Rural Life

Introducing Black, White and Spot

We did finally manage to get a photo or two of the new girls - not at all flattering to any of them, but then they are still a bit grubby and tatty from their former lives, or in Spot's case, still growing.

Black is one of the fairly ubiquitous blackish with a gold head variety that you find round here and is a bit older than the other two - you can see this from her comb and beak.  Once we got her home and had a good look at her, we could also see this from a bald patch on her tum where she is coming out from a moult.  She seems to have lived in a shed, as she doesn't really know about scratching or greens, but she is enjoying dust baths a lot, which is good.

White is a Light Sussex, still quite immature (size and development of comb), but seems to be the one laying (second egg today).  She is a good size and will get bigger but is also rather grubby - we hope she will shine a bit later in the year.  White has got scratching sorted out, and is starting to be interested in greens - sort of!

Spot is probably a Marans, but we won't really know until she starts laying as the big hint of a Maran is the practically chocolate colour of the eggs they produce.  She is definitely the youngest of the three and can get shoved out of the way when heading for food, but is also quite adventurous in her own way - she pecked one of the cats yesterday that shoved a paw through the wire.

More tales from the chicken run to follow......

New Chickens

Today is marked in some people's view as having the worst storm of the winter with winds of 82mph recorded at Berry Head and The Mumbles and 105kph winds in land at Cholet.  So it seems obvious to us that today is ideal chicken buying weather.

Yes, we have finally succumbed to the lure of new chickens - well they are such fun, and helpful at ridding the garden of pests, and they lay the odd egg (previous chickens have laid very odd eggs - wind eggs, shell-less, double yolkers).  John checked out the market this afternoon with little hope and called in to say that there was a good selection - he would get the feed and bedding and collect me for purchasing.

Now, we have had a bit of damage from the gales, so perhaps this wasn't the best idea, but what the heck.  We selected a fine white with black bits (probably Light Sussex), a very pretty black with golden head, and a really rather cute grey speckled chicken, and watched them be stuffed into the obligatory cardboard carrying box tied up with blue string (it HAS to be blue).

On the drive home, we reminded Black, White and Spotty that they really were the luckiest chickens in the market that day, as they had found English owners, and once I had lined the coop with all things a chicken needs, rebuilt the cover for the feeding trough and tipped them out of their box, it took them 30 seconds to find the scran and agree with us.

Then the rain started, hence no pictures and actually the chickens might not totally agree with us on their luck.  But we are once again poultry owners and life is good!

Hedgehog paradise

We have a lodger in the garden.  It has been around for a number of years and we have seen some of its children tramping through the raised beds of the kitchen garden.

During the spring it hides out in and around the potager, possibly among the compost bins or in untidy patches under shrubs.  It battles with the chickens (when we have any) for the rights to keep the slug population under control, as we do not use slug pellets.

During the height of summer it goes down the garden and hangs out around the back of our house and our neighbour's house, where it is relatively cool, reasonably well stocked with slugs, no chicken competition and where it might get the odd baby lizard to boot.

During the autumn, we know it goes walkabout, but this winter we found where it made its winter snug (under the black rose bush, and up against a south facing wall).  You can see it in the photo, warming its nose in the February sunshine and preparing for being bounced on yet again by Maigret and Poirot!

Also, if you are feeling compassionate, read the other blog I do (follow this link) or go direct to this point and add to the petition to free Ingrid Betancourt.  She is not nearly as comfortable as the hedgehog.

Ducks reprieved

The saga of the ducks is finally over.  We found a new home for the 5 ducks living in our currently vacant hen run.  We found the same home for four more ducks that were living in a cellar waiting for the chop - they were delivered to us by hand and upside down on Friday lunchtime.

John helped to build a rather nice duck house at their new home - photos to follow at some stage - and on Saturday we were able to get them to their new home.  This is a meadow with a small winter pond (variously called the overflow or the frog pond), a goat house, three goats and a duck house.

It was really heart-warming to see the ducks start to behave like ducks finally after being terrified and cramped in our hen run.  In the meadow, they can roam as a flock, sun themselves, take a dip in the pond or the drainage streams round the sides, nibble the grass, rootle for insects and slugs and acorns and even try out flying.  They don't get high off the ground as they are too portly and not really designed for flying (see previous comments of mine on selective breeding).

So here are the 9 Donalds in their new home - what a happy ending!

Visiting ducks

One of the things we like about our life here is never really knowing what the day will bring.  Yesterday it brought us 5 ducks, today it brought us another 4.  I hope that tomorrow will see the ducks go to their new home, but that depends on John getting a duck house built.

The ducks were bought in a job lot of 35 birds fattened for slaughter, but the purchaser ran out of freezer space so, kept a few ducks alive while he worked out what to do.  He got permission to park 5 in our chicken run, while working out what to do.  We found a purchaser for all the remaining live ducks, and I think it is fair to say that they have won a reprieve and a life of luxury once they get to their new home.

My one worry is that like our old chickens, these are utility hybrids with unhelpful characteristics bred in.  They are white with blue eyes, pinkish bills and a certain inertia to them - quite cute, but not as much fun as a chicken.  They probably taste good too, but we will never know!

Goat friendly weather

We have just finished a month of goat sitting, as Nanny, Lucy and Bessie's owners had to be away.  It was the first January we have spent with goats, so there was quite a learning curve and I have spent a lot of time looking up goat care related web sites. 

For information, the UK ones seem a bit precious and useless to me.  Any site that recommends you regularly keep an eye on the body temperature of your animals with use of a rectal thermometer, and doesn't then qualify that a bit, seems odd to me.  Particularly as there are a lot of people out there that keep goats as pets, and not as a breeding herd.  I wonder (purely as an aside) if the goat herds of the deserts of the near and middle East keep such a thermometer with them for regular inspections....

Anyway, the girls made it very clear to us over the month that good winter goat weather is nice, sunny days and no harm if it gets a bit crisp and cold at night (even -10 degrees C is quite alright thank you).  What really gets a goat's goat is wet, dank, windy weather, when your hay seems to soak up and attract ever more water and your deep litter bed in the goat shed gets a bit ripe and wet as well.  Fortunately the girls have had more of the former weather recently, and welcomed their owners with a merry skip and then begged embarrassingly for food.

The disappearing rabbit

On one side, we have lovely neighbours who have been in the village forever, but on the other side, we get a new set of neighbours every year, normally in late April/early May, after the previous lot have been evicted for non-payment of rent due to the disgusting state of the house.  It is a real peasant dwelling - at the back there are no windows and the house is half buried in the garden.  In summer it is a picture of quaintness, in the winter it is a festering hole with rising damp, falling damp, condensation and just a couple of convector heaters to keep you warm.  Naturally with something built directly onto the earth, there is no damp proof course.

The current neighbour, J, is nice enough, but a bit scary looking and with some strange friends.  Last Sunday, one of them brought J a large rabbit that they had trapped, but he was out.  Could we look after it for him?  No, the cats would go mad - the thought of Poirot clamped to it for the next week while she tried to eat it all didn't bear thinking about!!  But we did say he could leave the rabbit on our cellar steps until J got home, and while we went out for a walk.

We got home again three quarters of an hour later, and J was back and the rabbit was gone so we thought no more about it until Wednesday, when P, one of J's strange friends popped in to see us about something.  At the end of the conversation, he got a bit embarrassed and asked about the rabbit.  We said we thought J had taken it when he got in.  No, J hadn't, and didn't like to ask us himself - perhaps a passing stranger had made off with it.  We didn't think that likely, we don't get passing strangers in our courtyard, apart from J and his strange friends like P!!

As a last resort, we said maybe it had been moved into the cellar, so John dragged P down into the cellar with him to look.  Behind the hot water cylinder were the head, paws and spine of the rabbit - everything else had been eaten by a cat or two.  We knew it wasn't our two, as they still don't go out, so J's two cats were in the frame.

So never underestimate what a cat will walk off with!!

Goodbye Battery Hens?

Normally I am pretty introspective here about stuff, but there was a report today on the BBC website about a planned end to battery farmed eggs by 2012 - YES!

Sadly a lot of the report was about how this would be impossible to implement, but for once something being right rather than economically easy seems to be winning the day.

In a battery egg unit, a chicken has about the space of an A4 sheet of paper living space if she is lucky - look at a piece of A4 paper then look at the photo of one of my sets of hens.  They do have a size roughly equivalent to an A4 piece of paper - so how do they move, find food, preen and so forth?  Actually my girls, although designed for a battery unit, were raised in a much larger space (in excess of Soil Association regulations) so they did actually get rather bigger than an A4 piece of paper.

I could add some fairly disgusting detail about the problems of the hybrid race that populates the battery houses, but I won't though I have hinted about it earlier.

Of course, eggs are just one product of battery systems - boycott battery eggs, but also battery chickens raised for food (Ross Cobb and Sunvalley Hybrid breeds in particular), and then the most difficult step of all, if you have cats, particularly elderly cats, chicken and rice cat food.  Well what do you think happens to the battery egg hens after a year?

It's cold!!

Over the past few days here, the temperatures have plummeted.  Yesterday we didn't get a positive temperature until after 2pm and the high was 0.9 degrees Centigrade.  Now I know that isn't much when you compare it with what they are having to put up with in Quebec, but it is more than cold enough for me.  Especially as the goats need looking after.

These are not our goats - they are adoptive goats that we look after when their owners have to go away.  Bessie and Lucy are about 10 months old and Nanny is nearly 2 (Lucy is her kid).  They are dwarf goats and their duty in life is to keep the grass down in their meadow, but they much prefer acorns, oak leaves, brambles, trees and maize to boring old grass.

In this cold snap, they are doing fine - there are still loads of acorns around, plus they have a bale of hay to nibble on if required, loads of grass still and we pop in (theoretically) every three or four days to give them some extra feed and make sure nothing is bothering them or that they haven't trashed anything.  Currently we are having to go over more frequently to ensure they have unfrozen water.  Their bowl doesn't defrost during the day, and their stream has now frozen over as well.

They are extremely podgy and have very thick coats, so they aren't suffering, whatever the goat care mafia might say.  It is just the need to keep fresh water available that causes the worry.  Below are pictures of all three during the summer.

Spaying kittens

It had to be done, with two girl cats in the house, we couldn't face the unwanted suitors or the possibility of kittens, so once they were past their suspected 6 month birthday and we had mentally girded ourselves, we booked them in.

Spay day was Tuesday 6th November.  They had been up playing most of the night, so we were tired, but they went into their cat carriers without any problems.  It is a quick drive to the vet's and then we left them, with me being rather weepy to leave them there.

Six o'clock in the evening we collected them and were given our instructions on after care.  We were also given two packs of special neutered female cat food - aren't those medical reps lovely people?  When released into the calm of the bedroom, they were as wobbly as new born lambs, so we left them in peace with a pile of jumpers to snuggle into.

Maigret has been quite clingy since the operation but is  bouncing around quite happily, and while she looked frighteningly thin when she came home, has filled out again a bit as she has re-hydrated (she is slim by nature it seems).  Poor pudgy Poirot has had a much more difficult time, and has gone off men completely.  She is starting to be interested in play again, but anything out of the ordinary and she dives back under the nearest bed or curtain.

We know it is for the best, but for the moment, it is hard, and their shaved tummies are a constant reminder of what we have put them through.  However below is a reminder of them in their entire and unshaved state!