Tag Archives: chicks

Spring! (tra la!)

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Yesterday was one of those frustrating days, caused by what we laughingly call April’s ‘sweet Spring showers’.  The day dawned glorious – sun-kissed and promising.  Grass was reassuringly green, daffs were delightfully golden, birds said variations on ‘tweet!’  All was good.

Inspired, I rushed to put the chicks’ run out on the grass so they could feel the sun and eat fallen blossom (for some reason all poultry adores eating blossom, small chicks no exception).  I took Slip’s rug off so he could sunbathe and top up on Vitamin D and I set off on a long walk with Darcy and Indie.

When I was at the further end of the walk, a cold wind arose.  It whistled up some ominous clouds which rapidly blotted out the sun and I accelerated, because I knew what would happen next.  It did happen:  when I was nearly home the sky turned dark purple and it began to hail.  I shot home and moved the chicks back indoors under their infra red lamp.  They were surprised, but rapidly recovered.  Then I whizzed out to the field and put Slip’s rug back on.  He hates hail, so was galloping around the field scattering sheep and swearing under his breath.  I got his rug on as quickly as possible, but he was blaming me for everything throughout, and I can’t say he was cooperative.  Then I rushed home to dry Darcy and Indie who looked as if they had just emerged from a swimming pool.

Then the sun came out and everything steamed.  Steamiest of the lot was Slip, who was now too hot in his rug, and blaming me all over again.  So I took his rug off and, after a dither, put the chicks out again (which, I should mention here, takes 3 journeys every time – one for the run, one for the box of chicks and one for their food and water bowls).  Then I encouraged the dogs outside to dry off in the sun.

And that’s when it started to rain again.

Well, that’s Spring for you, and at least the grass is growing.  We’re off to the Sahara wild-camping next week which is guaranteed to produce a couple of weeks of gladsome warm weather back in the UK: it always does.

Thoughts various …

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Here is a small hotchpotch or smorgasbord of today’s thoughts:

(a)  Indie met one of his brothers this morning for the first time since they were all eight weeks old.  Brother went to a farm in a neighbouring village and joined a pack of lurchers and spaniels, and the whole lot of them came roaring over to where I stood with Indie by my side.

Brother is bigger and tougher and rougher than Indie and when they stood staring at each other I was strongly reminded of that famous photo showing an impeccably dressed boy in an Eton collar being jeered at by urchins.  Indie is sometimes a housedog and sometimes a pirate, but today he looked like the shiny posh boy being confronted by village oiks.

(b)  Next up was a chap in a van from the Council who came to gaze at the bridge where our stream flooded in November (remember that?) and make useful suggestions.  I gave him a long impassioned speech about the inadequacy of the bridge, the silted nature of the stream bed, and dreadfulness of watching rugs floating out in a room while you bale out of the window and he listened to me with close attention.  When I finally ran out of words, he drew himself to his full height and spoke:  “You’re not from Wiltshire, are you?  I can always tell!”

(c)  Apropos of nothing, but just one of those happy things:  the new chicks are colour coded.  Their first teeny weeny wing feathers have come through, and the yellow ones with black dots are frizzles, and the black ones with yellow dots have straight feathers.  Isn’t that just cute?

Have a fab weekend, everybody – in Wiltshire Spring is finally springing (yay!)

More new kids on the block

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I’ve just spent a happy half hour in the hen run, introducing this year’s fresh young chicks to the old lags who live there.  It’s a peerless day, unclouded blue sky with promise of real heat later in the day, and the smell of the neighbouring hay field makes every breath a pleasure.  So I didn’t exactly rush away as the chicks made their way down the gang plank, all wobbly knees and big eyes, to discover what the rest of their lives is going to be like.

I put them in the hen house last night, so that they would become part of the flock in the dark of the night without really realising it had happened.  This morning the home team came bouncing down the ramp all fluffy and bright eyed and made a bee line for breakfast.  Then came a pause as the chicks all shuffled around the hole in the floor of the ark, gazing down at the hen run below and saying ‘after you’ to each other (the little ark they started out in doesn’t have a gang plank).

Then Frillz, the bravest, started inching slowly down the plank, all claws and feathers.  She started to speed up despite herself, then gravity took over and she finished her descent at warp speed, hitting the ground below with a startled squawk.  She’ll learn how to do the plank, it just takes practice.  Encouraged by her example, the rest of the chicks came out to join her except for Dolly (there’s always one).  Dolly yelled through the hole in the floor that she is having nothing to do with that there plank, and is going to live as a hermit in the hen house.  For ever.

The other chicks all headed out into the run.  It’s bigger, and lusher, and greener and more interesting than anything they have ever seen before.  They explored as a pack (safety in numbers), and when I came in to write this they had:

  • Tried out the drinker (big success)
  • Stuffed themselves with breakfast once the older hens had finished
  • Watched Wenceslas having a dust bath (awesome sight)
  • Been chased by Fluffy (most unfair, as she was once Frillz’ mum)
  • Found and eaten a small and bewildered spider which they discovered with shrieks of excitement under a leaf

Now they have the rest of the day free to explore and amaze themselves.  I’ve got a busy day ahead myself, but I’ll just nip out now and see if I can encourage Dolly to walk the plank and join her mates …

It’s raining!

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I don’t want to sound picky, but running a smallholding gets less fun when it rains and rains and rains (you get the idea).  The new frizzle chicks aren’t very waterproof yet, even less so than non-frizzle chicks, because their new frizzle feathers stick out at odd angles and let the rain in.  Once chicks have reached a certain age I like to put them on the lawn in a little run every day, so they can potter about in the sun, eat the occasional bone-dense fly that strays into their path and generally start getting street-wise.  Not a hope at the moment, they are all indoors with the heat lamp on, doing the chick equivalent of playing video games and getting on each others’ nerves.  And needing their newspaper replaced with astonishing regularity for such small birds.

Back in the henrun, Wenceslas’ dustbath is awash so he’s hanging about in the shelter with the rest of the flock and reminding them of why they couldn’t take him seriously in the first place (I am still amazed that he has fathered at least 4 chicks – all the bantam hens will peck him as soon as look at him).  Pavlova the Pekin cockerel just doesn’t get up at the moment.  He spends all day in the henhouse, presumably wrapped in a duvet and sending out for pizza.  He says he will reappear when the sun does, and not before.

The sheep look tattered and grouchy.  They should be shorn by now, but the Gribbles say they won’t do them until it is dry (at least I think that is what they said, I needed a Babel fish to properly translate “Oi’ll kumana droi like moi dear”, which is what one of them said to me last time I rang.  At least there is no worry about fly strike at the moment, I think all the flies have drowned.  And the sheep are nice and cosy inside their fleeces unlike their cousins in neighbouring fields who have been shorn and look cold, wet and depressed.

And the horses are back in their winter rugs.  I haven’t ridden Slip for days and he’s rapidly turning feral, while Harry has disappeared into the field shelter and tells me he’s applied to emigrate.  Anywhere that doesn’t rain, at all, ever.

On the plus side the geese think it’s marvellous and have discovered puddles in places where we don’t usually get puddles, like the herb garden, and are dibbling happily away with random shouts of joy.  And everything looks lovely and green.  Positive thinking rules (but it’s getting harder …)

Bombshell from the henrun!

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And now for the bombshell from the henrun (we’re talking a very local level bombshell here, nothing scary).   When we returned from our Saharan camping adventure, I put some bantam eggs in our little incubator out of a spirit of adventure.  Long time readers of this blog will know that we had a Polish Frizzle cockerel called Wenceslas who didn’t like the ladies.  The bantam hens used to sneer at him and kick dust in his face, and when it came to a fertility test I discovered that only 1 out of potentially 12 eggs had anything in it.  That thing, by the way, is now called Frillz and looks more like a cockatoo than a bantam (see photo of 4 June).

So Wenceslas was retired from stud duties, and Pavlova the Pekin cockerel came to join us instead.  The hens adore him, and follow him around in a groupie sort of way.  He struts, and preens, and crows, and does everything expected of him.  He’s also a puff of pleasingly bright white feathers with a bright red comb and looks just great (and very masculine) (for a Pekin bantam).  I was ready to rehome Wenceslas if he fought with the new boy, but there was no need.  Soon they were slapping each other on the back and buying each other drinks, and as the weeks progressed Wenceslas retired to a particularly fine dustbath in one corner of the run, while Pavlova told the girls amusing stories and complemented their egg laying prowess in another.  Peace reigned.  It was great.

Back to the new chicks.  6 healthy chicks hatched out and started pottering around and being cute like chicks do.  They were all shades of yellow, so will end up in a pleasing selection of Farrow & Ball cream tones.  Then their first feathers started to grow.  I was watching some of them, and thinking “those chicks are a real mess” as their tiny feathers started sprouting on their shoulders, turning back back like the petals of a daisy rather than laying flat against their bodies.  And then the bombshell hit me:  THOSE CHICKS ARE FRIZZLES!!

Genetics:  some surprisingly weighty tomes have been written on the subject of frizzle breeding, but put very simply, for a hen to be a frizzle, one parent has to be a frizzle and one smooth.  To my certain knowledge my bantams have no frizzles in their backgrounds, ever.  So step forward, and out of your dustbath, Wenceslas!  He is the Daddy of at least 4 of the chicks.  And what Pavlova will say when he works out why his baby girls have Big Hair, remains to be seen.  There will be trouble.  I’ll keep you posted.

 

 

A hatching observed

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I think of our incubator as a ‘miracle tube’ and right now, as I write, it is performing another little miracle.  You may remember that when we came back from Morocco I filled it with 12 bantam eggs, probably because it was raining and I needed something optimistic to do.  Now their time has come and I’m finding it hard to tear myself away.  Honestly, it’s far better than watching TV.

The incubator is a yellow plastic tube, big enough for 12 bantam eggs, 8 hen or guinea fowl eggs and about 6 big goose or peacock eggs, and it has hatched all of these in the past (you may remember my mixed emotions when Duffy came into our lives).  When you feel like adding more players to the crowd scene in the hen run, you warm it up to the correct temperature, top up the water reservoirs, add the eggs, turn it three times a day and wait for results.  Two days before D day you stop turning it, so that the chicks aren’t dizzy when they come out.

First sign of imminent hatching is that an egg says PEEP! which is always exciting.  It continues to peep regularly as the chick inside gets down to business.  First a little hole appears in the side of the egg, through which you can see a tiny beak chipping away busily.  Then if the chick is strong, it saws around its shell as efficiently and neatly as if it had a tiny chain-saw tucked away inside, and flops out.  At first it is like a soggy cottonwool ball, which the astonished expression of most new-borns.  A few hours later, Sog Ball will have dried out into Perfect Easter Chick, pottering around on its tiny toes, and will be ready to make the move into the little run I keep for new chicks which has an infra-red lamp and special food and water bowls.

Of the 12 eggs I put in 19 days ago, 10 are fertile (nice one Pavlova), and it looks as if 6 will hatch out, which is fine by me. To date we have two Perfect Easter Chicks ambling about under their infra-red light, two Sog Balls collapsed limply against the other eggs, and two eggs saying PEEP!  I’ll keep you posted.

By the way, Lupin, Foxy and their four lambs are out in the meadow and lovin’ it.  Duffy has grown more blue feathers and attacked the oil delivery man (his oil tank, his rules), and the baby robins are now a nest full of enormous golden beaks.  Have a great Bank Holiday Weekend, I’ve taken a photo of Foxy and her little lambs which I’ll ask Mikey to put on the blog.  They are very sweet and incredibly friendly.

Shameless publicity

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I’ve just seen the first proofs of The Book and (I blush to say it) I LOVE ‘EM!!!  It looks just like I hoped it would, and I’m so excited about it.  Celia’s pictures come out just great, too.

It’s been a bit of a busy day (I had to check the proofs too, bliss) but I must quickly get you up to speed with my rapidly expanding flock.  I’ve only got two in-lamb ewes, but they punch above their weight because they are pampered prima donnas and huge characters.

Foxy is black, laid-back and adores anything with wheels.  Quad bikes, wheelbarrows, tractors:  all grist to her mill.  She trots after them and if nobody stops her tries to climb inside.  She doesn’t do flocking, but prefers her own company.

Ewe Two is Lupin, who is a grey and black battleaxe and afraid of nothing.  I have a fond memory of watching her handle a dog that had winkled into the field and thought it might try a quick spot of sheep herding.  It galumphed up to Lupin, expecting her to stampede away in typical sheep panic, instead of which she stood her ground, measured it up and then send it flying with a sideswipe of her knobbly head.  Dog got up, wondering what on earth had gone wrong with the whole predator-prey thing, and then Lupin advanced and finally had it running for dear life back out of the field with her thundering along behind.  She’s like that – feisty.

Both of them are expecting a happy event very soon, and while we were in Morocco they have increased in girth enormously and also have promising udders.  So what with one thing and another, I prepared maternity units this morning, closely supervised by both girls who know a soft touch when they see one (they like apples, and I had a large supply with me).  So we’re ready to go, and I have my torch/thermos/lambing ropes/iodine/camera/chocolate (for me) crash kit ready to go on the side in the kitchen.  I’ll tell you when anything happens.

And in a spirit of optimism and enthusiasm but for no particular reason, I’ve just filled the incubator with random bantam eggs and fired it up.  New life due in about 19 days (again, I’ll keep you filled in on that one).  Have a great weekend – if you live in the UK there’s sun forecast – huzzah!