I immediately went and gathered several snails for her from the hydrangeas. I see a much less-chewed garden in my future.
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I immediately went and gathered several snails for her from the hydrangeas. I see a much less-chewed garden in my future.
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Our first egg. Funny blue speckles on it -- maybe she'll end up laying bluish eggs, or maybe not. And they will probably get bigger as she lays more often. Nothing's perfect the first time. But this weekend the pancakes will be a little closer to home.
Joan was also acting weird but apparently did not produce an egg, so we may get two tomorrow.
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A few weeks ago, Goldie had a bout of Kennel Cough, which is basically a dog chest infection. She was very under the weather and spent one afternoon outside with me in the garden, while the chickens were out and about. They all did very well together, and after that, dogs and chickens seemed to reach a certain detente. In part because the dogs realized that chickens produce chicken poop out of their butts, and chicken poop is much better than feathers.
So we get a lot of this:
OK, it's gross. But it's also much less worrying than the dog lunging at the chickens as if to kill them all the time.
Also, the chickens are larger and more able to defend themselves (including the occasional peck on the nose), so the dogs are less inclined to get too close to the pointy end of things.
So now they are locked up for the night, and with any luck we will not have any more losses. It's a real bummer to go out and see only three little faces in the yard, though.
It works very well, indeed. Especially on Rosie's extra-thick coat.
]]>It was a trifle dramatic. I got home just in the last bits of sunlight, and they were all huddled on the concrete slab making lots of noise about how unhappy they were. When I picked them up, one by one, to put them in the house, they squawked and flapped and acted as if they were being killed. For ten minutes after I put them in the house and shut the door, they made quite a bit of noise, but eventually they settled down. When I let them out again this morning they were all worked up again.
Well, getting used to new things is always hard.
They are liking their yard, though, and especially the compost piles, which are full of bugs and seeds for their consumption. Here're some photos:
Here are Debbie, Carole, and Liza on the narrow perch. They are getting too big to be able to balance well on the narrow edge of the piece of wood, but they try it anyway, flapping and teetering.
Then they were exploring the compost pile, eating bugs and looking at stuff.
Liza was the last one off the perch, still trying to get the hang of balancing with her larger size.
One of their favourite places to perch is up on the edge of the compost bin. I think because it is well above dog level (and Rosie has been harrying them obsessively; I'm about to break out the heavy guns on untraining her from that behaviour). They climbed up, settled down, and chattered at me for a while.
And some movies, too:
The girls on the compost bin, with bonus dog pouncing at them:
The girls on the compost bin, then they start hopping down:
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This is Simon. Simon has cancer. We had a tumor removed from one of his boobs last year and at the time the vet said that it might already have metastasized, and that has proven to be true; the tumor came back and lately he's been coughing a lot, too.
There are options for treating cats with cancer, but in this case they aren't right for us (us being the combination of me, Noel, and Simon). Rather than put an elderly, skittish kitty through a lot of surgeries and treatment (which he hates more than anything) we are trying to keep him comfortable and letting the disease take its course. When it gets to be bad for him, we will have him put down.
He now has an enormous tumor. It's under his left front leg, and you can sort of see it bulging here. He seems mostly comfortable except the tumor seems to get in the way of his lounging. I may take him to the vet this weekend to get some pain pills, because he's starting to act a little achy which means he is a lot achy.
This is the last cat we get Ana. When Mikey died, we got her Simon because she was inconsolably lonely. But this time she will have to just Get Over It, because there is a limit to the number of cat graves I want to dig in the back yard in the next few years.
]]>On the other hand, there were cute little goats.
They were pretty playful at the end of the day, when the sun was going down and they heat was fading.
I made some movies of them playing.
This one started with us looking at the goats eating from their feeder, then there was a dramatic goat-fight on the pile featuring one of the finest GWF (Goat Wrestling Federation) moves ever.
And this one shows more of what was happening most of the time we watched them.
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Everybody is looking very chickenesque these days. You can see here that Debbie's getting her belly feathers in still, but most of the rest is all feathery. She's about five weeks old now. I love the little earmuffs.
With a few visits to the yard under their feathers, the girls are much more exploratory than they had been. Today they dust-bathed in a different spot (one of the piles of soil from the fence post digging), and explored around the larger compost bin.
The bin is made from three pallets lashed together with brass wire, and it has a certain population of insect life thanks to about two years of service. This was of great interest to the girls.
For reasons I don't totally understand, they seem to all fixate on one area and try to get right there, rather than spreading themselves along the length of the bin. Maybe they think there's something special there. Maybe they're right.
It was mostly Debbie, though. I think those little white dots are bug eggs, and she was eating them.
Eventually Carole figured out that she could jump up and reach higher.
And then Joan joined her.
They're still getting the hang of perching -- check out Joan's death-grip on the slat she's standing on there -- but they're mostly good at it. Occasionally they will try to stand somewhere and just fall over, at which point they flap their wings and try to pretend they intended to fly down anyway.
A recent addition to the equipment is a lid for the transport box so the girls will not fly out halfway across the yard. This meant that the dogs could come over and look, which Rosie was very interested in doing.
And finally, I added a bunch more movies, of which this is one:
The reason for this Chicken Exercise Hour was to try out their new digs, the just-enclosed Chicken Yard. The girls seemed to like it, and to feel very safe there. And because the dogs have usually been banned from Chicken Exercise Hour due to bad behaviour (ie, trying to eat the chicks), they got a real treat because they were allowed to be on the other side of the fence, looking in.
These chicks are growing fast. They're definitely starting to look like real chickens. And they're slowly learning how to act like them, with all the scratching, pecking, and hunting of an adult. Joan got a really big spider and it was gone in two gulps.
Debbie's head fluff is considerably lighter than her new feathers coming in. Noel's worried that we won't be able to tell her apart from Liza any more, but Liza is a lighter brown.
Carole has lost the most head fluff.
But all four are very happy with their new yard, and spent a bunch of time exploring. They were particularly interested in the compost bin lid leaned up there, probably because it is usually teaming with spiders. They would have stayed out much longer, but we were cold and tired and brought them in.
And of course, we filmed the first few minutes in the new digs.
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She spent a bunch of time perching on the edges of the box before deciding to move on to the grass. It was a good opportunity for me to check out her new feathers.
Liza is also getting some interesting new feathers.
Carole seems to just be getting fluffier. She's also growing feathers on her head.
Here's more of Liza's head feathers. As you can see, they grow out attached to the chick fluff, so at the end of each new feather is a little tassel of fluff.
Debbie, here, is a little behind on the head feathering. But you can see that the fluff is loosening up and the darker head feathers are coming in. It's made her head kind of marbled.
Here's another look at Carole's head and neck. She's getting a nice caramely colour (well, buff, I suppose). There are still a lot of points where you can see her bare skin under the new feathers. But she's not looking quite as mangy as a week ago.
Everybody's body feathers are mostly filled in. On Debbie here you can see the last bits of fluff at the end of feathers around her shoulders. She's also a little bald around the legs, but I couldn't get her to hold a pose for the camera.
Check out Carole's awesome tail.
Another feature of today's exercise was peck-the-human. For some reason they were all very interested in pecking at me for about a minute. They're definitely aware of me and will come running to hide under me if something startles them, and Debbie flew up into my hand to take a ride for a few minutes.
Here's Debbie sitting on my knee. Look at all those feathers all over her back! But they still have chick puff on their heads.
After a nice long playtime outside with the compost heap, they came in and immediately ran to the feeder.
And because it's easy to forget how tiny they once were, I give you in contrast, this photo of Liza and Debbie at the feeder the day after we brought them home:
Here they are, sleeping on their assorted roosts. They're mostly sleeping on the ground, lying down like chicken carnage, but every now and then they all climb up and settle down together on the roost.
And yes, I do realize how lame it is that I am watching my chickens through a webcam.
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