Rural Life

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).

 

The kitten saga is nearly sorted....

Well, the kitten saga is nearly sorted out.  When I last wrote, our garden was awash with small, cute flea-bags.  We had notices out everywhere and about a week ago it was all looking as though it was sorted.  Friends of ours had reserved the male and female with white socks, the black one was going back to the person who originally chose her, but had to go into detox so sent her back, and fluffy Fifi was going to a village 5 miles up the road.

So far so fine.

Tuesday, the feckless owner of the mother cat, had friends round, got bladdered and gave away the two with socks and Fifi, shut the black one in the house on her own and left the Mummy cat outside where she could get into trouble in so many different ways.

Wednesday, the detoxed one took his kitten back.

Friday afternoon, the feckless one left a note on his door bidding us all adieu, and drove off leaving both his cats and both his chickens behind without food or shelter.  Either he has gone on holiday, gone to kill himself, or run away.  Our friends whose reserved kittens were given away on Tuesday, and who are understandably rather upset, are planning retribution in the form of giving Momma cat a kind and loving home, where she will be fed, watered, sheltered, loved to pieces, de-flea-ed, de-wormed and neutered.  A bizarre form of retribution I grant you, but one that I am willingly aiding and abetting.

So here, feckless Joel, is your last chance!  Si vous ne reviendrez pas pour soigner vos animaux avant jeudi soir, vous ne trouverez plus Ninette!

There - my conscience is sorted out, and on Thursday evening, Ninette will have a loving home - she really is very sweet and deserves better than a chair in our garden.  See her below, in a blissful moment with Fifi and one of the Louis.

Feral kittens in the Baugeois

It is that time of year when all undeconstructed female cats produce huge numbers of lovely fluffy bundles.  Our two have been dealt with, so in theory we don't have that problem however next door's girl cat has produced a litter of very lovely kittens.  We think the father is next door's boy cat - and that fact is the sort of thing that will set me off on a major rant.

The litter was 5 kittens, but one didn't make it and one has theoretically found a home (and not just our garden), however if you live in the 49150 postcode area of France and would like a totally adorable kitten, contact me!  The feckless owner is doing nothing about rehousing them - source of another major rant.  They are ready NOW!

How can you resist this?  Further lovely photos of them can be found here.

Baby Newts

I might have mentioned before that this is the fifth wettest year on record to date, so it is hardly surprising I guess that the two seasonal pools in the One Acre Wood are still full of water.  When I say water, I think I really mean brown oak leaf tea or even primordial soup - it doesn't bear any resemblance to what comes out of taps or wells, that's for sure.

It might look disgusting, but it contains a lot of wild life, including mosquito larvae (I have the bites to prove that Mum at least is still around) and daphnia.  The real novelty for us however, is that these old clay pits are actually ancestral ponds for common newts.  We can't prove it, but there are also some more colourful versions knocking around that could be fire salamanders, but they are impossible to photograph.

The pits were dug to take advantage of the clay that the watershed is made from, also explaining the mix of trees we have in the One Acre Wood - chestnut for firewood for the kilns, oak for building, service for brewing and a very little pine for tapping for resin to give the local tiles their lustre.

This is the first year we have had water in the ponds until June, so the first time we have been aware of having newts.  Very soon now their external gills will fall away and they will scatter through the woods and fields around to do whatever newts do.  We caught this one to identify it and take a photograph and then gently released it back into the pond, to carry on doing what baby newts do - ideally eat all the mosquito larvae they can find!

Feeding chickens

There has been a bit of dialogue going around about how we feed our chickens.  For the record, this is what we do.

They have a morning feed made up of a mixture of 3 yogurt pots full of layers' pellets to ensure they get all the nutrients they need to keep their egg-laying bits working in good order - they eat these but find it perhaps the least exciting bit of their diet.  The rest of the feed is a half yogurt pot of cracked maize, a half yogurt pot of grain and a half a baby feeding spoon of poultry spice.  This last was due to the fact that Black has taken a long time to get into lay from whatever bad experience she had before us.

Their water is changed every morning as well - it is a bottle drinker so keeps quite well - and that is tap water with a half a teaspoon of cider vinegar in it.  They have bird grit available at all times, but generally seem to ignore it.

In addition they get fresh vegetable waste (tomato innards, melon innards, cucumber, lettuce, spinach), some cooked vegetable waste from time to time (potato peelings, carrot peelings, courgette, mashed potato but only if they are very good), and very occasional treats of other cooked waste - spaghetti is a particular favourite, and most chickens like the odd crust of baguette, but not our current three.

As well, when we are working in the garden, they get non-poisonous weeds to work through, including grasses but not lawn mowings, spent bits of plants (broad bean stems and leaves, cabbages, Swiss chard), slugs and small snails from the beer traps or that we find when we lift anything up, worms, over-ripe cherries and strawberries that are past their best. 

They eat anything they can catch too.  Don't be surprised to see your chickens eating flies and butterflies for example.  Perhaps the most disgusting things they eat are baby birds and any mice that they can get their beaks on, but as hens have no teeth, you can imagine that this is a pretty disgusting process.  We don't give them those, but if they catch something, we don't stand a chance of getting it back off them.

We never give them meat scraps (beef, lamb, pork, poultry, etc) or eggs.

In return, the eggs we get have yolks the colour of Sunny Delight, but are much nicer tasting to my mind.

Breaking a broody chicken

Well, we have managed it.  White is no longer sitting in the hen house looking like a rather classy tea cosy, she is up and about, making a lot of noise and back laying eggs.

In a previous post I described how White had gone broody, and having been full of good advice for friends in the same situation, we were now facing it ourselves.

Firstly I should point out that we never had this problem with the beige battery hybrids that we used to buy, but then White, Black and Spot were purchased with the idea of not having to replace a worn out hen every 18 months.  It seems that Light Sussex are inclined to have a brood from time to time, being a somewhat more natural bird.

At first we did ask around to see if anyone needed any eggs hatching or if there was any wisdom among the local peasantry.  Either I expressed it badly or the local farm chickens know that if you sit still too long, you are for the pot, but no one had any advice and nor did anyone need any eggs hatching.

Plan B was to make sitting uncomfortable.  For about 10 days we had White happily trying to hatch cool blocks from the freezer.  As it was the hottest it has been this year so far when we tried that, she seemed to rather enjoy it, so eventually we gave that up.

Plan C was rather less cunning.  Once Spot and Black had had their chance to lay their eggs, and for those eggs to be stolen by White for hatching, we would lift White out of the hen house, deposit her in an open bit of the run and close up the hen house until the evening.  This lead to some awful noises as she tried to burrow back into the hen house, or stood on top of it, trying to see in through a gap by the roof hinge, and to White falling off the hen house quite frequently as she is not very acrobatic.  She also made a few spare nests around the chicken run, but these either got rained on, trashed by the other two when she wasn't looking or dug up by us to help in the search for worms. 

After about 5 days of this, White gave in gracefully and has resumed normal chicken life.  Indeed after about 6 days, she even started laying again, which was a surprise to us as we thought she would take longer to get back in the swing of things.  What may have helped was that she didn't lose condition at all while she was brooding, apart from the fact that her comb went pale.  Anyway, it is nice to have her up and about again.

The problem of a broody chicken

It hasn't happened to us before, partly due to the type of chickens we have had before I suspect, but White has gone broody.

For the past week, she has been clamped to the nest bit of the coop, only coming out to feed and poo once or twice a day before rushing back into the coop and continuing her vigil.  We have removed, over the past week, about a dozen eggs from under her.  She has given up laying, but steals Black and Spot's eggs and sits on them.

We aren't quite sure how to deal with this.  The special boxes and coops for broodies seem a bit cruel and also a bit of a pain in a small area like ours.  We have tried to make life uncomfortable by removing more and more of the nesting straw (but we have to leave some as Black in particular is a bit rough when laying eggs) and replacing the eggs with freezer blocks from the freezer (as a substitute for ice eggs which we hear are effective).  We also open the roof of the coop all day and are threatening to send in the cats, but still she sits.

A photo of the brooding one will follow when we get it off the camera - but think of our nice standard Light Sussex, then double her size as she puffs up in anger at being disturbed!  Finally, as she flies out of the coop for her second feed of the day, picture her flying straight into the chicken wire fence - she has done that every day for the past week too!

And here is the picture of White in all her broodiness!

Wot you lookin' at?

Normally I stick to writing about our animals or those that we look after, but the photo below just had to find its way onto a blog!

This is one of the two "hard" chickens from next door.  They have attitude - well they need to.  They share their garden run with a number of cats (occasionally including ours), two ducks, and numerous pigeons and doves.  They don't have anything as namby-pamby as a coop to spend the night in, they just hunker down where ever they are when the sun sets.

There used to be 3 of them, and they could make quite a good chicken stack (best to be at the bottom as you kept warm) or chicken pyramid (for rainy days and nights, rain runs down backs, heads and tummies stay warm and dry).  We don't know what happened to the third one, and none of the neighbours are admitting anything, however "Droopy" didn't like them as they kept climbing into his garden and trashing the compost heap.  We haven't found any remains in our cellar, so we don't think a cat got it, and their owner is a self-proclaimed pacifist, who can't remember killing it, so we have to believe him.

So if you see a chicken with as bad an attitude as this, send it back to us, to rejoin her flock.