Husband Material

Our latest newcomers, a couple of 4 month old Guinea Fowl

Somewhere in the filing system we have a DVD of an excellent Irish wildlife series, "The Secret Life of the Shannon". Filmed and presented by wildlife camera-man Colin Stafford-Johnson this has some lovely footage of natural history (mainly birds) along the full length of the River Shannon but also includes a variety of pieces to camera, some in the dark in his tent where he comments on what he is seeing and hearing. In one of these, he is hearing the distinctive "crake-crake" call of the corncrake repeated over and over through the night.

A possible husband for 'Min'?

These birds are so rare now in Ireland that one bird calling for a mate is very unlikely to be within sound range of any other birds so that they show up, call through the night, fail to mate and then give up. Colin Stafford Johnson sounds almost heart broken as he says that the (male) bird calls and calls. "He doesn't know there are no females around". We have had our own little version of this tragedy with our Guinea Fowl. You may recall that we originally bought a mating pair (Henry and Min, named after the Goon Show characters) and they did. indeed mate and lay a clutch of 16 eggs in a hedge opposite but then the cock bird was killed by a vehicle in the lane.

4 month old Guineas are an almost perfect size match to
5 week old turkeys. These 4 are 2 and 2. 

Min gave up on the nest (though we rescued the eggs and hatched 13 in the incubator) and came back to join the chicken flock, where she looked like she'd made good friends with our Marans hen, 'Squark', she of the mink attack survival. But she was not happy and obviously missed her man so she has ever since set up our answer to the lonely corn-crake call, the much used and repetitive "buck wheat, buck wheat" shout of a Guinea Hen. She finds herself a nice echo-ey spot; the corner of a wall or the concrete alongside a building and buck-wheats away for literally hours. In the end it tells on your mind and you feel guilty at leaving her "all alone". We tried to sell her and we tried to give her away but it seems nobody wants a love-lorn Guinea hen.

This week we decided to try to find her a new mate. The one thing people learn first about Guinea Fowl is that they are VERY DIFFICULT to sex and pretty much the only way to tell them apart is to wait for the female to start the 'buck-wheat, buck-wheat' thing. The male has no distinctive call, he just "doesn't do" buck-wheat. Step forward our new friends Sue and Rob, who have a huge incubator and a gazillion baby birds of all types. They could spare us an unsexed 4 month old Guinea and, in fact, why don't we take two to improve our chances of one being a cock bird. We could "always eat" the other bird if it was not required.

"I'm getting quite good at this!" says Liz as she turns out another
beautifully plucked pair of Hubbard carcasses

Off we went with car and kitten-basket to collect these two and the problem of where to house them was solved too - by happy coincidence, 4 month old Guineas are almost a perfect size match to 5 week old turkeys. We were able to drop the new Guineas into the turkey run with turkeys #1 and #2 and they quickly got used to each other with no fighting for supremacy or arguing over food rations. They are there in the yard where they can see all the rest of the birds (including prospective wife, 'Min') come and go and say 'Hello' and can get used to our skyline and farm noises, as well as Liz and I. They will get that for a few days before we think about letting them out free range. Min came and had a nose but if she could tell that either were male and a prospective mate, then she "never said a mumbling word" to us. Que Sera.

Always mount your bonnet-mascot so as to avoid interfering
 with the driver's view of the road. Barbara tries out the new car
as a perch.

A couple of days prior to collecting these Guineas, we had actually let the turkeys out of the run and they were doing OK but it quickly became apparent that new cat Soldier saw them as fair game for a hunt/kill and we had to fend off a number of his stalking pounces. Belly to ground he was creeping forward like an African big-cat and when fended off he'd just sneak round to another angle and try again. This may be a problem. For that day, we were happy that it started raining and we had to round up turkeys and secure them back in the (cat proof) run.

Lamb shanks on the menu - not a great deal left for the dogs but
they do enjoy a good lamb bone. 

Meanwhile, we have been chugging through our Hubbard 'harvest' and today 'processed' our biggest cock-bird, who turned out to be 3.1 kg in oven-ready format. 3 more birds to do to finish the job for this year. Liz has been quite enjoying it and is very pleased with her improving skill. She turns out lovely clean neat carcasses. Also in 'meat' we are working our way through the last cuts and bits of the 2014 lambs, the 'Ramones'. We love a good lamb-shank, the meat cooked really slowly till it is falling off the bones and the flavours all meld in with the onions, sweet potatoes, garlic and other veg. Good eating.

Aches and Pains.

No, not chain-saw injury, but rat damage!

I ache like an aching thing. I must be getting too old for all this physical stuff. (OK, not serious really). I had a good old session mucking out JF Bob's cattle barn again yesterday and then today Liz and I were over at Vendor Anna (and Paul)'s place beyond Carrick on Shannon attacking the overgrown hedge we started on back in November before Christmas, the snow and our hosts' 3 week escape to find some Canary Island sunshine all intervened.

Breakfast of Champions - boiled goose egg and toast
'soldiers'. 7 and a half minutes, boiled to perfection.

The muck-shoveling is quite physical but not a problem. It's the hedge that takes it out of me, as it's full of thick, chain-saw sized trunks which need taking off at "roughly head height", so I spend a good part of the day hefting the saw up and holding it there while I make the cut, or clambering around trying to tie ropes on even higher so that Liz can put some tension on the stem and stop it falling into the telegraph wires and onto the lane. I hope I don't sound like I am complaining - we LOVE all this stuff; one of the things that attracted us to this small-holder life in the first place was the chance to do some serious gardening and spade work.

A first egg from the young Buffs (right)? We now have no
idea what the egg on 13th Jan was, maybe a sputter from the
Guinea Fowl?

And we get fed. of course. Any job which involves getting fed is better than any job that doesn't and Anna knows the way to our hearts with her delicious lasagna and apple crumble. No, not on the same plate! So a good time was had by all and the hosts now have a much improved panorama down across the River Shannon from their front door. There were just two uprights that the 'Health and Safety' Manager (Liz) would not let us touch and these had grown up to form a 'Y' wrapped around all three cables running down the lane. These though, Paul thinks the phone people should be willing to come and sort using a man-up cherry picker, especially as we've done all the hard work for them.

The fire hood gets a second polish.

So, 9 o'clock this morning saw us loading all the gear into the car, but we needed to head for the chainsaw main dealer in Boyle (East Brothers) first as I needed chain and bar oil for the machine, a new 4 mm round-file (for sharpening), a new chain (the existing one was well past its sell-by) and, annoyingly, a new pair of posh, kevlar, safety gloves. My 'old' pair (only 3 years old) had survived all the abuse I've dished out in my inexperience in 3 years of using the most dangerous piece of kit on the 'farm'. They were well used looking and soiled but had no nicks or cuts, tears or even undone stitching. Then at some point between me taking them off last week and stashing them, as usual, in the shelf in the shed in my chainsaw hard-hat, a rat has eaten great holes in the old leather of the palms. Thanks, rat! I hope you were one of the ones Blue has recently 'terminated'. So we needed to buy a new pair; simple enough except that my hands are quite big (XL) and all the XL shelves were empty except, by coincidence, for 'Stihl' gloves.

New brush-cutter / strimmer

While we were in that Alladin's cave of man-toys, we also accidentally bought a brush cutter / strimmer. This is a piece of kit which you need for the margins of your territory, where my little lawn mower dare not go and where you cannot allow sheep or rabbits to keep the herbage down. We've borrowed one in the past, to knock back the rushes in the East Field, but we hadn't bought one for ourselves. Every year Liz glowers at the nettles which grow in our 'woods' and I glower at the brambles along the side of my veg patch, at the rushes which grow in the field and the docks and plantains which erupt from the orchard turf, unchallenged by the geese. The geese would not top off a plantain even if they were down to the clay everywhere else. So we bit the bullet and asked the man if he might have a machine tough enough to tackle briars, docks, plantain and rushes but light enough to be managable by Liz (she insisted on being the main destructive force in this department so did not want a hulking great 'professional' machine that only I could lift). We therefore have, sitting in the living room on the sofa waiting for its first outing, a Stihl FS55, a 2-stroke with the 'handlebars' fitting and a shoulder harness. I think I can probably predict what we are up to tomorrow, more physical stuff!