The ducklings that arrived May 2
are suddenly gangly teenagers.
Archive for the 'birds' Category
In the last two days, the chicks have been visibly larger every day.
They’re starting to have a ripe musty odor, even though I change their wood chips every day. They run around so much in their pool that there’s a layer of dust over my office. It’s time to get them outside… so I found plans.
It gets moved every day, so the chickens always have a new area to graze on and the grass doesn’t get raggedy.
This chick hatched 17 days ago, and it’s almost done with its warm red light and chick mix. I’m sick of simmering on the back burner, he says. I want to get out and boil.
One summer we raised mallard ducks on the pond, hoping they’d fly off in the fall with the wild mallards who stop by the pond on their migration south. But the mallards we raised didn’t leave. They weren’t tame at all–they were raised to fly away–and we didn’t want to winter them over. So we shot the ducks from across the pond, and scalded them in the lobster pot. The plucking was horrible, the gutting was worse, and neither of us even like duck. The only way Bob agreed to raise chickens was if someone else processed them… and the local slaughterhouse doesn’t do fowl.
Last summer I asked our local chicken farmer if he’d process chickens for a fee, and he said yes. His wife Holly was at the Farmer’s Market, and I explained that I got chickens thinking of her husband saying he’d process them. She said that she normally didn’t do any extra chickens, but since…
It’d take about an hour and a half to do 23 chickens, she said. It’s the clean-up that’s the problem. So somehow it transpired that she’ll do my chickens as a separate run, and I’ll clean up. That’s one thing I learned about chickens.
The second thing I learned is that they should be slaughtered at 8 weeks. I have six weeks to go.
Meanwhile, the chicks were much more interested in the world this time out.
They stick close together, but they pecked at the flowers and scratched the ground and generally looked around.
You can see they have a little set of wing feathers,
and this chick has the first hint of tailfeathers.
It’s hard to believe they’ll be grown in a month and a half.
People say, I bet you fall in love with them and keep them for eggs.
I wish.
From the time my dog was very young, Jessie’s mantra has been: good dogs get treats and a place by the fire, while bad dogs get the short end of the stick. She has worked this angle her whole life. She was the star of her puppy class. She’s the only dog in town with manners enough to sit outside the door at the bakery doing tricks for treats. She can walk a few inches from me, fast or slow. She knows good dog english, including “out of the garden”, “go for a walk” “out of the road”, “where’s the bear” “ride in the car” ”bakery” ”get the deer” “want some food” “go swim”. She had the world wired… until recently.
The day the chicks arrived, I left Jessie in the office with the kiddy pool, and came back to find two chicks dead on the floor. I think she took them in her mouth and shook them, breaking their necks. Poor dog was punished all day: no car ride, no good times, and every so often I’d hold a chick corpse right in front of her face and call her a bad bad dog. She was mortified.
A week and a half later, and she can still barely bring herself to look at them.
When I specifically ask her to look the chick in the eye, she will, but given her druthers she wouldn’t be within 20 feet of them.
The truth is, this blog has been a hard stretch for her. New rules for an old dog takes a lot of concentration, and she’s been knocking herself out getting things right. First she’s not allowed to chase the deer and wild turkeys, and now she’s not allowed to touch the chicks.
If not for the bear, she wouldn’t be having any fun at all.
In another couple of weeks the chicks will be pastured, so I thought they’d like to have a field trip. Sunshine and grass, I thought. From office life to the wild world. At least they’d like to see the catmint (or so I thought).
They were so not interested.
This guy peeped peeped peeped
all the way back to the box. The other two chicks in the box were peeping just as loudly. Marco! Polo! Marco! Polo!
The chick had no interest in adventure, so I let him go home and pulled out another.
This chick was more interested in the world, but wasn’t a big fan of the bark mulch. I thought he might like the grass
but he didn’t. He’s a chicken. He wants to go home with all the other chickens and the warm red light.
He knows what the world is supposed to look like, and it doesn’t involve grass or catmint or any of that field trip stuff. He likes the world of a kiddy pool, a heat lamp, waterer, and excellent kind of feeder with a bar that spins if you run over the top. It’s probably be different if these chicks had a Mom, but without one, they love the simplicity of routine and very few choices.
They didn’t want to have an adventure at all.
The day finally came to transplant the seedlings we started last month–the proverbial 13 varieties of tomatoes. I did a few hundred today and have plenty more to go.
They look sort of dazed, but are coming along fine.
These birdhouse gourds are my current favorites: they grow 15′ to 35′ vines that want to be trellised, with gourds that are good for birdhouses. I thought these were quite endearing until Steve arrived with four ducklings.
It’s the bills that slay me.
The phone rang around 7 AM, and the caller ID said United States G. I checked Sam’s bedroom before I called back–when the government calls, you want to know where your teenager is–and it turned out to be the Post Office, with chicks.
The label on the box said ‘hatched on 4/25/08 at 8:36:57 PM’ and the notation from the Post Office was ’4/28 called 6:48 AM’, less than two and a half days after they hatched. They were all very perky.
The first few hours after they arrive they need to learn how to eat and drink. The directions said to lay newspaper over the woodshavings and sprinkle the paper with food, so they learn how to eat chick mix instead of wood shavings. The water is spiked with a little sugar, and the instructions say to dip each chick’s beak in water. I don’t know if I get them all, but everyone is having a ball, peeping, scampering, pecking and drinking. Two times different chicks sat down for a while, looking weak, and I picked it up and dipped its beak in water, and it shook itself off and got busy eating and drinking again.
They are ridiculously cute (I like the feathered legs).
and very busy.
Sam said, did you ever wonder how they sent us 25 males? Japanese guys squeeze out the chick’s poop and look up their butt to sort them. Really. You should look it up.
So I googled “chick sexing”, fearing for the worst. But there it was in Wikipedia, a listing for chick sexing that told the story of the professional vent sexer, typically Japanese, who turns the chick upside down and squeezes out feces to open the cloaca, allowing the sexer to see the male’s small bump. “The professional vent sexer has studied their external appearance, which can fall into as many as fifteen basic patterns, and learned to identify which ones are male and which female.” So some time after 8:36 last Friday night, someone was looking for bumps up these newborn chick butts.
Strange territory.
I have 25 chicks arriving Monday or Tuesday. I ended up choosing them by temperament: there was one kind of meat chicken that people commented on as having the nicest disposition, so that’s what I got. Light Brahmas.
According to Murray McMurray, Light Brahmas are a big old breed that probably originated in India, with fully feathered legs and toes. They’re good in cold weather, and exceptionally quiet and gentle; the hens are good layers of brown eggs, especially in winter. “Cockerels develop a tremendous frame, grow rather slowly, but when fully fleshed make a beautiful roasting chicken.”
If I wanted a mixed run or females, I had to wait until June. So I’m getting 25 roosters and hoping for the best. I have the kiddy pool that used to belong to Shaq the Newfoundland filled with a few inches of wood shavings; I bought a 2 ft. feeder, a one gallon chick-waterer, and a 250W red bulb. I’m good to go. And I’m keeping them in my office while they’re babies (at least I think I am.)
This is my favorite row of apricot trees.
They were well pruned in their youth and have lived to a very great age.
These are private apricots. But there are a lot of public apricot trees on the county road right-of-way.
Here’s a nice duo with a deer path in between
and the tree to the right is a public tree.
This is everyone’s favorite stop: a steep hillside with a row of apricots that were watered and pruned in their youth, and ended up belonging to the county.
I have a very minor mental map of unowned trees, and some of my friends know the feral fruit trees for miles.
Birds, though, are the masters at mentally mapping food sources. The Clark’s Nutcracker hides around 5,000 caches of pinyon nuts for the winter, and recovers most of them.
Can you imagine remembering that many secret stashes?
Here’s a little beaver pond at 8,300 feet. See the beaver lodge?
This gander’s mate is sitting a nest of eggs nearby, and he’s keeping watch over the pond.
At first he keeps a close eye on my dog and me, but after a while he’s back to
preening and
doing very fancy flexibility tricks with his neck.
Meanwhile, two great blue herons across the pond did neck tricks as well.
here’s the short version,
and here’s the tall version.
This heron made me wonder who else was watching us, but I’ll never know.
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