Rural Life

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.

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!