Home! (...but Deefer's in the Dog House)

Home in time for the pea harvest

Back home then to a rapturous welcome from the three dogs. I just fall to my knees and let them all have at me at once, sniffing and nuzzling, rather than stand, bent over while all three try to jump up for a fuss at once. They were delighted to have me back but Elizabeth had tipped me off that #1 daughter (Deefer) was in SERIOUS TROUBLE having killed our last turkey poult. Silly girl. The Woman of the House was hopping mad (she did it in front of Elizabeth despite a warning shout) and is now still "doing time" for it. If Deefer was in the Military, she'd be doing "jankers", scrubbing the toilet floor with a toothbrush or something. I know better than to undermine that by trying to do "Good Cop", so she stayed on punishment detail till late that night.

Opening up this year's "Parma" ham.

I don't know what it is about turkeys specifically - Deefer does not have a problem any more with tiny hen-chicks, ducks or goslings. Maybe it is the high pitched whistle-cheep triggering some kind of 'vermin' response rather than a 'valuable baby bird' one. She immediately goes all tense and twitchy with prey-focus, like a good sheep dog. There is no talking to her. A quick snap and bye bye poult. She has now killed all three leaving the (chicken) hen that we put them under to brood and who had since been rearing them, totally distraught. We will never trust her with turkey poults again, that's for sure.

However, I promised you a livestock round-up in this post, and quite a story it is. At Elizabeth's visits to the hospital, I must have been focusing a bit too much on the fox-attack stories. I was worried that I'd have to get home a bit quick while we still had some hens. No need to worry. We have plenty of hens and plenty of young 'followers' coming on behind. I think it was only the one we lost while I was away. When Elizabeth made the feed rounds that evening, which she does by broadcasting the grain in the yard, surrounded by chickens of all ages, turkeys, ducks, Guinea fowl, and geese and goslings, she seems to be knee-deep in birds. It is a pleasure to watch! I will try to find the photo.

In no particular order then.......

The pigs have come on well. The big female (left) is ready.

Bees: The main colony is still going strong and the swarm which I spotted had invaded the lure box is still active. Regular readers will probably know that Summer bees in Ireland, only live about 6 weeks each, dying worn out by all that hard foraging. If you get a swarm and it lasts beyond 6 weeks, then you have hit the Jackpot and snatched a viable, queen-right one. She will have been laying eggs from days of arrival (as soon as the wax-loaded workers drew her out some comb) and these new bees will be able to take over after the 6 weeks to keep the colony going. I will have to check my dates, to see if our 6 weeks are up.

Elizabeth doing 'shepherd'. She has no fear. She knows the
sheep will follow so she strides off with her bucket and, of course,
all the flock trot along behind.

Pigs: The pigs have come on leaps and bounds under the new management and the female, who was always a bit bigger than the boys, is now ready to go on that final journey. The boys we will hold back another month or so, if mainly due to lack of freezer space. We have booked her in on the Tuesday, so we now need to do all that trailer-familiarisation training thing that we do, over the weekend. It will be fun. We only want her in the trailer, but all three are likely to get enthusiastic at once. Watch this space. The freezers are completely devoid of pork now except for a small tray of (3?) trotters, so it will be nice to get some meat back in there.

The big ram lamb is on the left here. 

Sheep: Here too, two of the lambs are now good and ready and one of these, the ram lamb is also starting to mature and to 'jump' anything that moves. We dare not risk him getting the ladies pregnant, so he and one other lamb are also booked in, this time on Monday. We have decided, in the light of the uncertain health of the staff(?) to ease things a bit this winter and to try something new. The remaining 2 lambs (both ewes) will stay with us round till next Summer and then be killed as "hogget" rather than lamb. Hogget, the half-way stage from lamb to mutton, is supposed to be very tasty. We will not bring a ram in this winter, so we will not be 'doing' lambs next Spring. The girls can have a year's rest.

Young poults roosting where ever you look.

Birds: Plenty birds about, as I said, though not many eggs forthcoming. Too many birds are sitting eggs, or rearing babies, or they are babies themselves. There are 2 currently AWOL, the female Guinea fowl, and a white Sussex hen, 'Connie', we hope well hidden up from the fox, brooding eggs. We have no idea where. We see Connie occasionally, so we know she is still alive. We are knee deep in young poults, most of whom I lost track of which 'Mum' they came with while I was away.

Not ducklings any more. Silver Appleyards

I am very taken with the 'new' ducks. These, you may recall, were just a rag-bag purchase in a hurry when we needed ducks to replace the females killed by the fox. Mike the Cows had a family of Mum and 5 half grown ducklings of the "Silver Appleyard" variety. These youngsters have done really well and almost caught up with Mum in size, making it quite tricky to tell which actually is Mum. They have bonded well with our original drake, a Khaki Campbell, and now move round as a tight group of 7.

They have also taken over the pond, which they head for the centre of, as soon as danger or an intruder looms, or a dog gets too close. This good news may well be the reason why (touch wood) we have not lost any to the fox yet. I am delighted and amazed. They spend their time between the pond and the safety of the yard, sprinting between the two in a waddling 'crocodile'. They never stray out to the perimeter where Mr Fox might lurk in the long stuff. Long may it continue.

Emma and Flora start on the jungle formerly known as
"raised flower bed"

Humans: I finally got to meet the two latest Help-X lasses, Emma and Flora. I was worried I might miss them all together if the hospital stay continued into a 3rd week. They are pure delight, full of youthful vigour, happy, relaxed, and keen to work. Elizabeth had been 'minding' them and setting them their tasks, but she handed me that job as soon as I was back.

Trying out the 'chimenea' - could be quite
handy as the evenings start to cool. A lovely
gift from Steak Lady.

I have had them out cutting briars in the East Field, cleaning out the duck house and now, clearing the valuable plants from the weed-bed formerly known as "raised flower bed". This space had become so weedy that it really was simpler to dig out the good plants and start again. The plan is to dig it all clean over, then cover in weed-proof membrane and gravel, planting the (cleaned) good plants back through this, like we did to the front rose bed.

Crocosmia (Lucifer) giving us great colour
at this time of year.

That is surely enough for this one. Anything I missed, I will try to rope in for the next post.

Plant More Peas, You Fool!

Pear blossom

Dog owners will know that every now and again dogs get sick. #1 Daughter here, my 12 year old bitch (Westie) is, fortunately, one of those who will tell you in advance that she is feeling sick and needs to be let out to eat some grass and sort herself. Even at 05:00, that's better than her leaving it till she actually 'produces'. Deefer 'tells' me by whimpering miserably every couple of seconds which wakes me up and I can then hear that her belly is squelching and gurgling dangerously. I cannot sleep through that and it wouldn't be fair to.

Apple Blossom

So, at 05:00 on Monday morning, I am out on the front lawn with all three dogs (you can't leave two indoors - they would bark and wake the Woman of the House). You know what? It was beautiful. It was barely light with dawn just starting in the East. It was warm and windless, dry and calm.

For the first time this year, our young greengage tree has blossom

The Dawn Chorus was going at it hammer and tongs and (I think) four cuckoos were calling from the four points of the compass. A cock pheasant was throwing in the odd 'ker-chang!' and a wood pigeon was cooing energetically. In Sussex, they say that the wood pigeon shouts "Plant more peas, you fool!", or so an ancient, weathered, son-of-the-soil farmer (Les) I used to work for told me back in the 70s, anyway. It sounds about right. At one point a large-ish bat flew through in a straight line... possible Liesler's Bat then but I'm no expert.

The beech leaves are coming out. I love that 'acid green' colour
and , yes, that is an out of focus pig in the background. 

We did our quarter of an hour of allowing Deefer to eat the long grass and try to be sick, then we all trooped back indoors. We did it all again at 06:00 and then gave up and woke up and got up properly at about quarter past 7. Deefer declined her breakfast but you'll be relieved to know, she was OK and sorted by lunchtime.

Polly the ewe enjoys the longer grass round the
willow archway.

Meanwhile we have got ourselves firmly into the routine of letting the sheep out twice a day to get at the longer grass outside the field. So far this has held no fears and caused no escapes. We supervise them out for between half and a whole hour. Either the two of us do it or either of us are happy to do this single handed. I say 'supervise' - what we actually do is stand around leaning on fences, chatting, or take a coffee and sit in our 'Darby and Joan' chairs out by the pond in the warm sunshine. It is a thoroughly enjoyable and pleasant "job".

Ewes and lambs round the pond.

The sheep, including all the now weaned or nearly-weaned lambs do a brilliant job mowing the open spaces but even better, nibble in close all around the edges, trees and fence-bases where you'd not get with a mower. They take grass, ground elder, creeping buttercup, selfheal, cow-parsley (Queen Anne's Lace here) and any other herbs they can get.

Tightly curled tail is the sign of a happy pig.

They fill up that rumen in about 45 minutes, at which point you can see they are losing focus and would, given the chance, go for a lie down. You would have to supervise that, too, which might get a bit boring. Luckily, at that stage they are very biddable and more than willing to follow any human carrying a bucket of grub back to the gated field to take their rest. They have a small helping of their 'crunch' as a dessert and we leave them be for a few hours (or over night) to ruminate that lot (cudding) before we do it all again. As a result, they are puttying on some good condition and I have not yet had to fire up the mower.

Plant more peas, you fool!

In other news. and as a nice segue from those Wood Pigeon calls, we have been thoroughly enjoying this proper improvement in the weather and have made a good start on the vegetable gardening. Elizabeth went off today in the car with a wad of cash and returned with trays and trays of seedling plants - caulis, cabbages, carrots, parsnips etc, plus pot-grown herbs and packets of seed - peas of course!

Elizabeth trying to garden 'helped' by chickens. This involved
a lot of shouting at birds and shoo-ing them off with a stick. 

Friends of the Blog will know that with Help-X Carsten's assistance, the three 'empty' railway sleeper beds in the Kitchen Garden got a  thorough weeding and a good mulch of compost. The two strawberry beds have also now been weeded. The empty ones are now well planted with the new plants but with space allowed for succession planting. Inevitably this involved the chickens all trying to get involved so there was plenty of repelling 'boarders' and the new rows are now securely protected by our chicken-wire cages and frames.

Kato trying to work out how to get up to the
starling's nest above that overflow pipe.

I have also been down a couple of times to help archery friends Con and Niamh with various 'many hands' tasks down at their place including today putting the conical canvas 'hats' on the two round-houses they have in their repro fort. It's a bit like putting up a small marquee and involves plenty of wrangling canvas while balanced at the top of a ladder clinging to the central upright pole of the house. All good clean fun.

That is probably enough for this one. Talk again soon.

Walk-Home Wendy (2)

Lucky hen walked home from the fox's clutches.

My previous post had reports of a "minor miracle" where a grey hen had escaped the clutches of our fox part way (to his) home and amazed me by coming into view, walking (to her) home from 50 yards out in the fields. My report had the hen going from out in that field to "back with the rooster", with no detail. I now need to bring you a Part 2 as it was not quite as simple as that made it all sound.

Wendy back with the rooster and now sporting a pink leg-ring
to ease finding her again. 

I had seen her come as far as the fields 'below' our boundary-bank, but then saw her walk right past the obvious track home. I took Deefer and went out through a convenient hole in the hedge to look for the other 2 dogs but also to see if I could find the hen and help her home. None of the above were anywhere to be seen so I guessed that the hen had out-manouvred me and nipped home. I gave up the search and then found, with the rooster, a suitably bedraggled grey hen. 2 and 2 makes 5. Problem solved. Write up the blog post. Move on.

Bad sign. A slew of Gloria (turkey)
feathers. Another lucky escape.

That night (Thurs 5th) was very, very wet - lashing rain that turned us back into puddle central but the next night was warm and dry and on Saturday it was so warm that I went down to see how many bees I had flying. Lots, of course, but more notable was to find, standing in a daze in the veg patch, a bedraggled grey hen with a damaged, droopy right wing. My 'walk-home' girl, of course who had obviously been delayed in her walk home by 48 hours lost in the bramble patches or under the bank, struggling to navigate. Huge apology to the hen who will not have enjoyed the wet night.

I am happy to report that the (correct) hen is now returned to the flock via a quiet night's observation, the cutting off of the long primary feathers which were drooping down to her foot and getting kicked every time she took a step (must have hurt if her 'hand' was mashed by the fox), and by the addition of a pink leg ring to help us find her among the other grey hens into the future. She has been named "Walk-Home Wendy" at least for now.

Gloria after the fox attack. 

One more fox story, at risk of driving all my readers off by becoming boring on the subject. Trust me; I would be more relieved than the average person to off the fox and stop reporting him/her. This was today at 2 pm-ish and, once more, I am off site and miss all the action. We think now that Foxy pounced on Gloria the turkey hen as she was trying to lay an egg back under that bank which I have photo'd for you before. She presumably screamed and jumped up, setting off the Guinea fowl, and then Elizabeth, and then the dogs. The fox scarpered at that point leaving Gloria but with a mouth full of feathers. We found the feathers but by then Gloria was round in the yard (along with everybody else). It seems we have had another FAILED fox strike. It's all very nerve wracking but better this than successful hunts. Our big concern now is that once the neighbouring farmers' cattle are back out on the grass we will no longer have the option to let slip the dogs of war.

Blue Hyacinths.

It's not all foxes, though, so what else is new? THE PLAY had its final 2 nights on that Friday and Saturday and went off superbly. The Friday audience were especially appreciative and noisy, laughing readily out loud, cheering enthusiastically and 'ooh'-ing and 'ah'-ing when they spotted a cast member they knew or sussed a plot twist. Performers love this and all of them seemed to rise to new levels of sparkle and effervescence. It was lovely to watch. Praise is widespread and the Players have had some lovely feed back face to face and via Social Media.

Sarah and the pigs.

Our visitor from last weekend, Sarah M, had been off down south to her friends wedding and made it back, via Galway, to be here in time to come to the Last Night. She also got to meet the stock again. She loves our pigs and the sheep, especially bottle feeding the lamb. She left us for the 2nd time, heading back to Knock Airport after a goose egg breakfast to give back the hire car and fly home.

Not an easy picture to get - pigs sleeping contented in the sun.
Usually they spot you, jump up and scamper over.

This feels like the welcome end to a very enjoyable but very exhausting month or two of fierce activity with the play, especially, building to an ever-busier climax as the rehearsals accelerated to almost daily.

We are left delighted to be able to relax and take some days off to catch up with house stuff, but both of us could not resist wandering down to the Hall to see the stage and set all dismantled and being carried away in bits to a waiting van. It all gets stored in a container on the farm of one of the Players. Elizabeth had to get in there quick to retrieve all 'our stuff' (several play 'props' were ours) before they were buried for the summer in the storage.

Larch "roses"

I think that's about it, so I'll just post a few pictures which I have not had a chance to "use up".

Pulmonaria now in good flower

A man out standing in his field.

Flying the Flag(s)

Deefer at 11

Happy Birthday, then Deefer, this blog's eponymous dog. She made it to 11 along with her sister, Ellie-Bezz back home in Kent. Sadly, her brother (Archie) did not make it and had to be put down back in February (bone cancer) but we send our condolences as well as our good wishes to Deef's Mother, Mollie who is still with us. Another year, perhaps, everybody?

The very last of the 2016 pork bits get cleared out of the freezer for
use as raw ribs (Doggie Birthday Cake) and then a Medieval meat
feast for us coated in peanut sauce. Finger licking good.

That was Sunday 17th but ask anyone here what that date was all about and they will swoop on by Deef's celebration without so much as a sideways glance, and land firmly on one answer, "The All Ireland". This the GAA Irish-rules football final played at 'National' stadium Croke Park (you Brits think 'Wembley'), this year between Mayo and Dublin again for, I think, the 3rd year running.

This 'Dub' always puts out a good display, all be it the "wrong"
colours. 

One of the first cultural things a Brit notices on moving here is the huge keenness for flying flags; be it the National tri-colour, or more commonly your sports team colours or county colours. Perhaps a quick 'Heath Warning' here for those who don't know me and need telling that I was born without the 'sport' genes in my DNA - I was always rubbish at football and had no interest in it despite working all by life with hundreds of soccer-mad warehouse-men forever teasing each other over the triumphs and crashes of Chelsea, The 'Ammers, Man-U, Liverpool and Spurs. I have brought this appalling ignorance with me and am only very slowly learning how to chat 'knowledgeably' about "The Rossies", Mayo and the Dubs. If I have gone wrong here, please do feel free to comment.

If you don't have a flag pole then a wheel
barrow be-decked with red and green shirts
and watering cans will do. This guy even
managed a turf-stack topped with a Rossies
scarf!

So a month or so back we were driving through a sea of 'primrose' and blue as our team, Roscommon (Go the Rossies!) battled their way through the Provincial stages of the competition to end up Champions of Connaught. I think this is a league type competition where everyone plays everyone else within Connaught (Rossies, Mayo, Galway, Sligo etc), so 'we' may have beaten Mayo back then, but maybe not; it might have been a 'play off' thing.

Someone hung a Mayo shirt on the new
Memorial stone. One of the Guards named
here was a former Mayo GAA star.

Either way, I felt quite cheated when I learned that winning Connaught did not automatically get us a place in the All Ireland semis. Each Province enters 2 teams, with a 'back door' route for one of the teams so suddenly Mayo were back in it and, because the final 8 is a random draw, we were picked against them and they knocked us out. I know. Unreasonable!

Bobtail brings her 4 new babies off the nest.

Ah well, all the yellow and blue Rossie flags came down and most of the local support switched to Mayo being the nearest county to us still 'in it' (green and red). The die-hard 'Dubs' of course would not be seen dead with green and red flags outside their houses and created some impressive showings of the dark and pale blue colours of the Capital. Pubs tend to try to stay neutral, so will often fly both flags AND an Irish Tri-Colour just for the look of it. Many people also fly those little side-roof-gutter flags on their cars. It all makes for a lovely, happy, party atmosphere and very pretty countryside.

Onion harvest. Small bulbs but very pretty.

Ah well. The day came and went and history will record that Dublin won again, this time by just one point in the last seconds of a very tense exciting match, breaking all the local hearts again. Maybe next year, lads. Liz (a Dub, obviously) just sent me a very restrained, jokey text saying "Tanks Be". A few days on I see most of the flags are down now, though that Dub with all the flags at the far end of Lough Glynn village still has his out in celebration. The trophy they are all chasing is called the Sam Maguire Cup, or "Sam" for short. I am always amused by the Dub's adopted slogan, "Dubs for Sam, Mayo for sandwiches!" But enough of the All Ireland. Enough, I say!

Bullace plums and sloes

So, what have we been up to when not glued to the telly watching sport (Yeah, right!). One nice task was to tour the local hedgerows picking nature's bounty - black berries, sloes and just down the lane from here a couple of trees of the small wild blue-black plums we are fairly sure are known as 'bullace'. They are ripe, soft and sweet like greengages. They are not, as someone suggested, 'damsons'. We KNOW damsons and we have a tree in or orchard and these are not they.

She made a very dark sticky puddle! Bullace 'cheese'. 

The sloes have not yet had the necessary first frost but we have picked them anyway and they will get a night or two in our freezer before being converted into sloe gin. The bullace plums got a whole new treatment - being used for 'cheese' and also for 'leather'. I'd heard of the former but not the latter. 'Cheese' in this sense is a clear, very firm, super-concentrated jelly. It is intensely flavoured and you cut the set slab into small rectangles which then get sliced at the table to have with your cheese-board. Nom nometty nom!

Our James Grieves apples and blackberries from local hedges

The 'leather' is a fun confection mainly for the kids. You smear smaller amounts of the hot (cheese) jelly onto grease-proof paper as thin as (you guessed it) leather. When the smear is set you peel the paper off the back and cut the thin jelly into strips so that the kids (or adults of course) can eat them like liquorice shoe-laces. The blackberries and apples became a rather lovely tart. It's all very 'mellow fruitfulness' round here at the moment.

A very sleepy bumble bee on Sedum spectabile

I think that'll do us for this one. Good Luck now.

Mum looks a bit weary about the eyes. 4 kids under a week old.

Then I'll Do It Myself (Said the Little Red Hen...)

...and she did!

As sick as a dog. Deefer on Thursday

Poor Deefer was not well. She was, literally, as sick as a dog. She did not have a good night on Wednesday, nor a particularly good day Thursday. I'm not 100% sure why. I suspect she reacted badly to a cooked roast-pork bone, a chunk of shoulder blade I gave her as a 'treat'. RAW pork bones are their absolute favourite food and have only good, positive effects but this may not be true of the cooked version. As we went to bed, I could tell she was not comfortable, restless, sometimes panting. By 5 o'clock she was 'telling me' she needed to go outside.

Oh Dear Oh Dear. Not happy. 

That walk round finding coat, wellies, dog-leads etc showed me that she had actually been up several times in the night and done an impressive collection of squitty poos and sicks. In 15 minutes or so outside she unloaded a bit more but then seemed brighter, so we all went back to bed. We repeated this at 6 and she continued to improve. She had a fairly 'moopy' day spending most of it just looking sad and sometimes shivering. She just wanted lots of cuddles and declined all food, treats and did not want the daily walk at midday, so I let her off. By evening she was almost back to normal, ate her supper (though not with the usual hoovering gusto) and we all got a nice long night's sleep.

A good haul of beer cans and food packaging
for an hour walking with my litter-picker.
There was even a dumped CD player. 

While I'm on dog walking, I will ask you to bear with me while I have a rare moan. Fly tipping and jettisoning rubbish from your car as you drive along. I was almost certainly deluded and naive when I was planning to move to Ireland, but in my head I had conflated the known respect the Irish have for children/parenting with the '40 shades of green' thing and calculated that the Irish must be much 'greener' and environmentally aware than are we Brits. Foolish Boy! I was quite disappointed when I arrived and started exploring and found that the locals are just as bad as the Brits for tossing beer cans, fag packets, dead CD players and food packaging out of cars as they drive along.

Back in the goose egg game.

There is no equivalent here of the council guy sent out to pick up litter with his Hi-Viz jacket and his neat little row of filled bags along the verge waiting for the lorry-crew to round them up. Tidying up here is all done by volunteers working with the appropriately named "Tidy Towns" group - the local equivalent of the "Village of the Year" thing we were part of in Kent. Tidy Towns do a brilliant and much appreciated job but they mainly do it around the village and they only do it (understandably) in Summer. If you want it doing out here in the 'sticks' and in Winter then you're on your own. I will do it myself, said the little red hen... and she did.

And I do. The locals may see me as a weirdo-eccentric (though a couple have stopped to chat, empathised with my annoyance at those who litter and complimented me) but I just decided one day that this would be one way of giving something back to the area and the environment. I usually wait till just after the verges are mowed so that I can see the stuff lying in the grass but this most recent time was because I was particularly aggrieved by a bigger-than normal dump of a dozen cans and a shopping bag containing glass bottles (broken by now, of course).

This goose may have been interrupted in her egg-making.
An egg and a bit?

I will draw a veil over the fact that these were cans of alcoholic drinks lobbed out of a moving car. Other piles have been of children's orange drink sachets with straws, so I would guess dumped by a family outing with parents present. Hey ho. At least for a short while you can now drive down our lane and admire the 40 shades of green verges and lack of shiny, colourful cans and Coke bottles.

A chicken having a re-think? 'Herme'

Finally and while I am still on red hens, we have a strange tale to tell of odd sexual happenings among the chooks. In short, one of our Buff Orpington hens seems to be having a re-think and turning into a rooster. Friends of the Blog will know that we recently offed our #1 rooster for being aggressive to humans and were left, we thought, with our newest Marans lad, Gandalf. So far so good though we believe, now looking back on it, that one of the buff hens has looked 'different' enough to have been described by us as "the one with the long neck" or the bright cape.

The ducklings discover the paddling pool. 

So this morning I noticed that this particular bird was chasing one of the paler girls about and this afternoon 'she' surprised Liz by jumping onto a hen and "treading" her like a rooster would. We are now seeing 'her' in a new light and can see that 'she' does indeed walk taller than a hen. She also has a bigger, brighter cape and a medium-big red 'face' (comb, wattles) but from thorax down 'she' is still a hen - little feet with no spurs, stumpy hen-tail, no big fluffy rooster 'pantaloons'.

So, what have we here? A very slow, late developer? She was hatched in spring 2016. Her clutch-mates and brothers have long since matured/differentiated into roosters and gone down that route (culled by me or killed by the fox). Google and 'book-learning' give you three possible other explanations which are rare enough to have me shying away from 'claiming' them - proper 'hermaphroditism' where the sexual differentiation gets muddled and the bird is neither one thing nor another, 'gynandromorhism' where the bird is 50/50, sometimes 'sided', where the left half of the bird is fully male and the right side female (these are usually sterile) or, thirdly showing "spontaneous sexual reversal (SSR)". In SSR, the left ovary gets damaged and stops producing oestrogen, so the bird changes sex. So far so rare and so weird.

Our 'weirdo' has been named 'Herme' by Liz because he/she may be hermaphrodite and we'll just keep an eye on him/her. If he/she turns into a full active rooster, then all well and good as long as he stays off the human-aggression malarkey. If the preferred route is to stay 'Little Red Hen' then we can do that too. Watch this space.