Baby Guinea Keets

We have had our guinea fowl about four years and the first couple of years were excited that we would have babies.  We never got any babies.  The only thing I got was jealous when I heard of other people who's guineas were having successful hatchings.  We started with eight birds and this fall are down to two, thankfully a male and female.  To our surprise they came out of the swamp the other day with, as far as we can count, 17 baby keets.  It's been three days and it looks like they still have all of them.  They are a crazier, more aggressive bird than a chicken, and they co-parent unlike a chicken, so maybe they will manage to get a couple of them to adulthood.  The keets are so tiny though they look like peanuts running through the grass after their parents.  There has also been an eagle circling the house so they better keep them close or they will go on the raptor buffet. 

New Mother Fail

New chicks are so adorable!!! and fragile we found out this year.

This mother, who was all get any closer and I'll peck both your eyes out, hatched four eggs.  By the time she got done being the mom, usually about three or four weeks, she had one that survived.  That will happen when your favorite place to hang out is in front of the llama and goat feeder.

The chick rearing antics of this mother made us ecstatic when another mother hen came proudly strutting out of the wood pile with about 16 chicks.  Little did we know that she was going to be an even worse mother.  She hauled her chicks on the road where the traffic roars by at 55 mph, through the garden where they couldn't figure out how to get through the fencing, back by the pine trees where the raccoons live and anywhere else perilous she could find.   Two of her chicks are still alive, amazingly, because even though she isn't mothering them anymore, they are still dare devils.  When they are at their regular stomping grounds down by the swamp, where who knows what could jump out and eat them, I hear them laughing in the face of danger.

Chickens - not the sharpest tools in the shed.  That must be why it only takes 21 days for an egg to hatch, any longer and chickens would be extinct. 

First Eggs

One of our new chickens was standing in the driveway having a little snack.  Standing at the bottom of the driveway, I heard a clink and then a tinkling sound.  

When I looked down, an egg was rolling towards my feet. I don't think she even knew she had laid an egg as she went right on eating.  Thankfully she was standing in the middle of the food and it broke the fall for the egg or it would have been the egg that broke.  Our girls are growing up!  Now they are laying lots of eggs, but by the time we find them they are frozen.  

Greedy Panhandling Chickens

When we bring out cracked corn or kitchen treats for the chickens and guineas we yell "CHICKENS" and they all come running.  But now instead of waiting to be called for their treats, they just come right up to the dinning room door to look for them.

The guineas just roost on the deck rails so that they don't miss anything.  It has almost gotten to the point where we can't go outside without being surrounded by chickens.  The man who came to fill our fuel oil tank for the winter forgot to bring a wrench to get the top off. Dad left him by the pipe to find one of our wrenches and when he came back the guy was standing there surrounded by demanding birds.  He managed to stammer to Dad that they might be hungry.  Leaving the wrench, Dad went back to get a bucket of corn to throw out and save the delivery man.

The guineas are a beautiful bird until you get to their head.  They are in the coop for the night here and they were not happy that I was taking their picture with a flash.  Going to the coop at night is a weird thing we have not been able to figure out.  At some undisclosed time, no matter what they are doing, even eating, the chickens and the guineas all just start running to the coop and hop in.

Even the dog isn't safe isn't safe from those greedy gals.  She goes out to go potty and they run over and surround her.  It is hard to do your business with so many eyes watching you.  She is pretty quick out there now so she can get done and be heading back to the house before they can get to her.

Frugal Chicken Feeder

As the chicken are getting bigger they are eating more and more.  Chickens are a messy bunch, scratching and kicking their food everywhere and wasting a lot of it.  Dad made this feeder for free.  He took scrap wood and made a base with a lip that went all the way around it and didn't leave much room on the sides for scratching.  He cut notches out the bottom on two sides of a plastic litter pail so gravity can pull the feed down and they can't get to it all at once.  It has a nice top that keeps the feed dry and the chickens from pooping in it.  At the time he made this it would hold enough for about two days worth of feed so we only had to feed them every other day.  A win win for everyone.

Life of Chicken

Moved to the chicken tractor. 

Meat birds destined for the dinner table.

Baby Chicks

Our extremely cold winter was so hard on our animals that we only had one chicken survive and no rabbits.  So this year, after several years of not raising chicks, we got an order of heavy layers and meat birds.  We quit raising meat birds because the rabbits, which taste so much like chicken that the whole time you are eating rabbit you have to be reminding yourself it is rabbit, are work all year around and the meat birds are a project that only lasts a couple months.

Pumpkin Treats

 

We have had this huge pumpkin in our kitchen that Dancer keeps stubbing her toes on.  Today, before it started to get soft and make a mess, Dad cut it up for the animals.  When he cut into it we realized that it was probably never going to get soft because it had such a hard rind that it was drying out.  Perhaps that was from our dry, dry summer.

 

It made Chester very happy.

 

The llamas could smell something good was on its way before we even got one step in the barn.

 

 

Dancer had them eating out of her hands.  They always eat out our hands, I just wanted to say that.

 

The chickens were happy.

 

Calliope was so happy it turned her eyes blue!

Llama Progress

 

Dancer and Spark have made great progress with the llamas in only two days.  When the kids go to pet them, they don't flinch anymore. 

 

 

Llamas make a hmmm sound like what you would say to someone when you really aren't listening but, you want to sound like you are listening.  Or imagine when you are reading a book and someone keeps talking to you and they can't figure out that you are reading and they should give up and find something else to do.  That kind of hmmm.  We read that they make that sound when they are tense, stressed or nervous.  At first they were hmmming the whole time we were out with them and now they have settled down a lot on their amount of hmmming. 

 

When we picked them up a boy said that he spent half an hour the night before trying to get a halter on Nora, now Dancer is able to get it on her in just a few minutes.  Dancer has a way with animals and they just seem to do what she wants.  We are going to be busy on Monday and Tuesday most of the day so hopefully they won't back slide with less interaction.

 

The chickens are not pleased with the llamas in the barn.  Where we put the new pen is right where the chickens use to lay their eggs.  They stand in front of the gate and cluck, cluck, cluck.  I can imagine them saying, "I have to lay an egg and you are in my spot!" like they are waiting with their legs crossed in line for the bathroom.  The chickens have relented and made a new nest in the very corner of the pen, so far we have lost nary an egg.  Granted, our chickens are old and on a good day we only get a couple so there isn't a huge pile to be stepped on but, since we only get a few each one is precious.

Chicken In The Snow

This is Old Chicken.  I looked out this afternoon and she was sitting here in the snow.  Problem was, every time I looked out she was sitting there. 

Spark went out to see what was the matter and if she needed assistance.

He was able to pick her right up, she wasn't frozen down as we had worried she might be.  Maybe that was all the further she could get in the deep snow and thought we would be out sooner or later so she would just wait.  Or it could be she is just a dumb chicken who didn't know better than to spend the afternoon sitting in the snow, they are all a couple eggs short of a dozen. 

Hero of the chicken!  She does have a bald tummy so one would think it was a cold afternoon for her.

Pumpkin Patch Field Trip

 

Pumpkins as far as you could see.  It looked like a field of basketballs.  This is a farm that grows pumpkins that are sold at stores out front in the big boxes.  In our area, if it says that the pumpkins are locally grown they came from these fields.  The pumpkins shown here are the left overs.  There was an early frost so some of them froze and I am not sure why the rest were passed over.

 

   

 

All the kids minus two.  The little girl that Dancer is holding is a baby that one of the families takes care of.  The highlight of Dancer's week is getting to play with her and she holds her every moment she gets.

 

 

Back to a member's house to carve all those pumpkins.

 

 

 

Checked out their llamas and alpacas.  I loved the expression the middle llama was giving Spark. 

 

 

They are quite large but on the plus side they only poo in one place, unlike a goat who goes where ever, and they don't smell.  Although they don't have any males that aren't gelded so they don't have those hormones flying around like we do with the goats.

 

The family cleaned 50 chickens this fall and then when everything was all put away they realized that they only cleaned 49.  The mom was saying how now they would have to haul everything back out and heat up boiling water to pluck and clean "a" chicken.  Dad told her about how we have had success with sticking the air compressor nozzle in the under the chicken skin and loosing it enough to easily peel the skin off.  "Let's do it!" she said right away.  Her son and Spark headed out to cut off the head and bleed it out with the air compressor humming away.  Dad stuck the nozzle under the skin and the bird blew up, that is why the legs are sticking up like that.  The air compressor was set on 120 pounds and we usually have ours set on 90 pounds for using the stapler or nailer.  We learned when the bird "popped" that 120 pounds is a bit too much pressure.

 

The kids finished cleaning the bird and dug out all the entrails to find all the parts since we had just done anatomy in our co-op last year. 

I Always Feel Like Somebodys Watching Me

We do a lot of our school in the basement where the front windows are ground level.  Every day the chickens gather around a window and watch us.  It is sort of creepy as I just know they are talking about us.  They also come up on the deck and look in the dining room but by the time we run for the camera they leave.

After posting yesterday about not being able to get a picture of one on the deck Dancer caught this one this morning on film, or guess now it would be caught on SD card.  See her all nonchalantly walking up to the door.  There were two others waiting at the bottom of the stairs so I am certain that she was sent up to look in on us and report back any findings. Why else would they run off like they were guilty when we come to the door?

Someone's Not Pulling Their Weight

We got this cute little Barbie egg the other day.  Well, I guess it would be about the size of an ostrich egg for Barbie but small none the less.  If these were the size of chicken eggs the 15 to 20 egg omelet would become the norm.  I am also guessing we aren't going to find a yolk in it.

Once in a while we will get one of these long torpedo shaped eggs.  It is just odd that after months of "normal" eggs we got two odd ones.  Truth be told, if I was a chicken these are the eggs I would want to be laying day after day, if you know what I mean. 

Making Some Changes Around The Barn

We finally sold our buck Klaus.  We had a hard time selling him because he had horns and people don't seem to want a buck with horns.  We sold Charlie, another buck that was dehorned, and could have sold several more just like him a couple of months back.  Klaus was a good gentle buck, the only problem was that he was related as either a dad or a brother to all but one of our girls.  He had already been with Calliope, the one goat that we know isn't related to him, and possibly our other doe so we will get one more year of off spring from him.  I was really sad to see him go, we had had him for four years and I like to give him snacks and rub his freckled nose.  The buck above, Nico, is named after Nico de Angelo from the Percy Jackson books, which I didn't know Dancer named him after a book character until tonight.  He is the one we are going to use next year and hope he does a good job.  Klaus is his dad but he doesn't share a mom with any of our does.  He has a scur from being dehorned so I think he looks like a unicorn.

Now that Klaus is gone there are going to be some new "house" assignments in the barn.  When he was in rut he would try and get out of his house to either let the other bucks know that he would be taking care of business or to try to get close to a doe.  Every time he would break through we would just do a quick patch job to keep him in his house to deter him from getting into any trouble he thought might be of interest.  He had the deluxe suite house, it was about 10 X 18 feet, pretty nice for one goat.  Dad did a little sawing

and hammering and now it looks good as new.

These two, Calliope and her daughter Lola, are the new residents.  They had made such a mockery of their house that we didn't even bother to shut their door anymore and they have been having free reign of the barn the last few months.  Lola is very, very smart and smart goats can make huge messes and are danger to themselves as they try things they shouldn't. 

While Dad was fixing their new house they just couldn't wait to get in there, we had to keep shooing them out.  Once it was done, they ran in and we shut the door, it was a much different story.  They were thinking more along the lines of an open house not signing a lease.  They will adjust and they are never that happy anyway.  If they are outside they want in, if they are inside they want out, outside a pen they want in, and so on. 

The next goal is to fix the chicken pen that is in the barn.  There have been goats in it for the last couple of years and so they just roost along this wall.

Only problem is we never know where we will find their eggs and they poo all over.

Some roost in the rafters so it is always a good idea to look up before you walk right in so that they don't drop a little bomb.  It has happened before and it isn't pleasant.  You can't just rinse that stuff out of your hair, it takes a whole shower and even then you feel a little um, shitty.

Another Speckly wondering what I am doing with the camera.  Looks like she is giving me the stink eye.

Two other beautiful ladies.  I just love chickens, they are so soft.

Vidalia was also out there snoopervising the goings on.  Looks like she is really scrutinizing Dad's work.

She ended up with this big smile on her face so she must have approved.  I never did get her whole head in a picture because, as I was trying to take her picture, she kept trying to get closer for some pets and ear scratches.  She is a funny cat, she reminds me of a dog in how she acts.