Tag Archives: poultry

A plan comes together

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It’s a busy day today and everywhere seems crowded, we even had three buzzards wheeling over the sheep field when we stopped to look at the ewes this morning. I managed to get some sheep photos but the effort of capturing tiny specks with no viewfinder was too much for me. Nice picture of clouds in a bright blue sky, but little else.

We’ve had a bit of a sheep-based day for Quercus, with felted sheep and sheep lollies. In the morning we had a college visit again, and they completed the work on the goats and bedded the pigs. No electric fences today!

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Both groups are now moving chickens to the new accommodation that has been repaired by Men in Sheds. They are going to be out on the fields, though we will have to keep an eye out for high winds as I’m not sure how stable the new coops are.

I love a day like this – when everything falls into place like a well made plan. Derelict chicken coops resurrected by Men in Sheds providing work experience for animal care students and an activity for our group. At times like this I feel like we are really getting somewhere, but at the back of my mind I always find that thought about what is going to go wrong next…

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Why have my hands turned purple?

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Well, we’ve wrapped presents for the bran tub on Saturday, sorted out the Santa presents, put up more decorations, eaten sweets, fed the animals and chased a duck in the half-light to get it back in the barn. Turned out to be a wild duck attracted by the duck noise, and duck food, of our resident group.

I had a go at photographing the poultry, but as you can see, they have a sixth sense for spoiling a photo – almost like the auto-focus alerts them. Then it’s head down, turn round or do something else unsuitable.  I gave up after these shots. That’s why I’ll never be a top wildlife photographer. That and the lack of lions in the Screveton area.

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I now have enough red cabbage in the oven to feed a large group of visitors, and by good fortune I also have a large group of visitors booked in for tomorrow. They are planting trees and having lunch. There will also be sausages on the menu (including vegetarian and gluten free options), baked potatoes and those posh little carrots I can never remember the name of.

The words “red cabbage” will have alerted you to the answer to the title question I suppose. It was simple, but I am, as ever, short of inspiration for titles.

The Woodland Trust sent us copies of their report with pictures of the Quercus group in it, which will cause some excitement on Wednesday when we hand them out. They would have caused some excitement today but the postman delivered them to the wrong address and we didn’t get them until after they had left. There were only 60 houses in the village at the end of the 19th century and I’m willing to bet there aren’t many more now. What are the chances of a wrongly delivered letter?

Apart from speculating on that all that is left to do is clear up and do some last minute shopping for tomorrow.

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Poetry, pollinators and poultry

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The Puzzled Game Birds

They are not those who used to feed us
When we were young–they cannot be –
These shapes that now bereave and bleed us?
They are not those who used to feed us, –
For would they not fair terms concede us?
– If hearts can house such treachery
They are not those who used to feed us
When we were young–they cannot be!

Thomas Hardy

I was going to put this in the last post but I couldn’t remember who wrote it, or enough of the words to search for it. Fortunately, with it being Hardy, I’m able to quote it in full, which is a useful side-effect of having old-fashioned tastes in poetry.

Apart from that minor triumph of memory it’s been a flat sort of day.

We decided to set the bird feeder up now that things are getting more wintry, but found that the central post had filled with water and rotted away half-way up. That was rather vexing. Fortunately we have another bird feeder which we had donated a few months ago so we just need to set that up – a job for Wednesday I think.

The guinea fowl chick has started to put in more of an appearance now, instead of hiding all the time. It’s another of the patchy white type that we managed to breed when we had a a latter-day Dr Moreau looking after the poultry. Admittedly he wasn’t quite as savage as the Doctor, but his breeding did leave us with a lot of unattractive poultry.

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Mother and chick

Apart from that, the sun has drawn out a few late butterflies and bees; we’ve planted some new Verbena Bonariensis given to us by a neighbour (they’re always welcome, as they’re a good plant for pollinators); played a ball game with made-up rules and picked beans for seed.

We’ve also used the Applemaster to produce apple rings (which are currently drying in the new dehydrator), so we should have apple rings for tomorrow morning. In theory we’re building up a stock for National Apple Day on Saturday, but so far none of the batches has lasted longer than a day.

Worms, wrens and Kenyans

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Yesterday didn’t seem like a particularly eventful sort of a day until I pressed the “Publish” button. We waved off the 22 six-year-olds. We had an argument about me sighing as they went. (Julia thinks they are delightful at that age: I believe they are a minor manifestation of the chattering imps of Hell). They never stop twittering, they think they are here just to fill the pockets of their friends with gravel (which I then have to sweep out of the building) and people try to make me feel guilty if I attempt to impose discipline. Despite this I do believe that my two orderly queues for the microscope and wormery worked better than the method where they all pile in and the front ones refuse to move. And then (for I must remove myself from this digression) we started on paperwork.

This involved emails, pieces of tatty A4 paper (my contribution), forms, labels and excuses (yes, that would be me again).

Julia, despairing of me ever being useful, went to work in the garden, at which point five newly fledged wrens flew out of one of the less used compost bins. She called me and I went for a look. They were great little things and squeaked a lot instead of giving the normal scolding calls you get from wrens. They flitted about from rhubarb to blackcurrant to hedge and  to fence post. I have a good selection of blurred photos of greenery and some really good studies of fence posts, but apart from a couple of brown blurs I don’t have a picture of a wren. So I suppose not all young squeaky things are bad.

Next we had a visit from Mojatu, picking up some stuff from the weekend. It’s impossible not to feel happy with them around. Even the most serious of them laughs more in an hour than I do in a week.

Finally, just as we were leaving we were called over to rescue a remarkably stupid chicken that has hatched a chick in the pig pens. It’s black so we’re pretty sure who the father is.

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It’s all go.

So, after capturing an escaped sheep and several other jobs, I am finally posting this at 11.00 am on the day after the events occurred. There will be more tonight. I’m beginning to feel like the Laws of Time do not exist for me.

Back to normal

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It’s the first day with the big group all back and everyone is comparing Christmas presents and illnesses. Chest infections have been popular over Christmas (and continue to be popular as an excuse for not working outside!) and new phones seem to have been popular presents.

My phone is now over a year old and is seen as a positive antique. If it hadn’t been for the unfortunate conjunction of phone and cup of tea I’d still be using a four-year-old phone. It had survived being dropped in the washing up water but the tea was a step too far. If I’d been having a virtuous day it would have been OK but I’d backslid and put sugar in it, and phones don’t cope well with sticky stuff. An ancient phone isn’t a problem to me, I’m still old-fashioned enough to see a telephone as a communicatiion device instead of a platform for games and music and searching the internet.

We’re waiting for lambing at the moment and had a couple of goes at moving sheep. They didn’t work well, as sheep despite their reputation for following the leader, don’t like to walk across muddy ground. The driving of ducks and geese went better, but mud isn’t really an issue for them, and as dusk came they made tracks for the barn with a minimum of drama.

Meanwhile the guineafowl have been invading gardens again, so all is well and truly back to normal.

I really must remmeber to start using the camera again…

 

Wednesday already?

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Yes, it’s Wednesday already and the group is just arriving. One of the parents has just told us the guineafowl are all over the road (fortunately walking rather than flat) and the first task of the day is going to find them and guide them back into the fields. For those of you who have never kept guineafowl or peacocks – once you get them you will have a lot of people giving you messages like this as they tend to go wherever they like with complete disregard for modern traffic – a bit like like my great uncle who can’t see why he needs to go over 15 mph.

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They like the roads and often have a walk along them, much to the concern of passing motorists. It’s easier for doing distances I suppose, and from what we’ve seen they also like picking up grit as they potter along.

Grit is an interesting subject when keeping birds. When I first started in the poultry industry we regulalrly fed two sorts of grit to our breeders, but then I was taught the business by someone who had started keeping poultry in the 1920s. As time went by grit became a thing of the past.

The two sorts of grit are insoluble or flint grit, which supposedly aids the grinding process in the gizzard and soluble grit, or oystershell, which is assimilated by the bird to ensure good egg shells. It now seems that birds are capable of digesting food without using grit. Modern poultry rations seem able to include enough calcium to make oystershell superfluous, though that isn’t what I’m talking about here.

Wild birds still seem to like picking up grit, a fact that is used in the medication of red grouse in the wild. They may need it to help with digestion but they probably also extract minerals from it as it breaks up. Again, modern rations contain enough vitamins and minerals for poultry without them having to eat grit.

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For once I actually have a picture of the right species of bird!