Rural Life

Pine Processionary caterpillars - not cute!

Today I went with John to sort out some damage from storm Xynthia.  An old and slightly rotten plum tree had been partly brought down in the winds, and the owner wanted the whole thing cut down and into pieces.  When we got to the garden, we reversed down the drive to have a bit of privacy when we changed into chainsaw gear, and then had a few problems with central locking and the boot.  It was just as well we did - while I was kicking my heels by the back of the car waiting for the right clicking sound, I looked down and screamed - Pine Processionaries!!

They aren't much of an issue yet in the UK, but if you are driving round France and you see white blobs between the size of an elongated tennis ball and a rugby ball on pine trees, you are looking at the nest of the pine processionary.  They fester away in these nests through the winter, and keep alive by sucking the sap of the host tree (not good for the tree).  Then in the spring, any time in March or April, they march down the tree and find a suitable spot to turn into their next phase and finally very unremarkable moths.

Why the paranoia from me?  As a country girl I am used to disgusting things after all (although I am still scared of the four inch long luminous orange slugs in the wood - vicious blood sucking fiends that they are)!  Well, if we had had a small child or a dog with us, we would have been in trouble.  The spines of the caterpillar fall off at the least provocation and cause anything from mild skin irritation to blindness depending where they hit.  There is nothing nice about these creatures and they are not native to the area, so have no predators.  And they spread.

Here are some piccies to make your skin crawl.

They aren't luminous orange by the way - we sprayed the main blob once we found them with forestry spray paint in the naive hope that they were settling there and we could come back and spray them or set fire to them - these are the ways of dealing with them on the ground.

But we were foiled as they didn't like the paint so they set off processing - you can see why children find them so fascinating...

And this is why they get their name!

So - if someone like a gardener or a tree surgeon tells you you have pine processionaries, please don't say that it isn't a problem.  They are a major hazard - to children, to pets and to people working in your garden.  A park in Angers had to be closed after the scouts camping there disturbed some old nests and over a hundred were affected by skin complaints and worse.  We had a lot of difficulty working round the problem at our client's garden, and will be back with sprays to deal with what we can.  The ideal solution is to cut down the nest in January and burn it in a metal bucket with a bit of petrol. Of course if the nest is inaccessible then you have to resort to things like glue rings, but even an old and empty nest can contain millions of spines and they are what cause the problem.

 
 
 

A spot of gardening

It's that time of year when the garden gurus tell you to stay off the lawn and put your feet up in front of the fire with the seed catalogues to plan the next growing season.  When you have chickens and a workshop at the bottom of the garden, that advice is useless, and the best one can do is to ensure that you don't keep walking on the same bit each time (handy tip - put plastic garden chairs over routes that have got a bit soggy so you have to walk round them and thus let the grass recover, plus if the chair is white, you can see it in the dark and avoid falling over it!).

Round here, if you are in the country and don't have fences, you find that enthusiastic wildlife will do what it can to scarify the lawn.  I'm not talking here about the gentle progging that a green woodpecker or a blackbird will do searching for worms and insects, nor in the Southern Hemisphere that a friendly Ibis will do for reasons that the Southern Hemisphere will have to provide.  No I am talking serious earth works here - see below!

 

This delightful sight met our eyes at one of John's gardens near the river before Christmas.  The owner was concerned that someone had raided his grounds for wild cyclamen.  While they are prolific there, the French are not into nicking them as they are so widely available everywhere; they just enjoy them where they are.  Indeed our lawn is starting to sprout a number of patches of cyclamen due to the lawn mice that find seeds, bury them and then either lose them or get eaten by the cats themselves.  I think I am up to a dozen such cyclamen plants, and ours is not a huge garden.

So what had done all that damage, if it wasn't itinerant pilfering peasants?  The ultimate vandal was to blame.  A beast that, if it sees a fine lawn, just has to go and make a mess of it.  A beast that trashes woodland roads and verges (and sometimes cars too) and is growing in numbers in our part of the world despite the huge numbers of hunters that try to track it down.  The wild boar is a very shy animal - I have only ever seen a live one once, and that was living at a farm rescue centre.  John has seen a couple at night but only fleetingly.  We have seen their traces in the damage however and know exactly who to blame!

Foot prints and tusk marks - could the clues be any clearer?

 
 

A guest contributor dictates....

It seems to me that all blogs need a little refreshment from time to time - and this one is no exception.  I have also been accused of not playing my part in the household and just flopping around rather uselessly of an evening rather than helping with the Christmas cards or similar (my portrait at the end of this piece is not typical I assure you). So to set the record straight, I had better describe how I help out in these cold times.

Well firstly it is important to note that without me and my two chums, "they" would never get out of bed in the morning, but the need to tend to our needs means they do actually see the morning!  Secondly, the house would not be properly aired at this time of year, without me constantly reminding them to open a door or window so that I can get into the garden, or come back into the house.

I have also been doing a certain amount of digging so that all those nasty pests in the raised beds are killed off by the frost, plus I have been inspecting the bark of the cherry and pear trees pretty closely for other nasty things - I was reminded I needed to have a go at the apricot today too.

Then there are my jobs in the community, keeping various elderly neighbours on their toes.  I have to say that if I wasn't there to knock pots over, scare chickens, bat nuts about and look round open doors and windows, these poor old things would just stay rooted to their kitchen chairs, dealing with vegetables.  I am honestly doing a public service.

Perhaps the most onerous of my current duties is sorting out that young brat next door - you, know boy kittens think they can get away with anything by looking small, but that doesn't wash with me and he is going to get a jolly good thrashing when I next get my paws on him.  Of course, the poncy white oaf that sits on my wall needs to be sorted out frequently as well - I know his Mum is on the village council but I still say he is a waste of space with the memory of a goldfish.

So as you can see, my days are full, when "they" just sit around in front of these computer thingies with an odd unfocussed look on their faces (until reminded to move by me demanding food), and I am therefore entitled to my 18 hour snooze.  So there!

One cat successfully rehoused

Earlier this year, I wrote an impassioned plea about the need to get male cats castrated being as important as getting females spayed - you can read it here.

One of the reasons for this was that a male cat had turned up chez nous following his hormones and the scent of a female cat on heat.  When he arrived, he was well fed, with a flea collar and with the gangley awkwardness of a young cat who hasn't filled out properly yet.  We think he had travelled a long way to get to us - no one in the village knew or would admit to being his owner.

Over the three months he lived in our garden, he lost condition badly (despite being given or stealing some food), he got beaten up by older, more experienced male cats in the area, he lost his flea collar, he developed a huge abscess on his leg and the final straw was that he got shot at by someone with an air rifle.  We spent over 100 Euros taking him back and fro to the vet and feeding him, worming him and giving him flea treatment.

We put up rather pathetic notices with lovely photos in the bakers, the Mairie and the veterinary surgery and I called a number found at the vet's for someone who had lost a cat of his description, but just got laughed at.

It couldn't go on, so we have found him a new home.  He has a new name - instead of Elvis (from the phone call) or Sh*t for Brains (he isn't the brightest bulb in the packet) - he is now Barney.  He goes to the vet on Tuesday to be castrated, and in the mean time, he has the run of a lovely water mill in the country, and two people who love him to bits.  I hope that is the end of the drama and he can enjoy the remaining 5 lives he has left with them.

Here is Elvis when he arrived around us.

 

And here is Barney a day before he went to his new home.

A more determined broody chicken

Most of the visits to this blog recently seem to be generated from desperate people doing a Google search on broody chickens.  So I had better 'fessup that the tried and tested method of getting the main culprit chez nous out of her broodiness hasn't worked with Black.  We are going to have to find a Plan D!

The first two batches of chickens we had were what I would describe as ISA Browns - the beige jobs that are bred for the battery houses and similar and which you can pick up very cheaply in the local markets.  They do a brilliant job at laying an egg a day for a year and after than the problems start as they are sadly not bred for longevity.  In a previous post I outlined why we don't buy them any more, but one good side to them is that in my experience of our six and feckless Joel's two, they don't do broody.

Last year we had dreadful problems with White - our mongrel Light Sussex, who went broody about every four to six weeks.  But while she is the largestof our girls, she is really rather sweet, and would fluff up when being lifted out of the coop and gurgle a bit, but was otherwise pretty resigned to it all.  Black, our youngest and a possible mongrel Maran, has decided that a stint of brooding is what she wants  to do, and she is taking it very seriously.  I haven't been pecked yet but it is only a matter of time, and I daren't try Plan E (send in the cats) as I think the vet bills would be too high!  Having been locked out of the coop for a little too long (her opinion, not mine), she has found her way under the coop and hasn't been seen for 2 days now.  Tomorrow we will have to move the coop and scoop her out.

From that description, you can see why there is no photo of Black being broody, just one of her before the mood came on her.  For the quibblers out there - you know who you are Roger - yes, I do realise she is much more gold than Black, but only from the front and side.  If we find a way to break this one, I may have to patent it!

A nice clutch of eggs

With spring doing its thing, the chickens are having a lovely time.  There are still lots of juicy slugs around, plus snails (slugs with a bit of roughage one might say), and the worms are near the surface to have a go at too.  We haven't got much planted in the kitchen garden so they still have the run of the raised beds.  Much as I would like them to give the raised beds a good clear out and get every last weed and seed out, sadly they seem more interested in taking dust baths in them - heigh ho!

One thing that spring seems to bring out in chickens and in chicken owners is concern about broodiness.  While White doesn't seem to have succumbed to the lure of fixing herself in the coop all day every day yet, Black has decided that getting up in the morning is not as much fun as sitting on the odd egg, however as soon as the run door is left open for a rampage in the garden, any fascination with the inside of the coop goes, as she dashes for the choicest dust baths and best slugging terratory.

Lots of people come to this blog looking for advice on how to deal with broody chickens - good luck guys!

Here is a particularly lovely clutch of eggs that our girls laid last month - we hoped they would come up with chocolate ones over the weekend, but sadly we had to make do with shop bought ones instead.

Rules on Road Kill

It is that time of year when we are warned that boar are on the move.  Actually twice recently the motorways round here have been closed as groups of boar were on the carriageway.  A boar can do an awful lot of damage to a car.

We have noted that the start of the hunting season round here is always marked by the tale of some poor defenceless aged peasant driving home late at night who is willfully attacked in his car by a wild boar.  The outcome varies, but the most common version is that said poor peasant is in hospital, the car is written off, the boar escapes and had to be tracked down by the plucky hunters, who donate a large portion of the kill to a local OAP home canteen.

My interpretation is that some drunken old boy with dodgy vision is driving along in his "sans permis" car (small metal box powered by lawnmower engine), sees movement and chases it, thinking it is a good idea and he is indestructable as he is drunk and in his little car, but o dear, a boar is bigger and stronger than said car.

Be that as it may, many round here have noticed that while boar get ever more common, hunters who can actually shoot one get ever more rare, being more likely to shoot each other, their dogs or buildings (some friends lost a bathroom window which looked suspicious).

This year the local paper has been giving out advice as to what to do if you meet a boar on the road.  You are recommended not to try to hit it - they make an awful mess of the car.  If you can't avoid it, make sure it is dead (not sure how you are meant to do that), call the police and inform them you hit and killed it, and load the carcase in the car for consumption at home.  If you fail to call the police and are caught with it, you may be done for killing animals with an unapproved method!

My reading of this is that your car is knackered so while you save the money to get the car fixed, you have something to eat at any rate!

The importance of spaying tomcats

Spring is in the air now - well we are into March after all - and at this time of year, cats' attention turns to sex.  Particularly those cats that have not been seen to.  Our two girls were neutered before they were allowed out, and we got next door's girl cat done (with permission) once her kittens had left home.  However some new people moved into the courtyard and with the impetuousness of youth, thought that a cat would be a good idea, irrespective of whether they have any outdoor area for it, the time to look after and feed it or the money to have it spayed.  Don't get me started on the selfishness of that.

It is quite cute, but the first time it was chucked out of the window to do its business in the courtyard, it got jumped on and raped by two tom cats in succession - while the owner looked on!  Since then two more toms have turned up and had a go, while the girls of the area don't like the poor wee thing as she is competition for food.

So the sad thing is that in a few weeks there will be another litter of unwanted kittens doing the rounds, which may survive being squashed on the road before they are rehoused, but who knows?  We could well find them in the well as well.

Even sadder however is the toll on the local tomcats.  With four on the scene they were always fighting and having sex and not really thinking about staying safe.  To my knowledge, two have been knocked over on the road, and we suspect have crawled somewhere to die, another is limping around our garden with a bad leg and unsure of where he lives.  If their hormones had been under control, they wouldn't have been quite so daft and might still be around.

So people, heed my words!  Spay both your male and your female cats - it is better for them and it is better for you and it makes life a lot easier for all.

Cats and Toads don't mix!

Our two cats have taken well to out door activities and I will publish their respective tallies of the local wildlife (excluding butterflies, dragonflies and baby lizards, which we have decided don't count) at the end of the year.

Maigret is particularly outdoorsy - her thick and lush fur protects her from scratches, other than other cats, her perfect form means she is well placed for hunting and she doesn't set her sights too high.  Poirot, on the other hand, is not well formed and her coat is much thinner.  She also has large expanses of pink skin under white fur which all kinds of everything finds particularly attractive.  Consequently she has had bites, eczema, scratches and fleas through the summer.  She is also rather ambitious when it comes to catching things - pigeons (three this year), chickens (not ours, the neighbour's and thus very embarrassing), other cats, and her latest attempt was the garden toad.

Now Toad is a very good garden companion.  He or his descendants have been getting rid of our slugs for the past 8 years at least.  He generally stays near the house now, since we started to keep chickens 3 years ago, and favours the heaps of stone as his dwelling.  Imagine his horror as he started to get his winter quarters to his liking when all of a sudden a white furry paw followed by a white furry face tried to get in there as well! 

We presume he squirted some secretion or Poirot got some secretion on her paw, which she then stuck in her mouth.  The upshot of it was that Poirot jumped off the rock pile and started whimpering and foaming at the mouth.  She carried on slathering at the mouth for a good half hour.  Initially we were really worried - we thought she had been stung - and then I checked round the rock pile and found Toad and realised what had happened.

Once she had been sick, we provided a wee morsel of tasty food to take away the taste and over the next hour she perked up, had a fight with Maigret, had her little lump of garlic sausage and then a bowl of crunchies and was fine.  She won't go near the rock pile though!

I didn't have the presence of mind or heart to photograph the wild killer cat in her moment of frothing at the mouth, so here is an aerial shot of her pretending to be a jungle panther.

Introducing a new bird

One of our Marans, Black, was never right from the day we got her.  While we managed to do something about the massive bald spot on her chest, her depression and other problems couldn't be sorted so easily and she died on the 19th September.  This upset White rather - she has always been a sensitive soul and goes broody by moon phases (so boring that) - and she produced 3 shell-less eggs in quick succession before getting back to her old form of over-feathery greedy gut-bucket.

This left us with a problem, as we like to have three as a social group, but we were also hoping to start letting them freely range in October to sort out the slug problem.  This meant that if we were going to replace Black, it had to be done quickly.

Bauge market is a good source of chickens, with two poultry vans each week so you can make sure you get the colour, breed, and type of bird you want (currently there is a run on quail and young guinea fowl).  We went along on Monday afternoon and sussed out the two boxes of Black Marans, and as both boxes looked good, went to the van with the shorter queue.

We gave our new girl a good looking over before we bought (learnt our lesson from last time), and had her ceremonially stuffed into the requisite cardboard box with holes, tied up with blue string, and took her home to introduce to the others (White and Spot).

Black 2 is a young pullet, probably about 4 weeks off laying, so she is quite small but fully feathered and with a short comb still.  It took her half an hour to find her way out of the box, and while Spot was a bit shirty with her, White ignored her as she was still in mourning for Black 1. 

They are still sorting out the pecking order in the run, but at night Black 2 is happily allowed onto the sleeping perch to provide extra warmth.  White is now out of mourning and is also keeping Black 2 in her place, but she is a bit crafty and has found a perch that neither of our plump girls can get on to while she puts on bulk and grows up herself.  While Black 2 gets the odd nip on the neck, it is not the wings out, feet up, fierce fighting that would mean we have a problem, so we think we have got away with it.

The one problem with these three pretty chickens, is that unlike the hybrids intended for the Battery Units, which I disapprove of, they do seem to be rather on the dim side, but that is a story for another day.  Anyway, below are Black 2 refusing to come out of her box, White doing what she does best (eating) and Spot doing what she does best (being dim).