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.

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!