggers (us or them, undecided):

They enjoyed exploring their aquarium habitat

And now some movies, because they're so cute at this age that movies are best:

She can't go somewhere else to sleep, because she has to be near her people.

Noel went to the hardware store, and left the poor, abandoned dogs behind.

"So," a friend of mine asked, "what do the chickens do when it rains like this?"

Just about everybody has asked, so finally I will post a picture with proof:

They just stand out in the rain. Sometimes they look indignant that somebody is sprinkling water on them, but mostly they do their normal stuff, or as normal as it can be. Only during the worst downpours have I ever seen them take refuge in their room, although it is open and available to them all day.

When the sun comes out, they fluff up and dry out. If it doesn't come out, they seem to just stay out in the rain all day until sunset, when they get up on their perch and preen in the nice dry chicken room.

I had to euthanize Joan today. She'd been unwell since mid-January, and last week took a steep turn for the worse, hiding behind the compost bins and not wanting to come out of the nest box. I thought she was broody, but she was sick. This photo shows how yellow her comb and wattles had become, and she was having trouble walking and had lost her appetite. Note the bowl of tuna in front of her, uneaten.

I took her to the Very Expensive Avian Vet on Friday and spent scads of money on her, and found out she was worse than we thought. Her blood iron was lower than the vet had ever seen in a living bird.

We did subcutaneous fluids, a crop injection of hydrating fluids, injected antibiotics. We kept her in a brooder inside, with a heat lamp, all weekend. We shot food and water down her throat. Saturday she seemed to perk up and we were hopeful, but Sunday night she began to worsen and yesterday she did not want to move any more. So today I went to the hardware store and bought an axe.

It's not easy to kill an animal you have raised from a baby and treated as a pet. But by raising an animal in captivity you take on certain responsibilities. I could have spent more money and had the vet inject her, but unlike a dog or cat, there is a humane way to kill a chicken in your own yard.

She's buried under the sour cherry tree, because last summer she was the one who discovered that she could jump up and eat the cherries off the branches.

And here's how I remember her:

Rosie had a friend over to play today, and she got so worked up that she had to take a swim to cool down.

Then an after-swim roll in the straw I'm using to mulch the new garden plot.

We had a really nice day today, so I let the chickens come out to play (as I often do on a weekend day).

Carole made a beeline for the pile of loose sand by the pond and took a long and relaxing dust bath.

Watch her bathing (in which Rosie gets bored partway through and goes to see what the other chickens are up to):

Joan was intrigued by the idea of the pond, but not enough to do more than peck a little at the curly rush.

But mostly they followed me around cooing and chuckling as I weeded, cleared leaves from beds, and so on.

And when I'd had enough of them underfoot, I gave them a handful of scratch to enjoy in their chicken gym:

We bought our fish the most awesome ever toy. It is a light-up volcano with bubble action. This photo shows it looking sort of so-so:

But this captures the "OMG, the aquarium is on fire!!" cognitive dissonance of the volcano best:

The live effect of the volcano is somewhere in between the two photos. It is mighty fine.

The fish are, predictably, scared out of their ever-living minds at the thing, and have been trying desperately to swim away from it. But soon they will come to appreciate the volcano and we can all be happy.

Edited to add: