Happy Harvest Blog
Mass escape
We've had a lot of rain in a week and a bit. The ground is soft and muddy everywhere, and that makes the electric fence easy to knock over. The pigs escaped after their supper yesterday, an hour before dark. I thought I heard them snorting around in the woods by the house, and I assumed that they would be bedding down and we'd see them in the morning. Boy was I wrong.
No more Inky
Inky is gone. She wasn't in her tree and I searched, and found a half dozen black and iridescent green feathers. I'm heartbroken, and I've already been having a hard few weeks. I want to get out of chickens, because it hurts too much. I can't protect them 100% and let them range. It's captivity, or risk. It's not fair though, it's like they know which are my favorites, and get the special ones first.
Guinea spa
I heard the musical little sounds of the guineas approaching the house (doesn't happen especially often), so I peeped out.They were going for the bath! There's a spot right by the trail where I was weeding out buckthorn, and the birds have decided that that's the optimum dust bathing locale. Now there's all divots and feathers. The guineas came in for the bath as purposefully as if they had little towels over their shoulders. It was their specific destination.
We lounge hard
Chickens do an awful lot of lounging. They lounge under trees, in the sun, lots of time on the paths, and in dust baths. Their favorite seems to be dappled shade. Big group lounge under a secondary pine tree. Early post-breakfast perching is common. Big dust bath near the house. Barred & Brahma lounging. The birds have this odd tendency to sort themselves out by colours, like laundry. The darks.The lights/colours. There's some big boys emerging out of the tweens. It's adorable how much they cuddle.
Epic pig move
The pigs got another big move yesterday. And they're acting like they did all the work. The space they have with the two strands of fence is vast (not literally, but it seems pretty vast, and it's plenty big enough for them to get totally concealed). I walk around looking for them and it's like Wild Safari. Can you see them? Is that something moving over there? Well, there's a spot where pigs have been.I'm not moving. Maybe my eyelid. One lazy pig. Spot the pig? The other two are in there.
The five aren't afraid of bees
The famous five, in fact, love to rummage around around the hives, and jump upon them. That is the back of the hive, but they rummage equally well in the front. They go underneath. I've seen one jump up on the bee door closure stick. Meeting behind Pansy building! (My hives are plumb; the camera is tipped)I've thought one would get stung, and that would be over, but no. It's always just a little tribe. They have the place to themselves.
An experiment in chick freedom
Ursa Minor was protesting the confines of the chickery, so I tried something. I let all the moms and chicks loose. This is not rain day, these are the tiny chicks in their first few days of life, that are typically in chickeries in the greenhouse (warm and dry), before they go out to chickeries on grass for a few days, before they run wild with their moms (a staged transition to free-range). So I propped up the chickeries so they could leave, but still, get back in their familiar box.
Pig bribery
I've got some rowdy pigs. Specifically, the female. She's a bit of a loner, happy to be apart from the boys some of the time, and she doesn't respect the fence. She knows how to get under it, rooting under a post (the bottom strand isn't electrified), and then tossing it up, where it will flop down on her back and she can charge underneath, getting only a modest shock on her thick back. I haven't seen her do this all the way through, but I've seen her start into the process very deliberately.
those feather askew blues
One of Foxy's (the oldest of the small chicks) chicks has a feather issue today. This sometimes happens, more often to the Silkies though. Can you spot it?What?It has little outrigger feathers growing sticking straight out from its shoulders. It's so funny. It's like only two feathers are committed to flying. They'll be gone in a couple days. Guineas doing their guinea thing. They're growing so fast. Galahad has a feather stuck on his face. A keet is about to notice and pluck it off for him. It's the most beautiful time of year.
dirt bath and other shenanigans
Chocolate's out of the chickery now too. This is great. All the small chicks with moms are at large, meaning I don't have to constantly monitor do they have shade, do they have water? Their moms take care of that now (lots of water options). Soon enough there will be another round of chicks hatching. She's diving right into the dirt bath. There's two popular spots at the moment, an old pig wallow, and this one under the corner of the hen rain tent, which is a bit of a sauna in the sunshine.
Foxy and Feisty
Feisty's a very pretty chicken. We had a good photo shoot before dusk: If you catch them at the right angle, which isn't hard to do, Silkie hens look like they have no eyes at all. Foxy is irritable. Her chicks are at that stage where they ignore her until they need her, don't pay attention, and want to stay up too late. I've still no idea how many days/weeks it takes for them to hit these chicken stages of development, like pants, reluctance to go to bed, independence, rooster hero worship,
Bedtime, and coop cops
Some of them decided to face the other way, for variety. And two of them decided to have a big pecking fight, on the rail, with one uninvolved keet between them, hunched up low, keeping head down and out of the crossfire raging above him. So funny. Peck you! No, peck you! They're getting slightly more independent; they scatter wider. Packing up the three boxes of moms and chicks, to go into their safe house in the greenhouse (everyone goes in a lock box at night for weasel safety), Fiesty's box was empty.
Chick freedom day
Feisty and her chicks liberated themselves today. They usually let me know when they're ready for the big world by starting to leak out. Thing is, Foxy's chicks are days older, and they weren't the ones to start getting out. Once Feisty was out and about though, Foxy got excited. One has such beautiful wings. Who, me? I helped them out by lifting up the side of the chickery, and they started leaking out. One.Two.Three and four.No, I'm back in. All out.
Two tone pigs
The pigs were lying in the mud on one side only, so they (two of them) are browned right down the middle like mimes. They look fully mudded, but they're not. There's the pink side! Yesterday they liberated themselves. I came home, no pigs, and did my usual march all over all the places they could get themselves in trouble with a pail in hand, but I couldn't find any trace of them. It was too late to rouse them.
Cuteness is a full time job around here.
The rooster is making himself comfortable in the food tray. I’m just gonna lay down right here. The three pine trees I pruned up are seeing the use I imagined. Ursa and her chicks are under this one, and the teens have decamped from Pine Tree One (leaving that one to the grownups) to their own clubhouse tree, where they are cuddling (too much!). All the trees now have established dust baths, too. There’s a new addition! One teeny tiny little silver chick.
Perching faithful
Interest in the new trees was muted. There was some investigation and hay scritching, but the first tree is still the crowd favorite. I do mean crowd. I mused "Why is it always the chicks that are so excited about the trees?" And HW said it makes sense; kids usually enjoy climbing trees more than adults. The winter is going to be interesting. I'm going to have to build some serious multi-level structures in the greenhouse this year. Somebody left me a nice feather in the garden.
The before bedtime lounge
Before it’s bedtime, 7-8 pm-ish, it’s the hour for serious lounging. The various chicken cliques are scattered around, and more likely to be settled down on the ground than perching above ground. They just sink down in the grass/weeds (or wherever they are) and have a little lull, maybe even a proper nap. Two of Ursa’s new chicks came supplied with the most amazing permanent eyeliner. It’s too bad I used up the name Cleopatra already (although it was entirely appropriate) because these two have totally Egyptian eyes.
Full mudface
Finally some rain! The pigs, who are usually muddy to the eyes, are today muddy to the ears. They look funny, with their eyes cleanish in the full muddy cones of their faces. By afternoon they had gleefully mudded the whole rest of their bodies until they had single cleanish strips only along their spines. One of the pigs has a predilection for bringing one or more of their rubber bowls into their house. Sometimes all three are in there, sometimes stacked.
Instagram.
I may not make a blog post every day, but at least I Insta.
Bite size.
