The 'Ramones' Final Gig

George Junior with his swollen neck. 

The "poorly goose" of my last post (George Junior) did not make it, but passed away quietly in standard goose sleeping position (beak under wing) in a box of hay and tucked under a blanket. We found him on the 2nd morning, so just 48 hours from first spotting that he might have a problem. Frustratingly, we have no idea what went wrong or what killed him. He had that swollen neck or crop but that seemed to be mainly full of air - when I gently massaged it at the bottom end the bulge moved up into his neck like playing with a part-inflated balloon.

Oven ready version - 2.2 kg

Finding him dead yesterday morning I hung him up head-down in the shed to relax into an easier 'shape' to pluck him and over the next couple of hours quite a lot of clear liquid (water?) drained down out of his mouth, so that by the time I plucked him the swelling was gone. The crop and gut cut open told us nothing - just some part digested food as you'd expect, small wads of 'chewed' grass, some grain. No obvious blocked places or torsion, but all of that could have relaxed away due to the head-down hanging. Ah well, some you win..... We decided to eat only the carcass (2.2 kg) and to bin the 'offal' we'd normally keep (gizzard, liver and heart). He was only a young lad so he is not really filled out enough to look like a proper oven-ready goose and does not have the usual thick layers of sub-cutaneous fat. The other 5 geese seem fine to us, behaving and eating normally. We remain completely in the dark as to what 'took' this fellow. Unusually, my on-line support (the poultry discussion groups) were also disappointingly silent on the subject.

What no sheep?

The open gate pictured, and the empty field tell the tale of this year's store lamb quartet having gone on their final journey, off with a one-way ticket for their appointment with Ignatius G (Victualler) in Castlerea Main Street. I did all the 'shock horror' pictures last year and the year before of hanging carcasses and of Liz dealing with the 'crop', so I will spare you that this year. These 4 were named 'The Ramones' after the punk-band by a friend (a pun on the fact that they were all, allegedly, going to be male (Ram lambs)) though in fact one was a ewe. The real Ramones (the band) had a song called "I don't want to be buried in the Pet Cemetery". Don't worry, you guys, that is no part of the plan.

The trailer is left open while the
chooks pick it clean of spilled food

They were easily the simplest and most trouble free batch we have had. Nobody escaped, nobody got their head stuck in the fence, they were all dead easy to bucket-train and then, in the 'practise runs' and today for real, they obediently followed me from field to cattle race and thence into the trailer. We had them loaded, literally, from field to ramp-shut in under 3 minutes. Yes, of course it feels like a betrayal as reward for their good behaviour but it does confirm that they are not scared or distressed at all by the loading and transportation. Trusting to the end, poor lambs, which in our case is when we encourage them out of the trailer and into one of the clean, straw-strewn holding pens at Ignatius's lairage while we chat to the happy butcher-man about his recent holiday in Canada and the birth of his newest Grand-daughter, Blaithín* (also in Canada).

Christmas Cake ingredients get an overnight soak
in apple juice

These lambs were two Texel x Suffolk Down and two Texel x 'mule' (the mule being a cross between a mountainy sheep and a lowland sheep). They may also well be our farewell to doing business with sheep-man Kenny, as we are moving now into in-lamb ewes and keeping sheep year round, rather than just buying Kenny's store lambs in Summer to 'finish' them in November or December. We've done it the 'Kenny' way for three years and 12 lambs and he deserves our thanks. It has been a good grounding in what was to be a new species for us. We feel ready now to get involved in all that shearing, foot trimming and dosing for liver fluke that 'proper' shepherds have to do.

Follow the yellow brick road to the spot marked 'X'

All around this sheep-work we have continued the sneaky 'drift' of the young Buff Orps' new house, down the cattle race and into the yard. We move the house a couple of feet each day and the chickens seem to be untroubled by the fact that their house each evening is in a slightly different place. We are both reminded of my mother's (Pud Lady's) wartime anecdote. Living at the start of the Blitz in Bromley-by-Bow on the River Thames, she and her 'big sister' were evacuated as children several times down to Somerset. Every time the Blitz eased and they could come 'home' they had actually moved house because their previous house had been bombed out in the intervening period. By the time we boys came along, Pud Lady had a framed map of the evacuation village on the Living Room wall as a momento, but amusingly the framing job had been done by 'cropping' a bigger map to remove the huge first S and last ET of the county name, so I grew up thinking Mum had been evacuated to a place called 'OMERS', The framed map is still there in the Hastings house.

Blue looks balefully at the metal duck

Finally, as cats do, Blue has adopted a new favourite sleeping place, on top of our Living Room dresser. This, of course, involves evicting any inconvenient "junk" he finds there (trophies, plaster kingfishers, a posh 'Moet' insulated sleeve for your champagne and egg boxes - this after riffling through the stack of open 'nested' boxes like a professional card-sharp). In this picture he has cleared himself a good space but doesn't look too happy about the metal duck ornament eye-ing him up from stage right.

*Another good Irish name for the British readers, Blaithín is pronounced 'Bloh-heen', the 'Bloh' having a short vowel like in the word 'Blo(ck)'. It translates as 'Little Flower'.... ahhhh!

Settling in

The pigs are settling in well and seem to be quite happy. They were out of their house and exploring the patch the morning after arrival, the grassy bit, the woods and the storm-water 'ditch'. They are always together and they amble around making quiet little grunt noises, a cross between an adult pig's bass-y grunt, and the wheeze of an asthmatic man. It is loud enough that they cannot actually hide from you once they are exploring - you can always hear the faint chuntering noise coming from whatever tall vegetation they might be in, or from the ditch.

Muddy noses - we've been a-rootling!

With the ditch being quite deep (4 feet?) and steep sided, I'd been worried that they might tumble down into it and not be able to get back out, so I had dug out a more gentle ramp - I needn't have worried. These ladies are long leggedy beasts, very agile at the jumping and running. They used my ramp to drop down into the ditch but then made their way towards house and happily sprang out up the near-vertical bank back into the Secret Garden.

Yellow Aquilegia

So far they have grazed a fair amount of the herbs in their patch, quite enjoying the foliage of the Cow Parsley (Queen Anne's Lace) and my 'pig nuts' (commercial pig food) were immediately recognised as food and wolfed down. They have also made some bits of tomato vanish but have so far turned their noses up at anything else we have tried including foods I have read they 'should like' - banana, pears and carrots. We'll just keep trying things till we hit on a good treat, I guess.

Logging for Bob again - sycamore this time

Readers may not know that feeding pigs is all very controlled and restricted now (if you are law-abiding!) since 'Foot and Mouth' in 2001 and Swine Vesicular Disease; you should not feed anything that has been in a human kitchen. No more left overs and 'swill', certainly nothing that contains meat or animal fat, so even bakery waste which can include pizzas, lardy cakes and pork pies. You can buy or grow fruit and veg especially for the pigs and you can, if you want to, run a special boiler away from the house kitchen, to create hot mashes or swill from, for example, potatoes and peelings. We are pretty much using the commercial ration supplemented with special offer or end-of-life-for-sale-cheap fruit and veg (when we can find something these ladies will eat!)

Choc a block full again. Bob's sycamore is the split wedgy
stuff at the top. It splits nicely while still green.

I am trying to befriend them and get them to trust and even 'love' me. They are nervous little girls and wary of coming close. I go in there and sit down quietly talking to them and curiosity brings them near. They have come to within 12 inches today but their courage seems to fail them and they dart away again. I have made a point of not bothering them when they are inside their ark. That is their 'safe' place. I might sit a few yards away and talk to them but I will not invade their space. Hopefully they will soon get confident enough to come right up to me and accept a scratch on the ear, a tickle of the 'tummy' or a food treat. My 'pig bible' (Liz Shankland's "Haynes Pig Manual") describes the pigs being delighted to see and hear you and running up squealing an excited welcome. I wonder if I can get to that stage? I have to admit I find them utterly, utterly charming so that some cynical friends on Facebook are starting to suspect that when we get to slaughter time I might have a problem.

These toadstools popped up in the horse muck in one of our
planters, looking when they first emerge curiously like hen
eggs laid blunt end down.

We also have an ongoing light hearted 'argument' going with Anne and with my pig training course guy. They are convinced that only electric fence will contain pigs, and seeing the way Anne's pigs have quickly ploughed deep holes in their peaty soil, I can see why. I am baulking ( a bit nervously, I must admit!) at buying and using an electric fencer, and going with Liz Shankland's suggestion that good high-tensile sheep fencing with a strand of barbed at ground level should work. It is said that boredom and hunger make them try to escape, so we are hoping that our patch is sufficiently big and interesting. Also, the worry can be about burrowing in soft ground and potentially lifting your posts out by pushing their noses under the fence and lifting. Our ground is, as we know from the bitter experience of digging, not soft - it is clay with head-sized boulders in it and, in the pig area, a fair amount of big-tree roots (60 foot spruces!). So far the little piggies have not done any digging, just a bit of nose-ploughing in the litter layer, a couple of inches down. We'll see. I have been offered loans of fencers should a problem develop and we spot some escape attempts, and I can always buy one in a hurry locally.

Guinea Fowl keet at 6 days

Meanwhile, we have had a mini tragedy which it gives me no pleasure to tell you about. I was on my first-thing-in-the-morning dog 'patrol' prior to releasing the poultry from their houses and did not realise that our littlest gosling had sneaked out of the goose house (possibly through a small gap under the door). I accidentally walked the three dogs onto him where he was hiding out of sight round a corner. They were on leads but were on him in a split second and that was his lot. We are back to the one gosling, George Junior. I am kicking myself - I had heard some noise from the adult geese and should have gone to check minus dogs - then I would have found him and been able to return him to Mum and Dad. Ah well, that's terriers, I guess. Entirely my fault.

Keets already starting to look Guinea Fowl shaped.

The 11 keets are thriving and putting away their diet of chick crumb with lots of "salad" - they love their greens these guys and actually graze a lot of grass as adults. Their chick crumb comes with finely chopped grass (3 mm lengths or so) and finely shredded lettuce which it is great fun to see them dive onto and then try to run away with their prize so that the other keets cannot have it. I think I have already posted that keet No.12 who hatched with the un-absorbed yolk sac did not make it, and the 4 eggs that were left proved to have partly developed but dead embryos. So good fertility (16 out of 16) and, for eggs rescued from a wet hedge into a borrowed, not-particularly-sophisticated incubator, 11 is a brilliant result, One of the babies is giving us slight concern as his toes do not straighten - he walks with his toes curled round, on the side of his foot, but he gets about OK and certainly wins plenty of the lettuce fights. We will look after him a bit and hope that he does well. He is certainly OK running forwards and that, in our experience, seems to be what Guineas spend 99% of their time doing.

Testing Times (and a Minor Miracle)

Little George looks a bit lost with Big-G and Black Feather

We have been witness (and enablers, we guess) to a minor miracle. The tiny gosling rejected by the parent group on day 2 and rescued by us for, we thought, hand rearing, is now back with his parents. In our (limited) experience these rejections are permanent and if you try to reintroduce the rejects they can be attacked and killed. Geese are big, powerful birds, and the damage can be very fast and serious. Even as we let the reunion happen we were anxious that we might have to dive in fast and re-rescue George (Junior).

It was a charming and almost 'magical' day, the day after all our fun and games with exploding eggs described in the last post. Like a Mum who knows she is pregnant but daren't tell anyone before the 2nd Scan lest they jinx the thing, I didn't dare report this till now; I wanted to see us survive the first 24 hours and the first night.  Now, though, I can tell the tale. As I opened the goose house door first thing in the morning, I expected just George to march out to the orchard, and the 2 'women' to stay sitting on the eggs. Not this time. Out marched Black Feather on the heels of the Gander and off to the orchard in a determined way, her involvement in sitting on eggs now obviously over as far as she was concerned. She was a free range goose again.

Up the bath ramp at Mum's feet, down again nudged by Dad.

It was also a lovely warm morning, so I wondered whether to try again with the meeting we arranged 2 days ago between Gander George in the orchard, and G-Junior, safe inside a wire crate. That had gone well, with lots of excited beak-to-beak nuzzling and chuntering. It convinced me that Junior was well imprinted on geese, not humans. I wondered how it would go with George AND a female goose (Mum or Aunt, we don't really know). I did not use the crate this time, but put the gosling outside the orchard fence. Baby straight away started homing in on big guys and they on him. I held my breath. There was a good bit of the nuzzling and some open beak 'mouthing' of baby by George. Suddenly the gosling did one of his little clock-work-toy scampers in through the fence and was as suddenly 'in there' between the parents and was as quickly accepted by both.

These buttercups are a bit tall Dad!

The little threesome walked about in the orchard and even ventured up the bath ramp. There was some sitting down with baby allowed to sit close but Liz and I, looking on and feeling the rather keen wind which had sprung up waited for that moment when baby, who had been nudging around the sitting shape of Mum, seemingly nibbling the ends of wing feathers, was properly invited in under the Maternal wing, into the warm. The rest is history, really. They stayed nicely together all day so that we decided that they were better off like that than if we tried to end the experiment and 'rescue' the gosling again. It would have been more like 'steal' the gosling and we couldn't imagine the grown up geese being too happy.

Back on the nest between the 2 ladies

So we left them be, checking them hourly till 'bed time' when I shepherded them home and Black Feather jumped back onto the nest hotly pursued by the gosling, though he had to make his peace first with his other Mum-Aunt, 'Smudge'. Since then they have been doing happy families. This morning it was chilly and windy and no-one came out to the orchard. They all stayed indoors sharing their time between sitting on eggs, standing guard and walking around. I supplied food and water for all ages indoors (little 2 inch high Tupperware for baby, builders bucket for grown ups!). There is still a possible confusion as to how this goes in terms of either female being willing to leave the eggs to go exploring with Junior, but we are a lot happier that he is being minded by the geese rather than us.

So that was the parenting skills tested on the day when Ireland went to the polls so that the Euro and Local candidates (plus a couple of by-elections) could test their democratic mandates, and today we had the NCT ( =MOT ) test on the Fiat and our Bee Keeper written test. The Fiat failed but only on the alignment of the off side headlight (dip beam aims too high), so I was a bit annoyed but also very happy and relieved that that was all. The Bee Keeper exam went well for both of us, with almost all the questions being ones we had seen before and practised on. We are both hoping for good scores, though we may only hear the results in pass/fail format. We have now heard that the practical 'exam' session is to be on Monday evening. It will be good to have that all over so quickly.