An Extra Hour in Bed?

1,28 kg of 'Golden Hornet' crab apples. Our best tree this year.

We come to that weekend when we change all the clocks back and out comes that cliché that "we get an extra hour in bed". Indeed we held to that view when we had 'normal' jobs with fixed hours. This is always followed by a spate of Mums protesting, "Extra Hour? Not if you've a three year old child waking up" and now that we are out here doing the small holdering mallarkey, we have moved over to that view. We have no need of curtains in the windows here so the daylight comes streaming in 24 hours after it did yesterday and the westies don't know that it's now "only 7 o'clock" instead of 8 a.m. GMT.

The lovely golden pink of crab apple jelly.

They start bouncing around, wide awake so that you know they'll need a 'comfort stop' soon. The roosters are cock-a-doodling like billy-oh and the sheep start calling for their breakfasts. We are up and at 'em. In my case I was off 'buildering' in Sligo and Liz knew she had a load of crab apples to turn into crab apple jelly and we both knew that we'd have a normal length day with that odd jet-lag evening where all your senses are telling you that it is bed time but the clock says "No, not yet".

Too meaty for dogs? This chunk of beef spine/rib. 

If you are not familiar with UK or Irish TV you may not know of a recent successful advert for which the punchline has now gone into common usage in the same way as "Go to work on an egg" or "For Mash get Smash" did back in the day. That is the ad for the optician and spectacles shop, 'Specsavers' and the quip comes out when ever anyone has done something suggesting they are blind or poorly sighted, "He should have gone to Specsavers". The ad used amusing film of the sheepdog barely escaping the shearing shed where he'd been (badly) shorn along with the sheep.

Beef braised slowly in beer, to an adapted Nigel
Slater recipe. 

Where am I going with this? Nearby there is a butcher specialising in beef but who cuts the joints and ribs to suit the Irish customer. They love to see meat cut well clear of any connective tissue, cartilege, sinew etc and "well boned out" with the result that this butcher's scraps and "bones for the dogs" have so much meat wrapped around them that customers in the know joke delightedly with each other that the guy must have poor eyesight to have "missed" it and (inevitably) should've gone to Specsavers! To us he is now referred to as the 'Specsavers Butcher'.

I remember that my Mum (Pud Lady) had similar luck - she frequented a game shop near Hastings where the 'bones for the dog' were frequently casseroled into a very meaty venison casserole for us humans before the bones went anywhere near the dog. We recently came by a superbly meaty bit of spine/rib (Thank you generous benefactor - you know who you are!) which I converted into a superb braised stew taking a Nigel Slater recipe and swapping out his suggested Rioja (that must almost be a criminal act... Rioja indeed!) for beer and adding more veg. I reckoned that if I slow-cooked it long enough we'd be able to slap one of the big 2-vertebra chunks onto the plate and then forage the meat off that, with the veg and gravy doing a good job of mushing into the mashed potato (not too buttery, advises Nigel... keep it fluffy/floury to better take up the gravy). That was a very successful meal and the left overs, cooked up some more, may become a future pie filling.

Paired off? Belvedere now seems very attached to the widow
bird 'Min', here with inseperable buddy 'Squawk' the Marans

Way back when, our first Guinea Fowl were called Henry and Min after the daft Goon Show aul' folks, because they walked around stooped over like the old folks on the 'Old People Crossing' roadsign. Then, readers may recall, Henry met with an accident out on the road and Min has been driving us mad for 12 months calling her lonely mate-seeking 'Buckwheat Buckwheat' call. We acquired two young birds hoping that at least one would grow up a cock-bird and pair up with her.

Dylan tore his eartag out on a fence but we have found it
so we should be OK handing it in to the butcher with him
when the time comes. 

These 'guys' were named Apollo and Belvedere (it's a long story involving that 'Min' might actually be the Greek Goddess 'Minerva', so she'd need an Apollo for her mate and that there is a famous Renaissance statue called the Apollo Belvedere. We had two possible boys, so we needed 2 names. With me so far?). Well, it now seems that one young bird (Belvedere) has paired off with Min. He abandons his former gang (young turkeys and Guineas) for big chunks of most days and you can find him trotting along or mooching about closely paired off with Min and (inevitably) her inseperable buddy, the Marans hen 'Squawk'. Poor Squawk will be feeling like one of those less pretty  'best friends' who gets left behind when they grow up and her prettier friend starts to discover boys before she does.

The other young Guinea we think is almost certainly a hen but may be a bit confused as to her species. You see her doing a very flirty dance with the young male turkeys, where she runs in circles with her wings splayed, then squats down on the ground in front of the chosen boy. The chosen male turkey gets all excited and also start running in circles calling, but never quite works out (mercifully!) what he is meant to be doing, so the Guinea Hen runs round some more and squats again in front of him. Maybe he looks, to her, like a big Guinea cock-bird. Should've gone to Specsavers?

American Mink

Poor Squawk, badly bitten, bruised and swollen on the right
side of her face, her right eye swollen shut tight. 

A bit more excitement than anybody needs in the middle of the night came our way in the wee small hours of this morning, when a mink got into our chicken house and almost did for our elderly Cuckoo Marans hen "Squawk". Fortunately for us and Squawk, it was a warm night so we slept with the back window of the bedroom slightly open and the dogs, sleeping on our bed, never quite turn off the alertness and the keen hearing for unusual noises. And don't let you slumber on if they KNOW there is something out there.

The patient is in the 'hospital wing' seeming to be unaffected
other than the right side of her face. 

It was 01:30 or there abouts when the shout went up. We'd been woken by an unusual bird-shout from the hen house but, as you do, we were still trying to convince ourselves that we hadn't really heard it, or it was just the geese making love and it was warm under the duvet and raining outside. But the dogs were having none of this and bounced across us to get to the window sill where we could quickly tell this wasn't the normal cacophony of mad barking but an intense curiosity and investigation. They were silent except for the noise of Towser trying to hoover up all the air from the yard into his nose pressed against the window gap, we guess to get the scent of something new.

Escape route. I have never seen an animal
do an 8 foot vertical up concrete before. 

In seconds we were awake and sure I needed to go investigate so dressing gown and wellies on, head torch and out turning on yard lights and so on in case it might be a human intruder. I arrived to find a mink with the Marans hen's face in its mouth held down on the ground, half under the row of nest boxes. I tried to get a foot in there to stomp on the mink, but it let go the bird (who ran off) and shot up behind the nest boxes. Liz arrived at that stage and I called out that we had the mink and could she bring a dog. Deefer was quickly on the scene and when I lifted out the boxes, she chased the mink down under the hutches you can see in the pic. He was safe for the moment.

Escape holes under the tin roof. 

We rescued the poor hen and put her up in the hutches, then called in the other two dogs. They were delighted to suddenly have something they were allowed to try to catch and kill. I also grabbed a screw driver to whizz off the white panels blocking the hole where the mink was now hiding, to let Deefer get in there. We know the chase went down to the left hand end and back, because the back end of the mink suddenly appeared at a gap and Towser and Poppea almost snatched it but the mink had now had enough. He shot back along the 'tunnel' past Deefer and then took off vertically up the concrete block wall and Liz caught sight of his vanishing bum disappearing at roof level through a hole under the corrugated sheeting.

Mink Trap.

He was gone. We were just left to round up dogs and take them for a patrol round the buildings inside and out, calm down the chickens, rue the many gaps and holes in these old buildings many of which are easy pop-holes for an American Mink, no bigger than a stretched out rat. I will attack those tomorrow. Also, as we have a mink trap since about 3 weeks ago and, in the bin, a ripening bag of prawn heads - perfect mink-bait, apparently. We set the trap and decided it had all gone quiet and the scent cooling, headed back indoors for a middle of the night coffee. We knew that if our mink came back, then the dogs would surely alert us to him again.

Come and get these lovely prawn bits, Mr Mink. What could
POSSIBLY go wrong?

That's it, this time - that's all she wrote so far. The chicken survived the night and is now in the hospital wing trying to get some rest despite the constant cheeping of baby Hubbards. She seems fine apart from the right side of her face which is badly swollen. These are the invasive non-native minks, the 'American' Mink (Mustela vison) which are escapes or releases from fur-farms. We do not seem to do the European Mink (Lutreola lutreola) in these parts (in Ireland at all). They are not "evil bastards", they are just very efficient predators, plonked down in a 'foreign' environment, just trying to make a living like the rest of us. It just seems unreasonably wicked that they do not kill our chickens quickly and cleanly, like the bone-crunching snap of a fox's jaws, but instead they grab the head-end somewhere and chew through enough skin and flesh to get blood flowing, which they can then lap up. Their mouth and teeth are similar to those of a cat, with the carnivore 'fangs' (canines) and the secateur-like premolar and molar cutting teeth (carnassials) so the internal injuries from the first grab alone must be horrendous. The bird must die slowly and in great pain and all the other birds just have to watch and wait their turn. Our friend Charlotte has recently had all her ducks killed, maimed or traumatised like this to the degree where the most merciful thing was to despatch the traumatised and badly chewed survivors. If this lad returns and gets himself caught in our trap then I'll have no more problem finishing him off than I did with the foxes. We hope this is a roving young animal who is now so scared of 'us' that he won't try it again. Stay away Mr Mink.