Cuter by the Day?

Padfoot's babies are coming up to a month old by now and are getting cuter by the minute. They are also getting more adventurous and brave as they wean off Mum's milk and start to share in the 'grown'up feed mix (called Meusli) and in greens and carrots which they have to come out of the little 'bedroom' bit of the hutch to eat.

We therefore see them every day and get a chance to photograph them. We are now fairly sure, as the brown and white one looks so much like Rogers, that these babies could be by Rogers rather than the meat-breed (New Zealand White) buck, Peter, which we visited at our Friends and Mentor's (Anne and Simon's) place. Anne's not so sure because Peter has 'thrown' babies in all shades and hues from a wild-rabbit brown to pie-balds and pure whites and we did actually see Padders successfully mate once with Peter but, what ever, we will probably never know. If they are by Peter, they should grow fast and put on meat quickly, where as if they are by Rogers, they will presumably grow at standard bunny rate. Could even be some and some, I guess.

The fate for these guys is probably going to be the freezer and some kind of rabbit stew, but just in case there's a market, we have put them up on the Irish "classified ads" website DoneDeal.ie at €15 a pop. If we are lucky enough to sell them as pets then the €45 will have paid for all the meusli we have had to buy since owning Padfoot, Ginny and Rogers and probably a bit of the chicken wire that's gone into their runs and hutches. A rabbit's not just for Christmas?

Meanwhile, the baby chicks are growing fast and starting to put on real feathers on tail and wings. If anything, baby chicks tend to get a bit less cute as time goes by, changing from the almost spherical cartoon chick shape to more of a chicken shape as they go through the adolescent, part-feathered stage. They show their 'reptile' and 'dinosaur' flavours as they change, particularly around the head and face, before their fully feathered chicken appearance comes with the in-lay fully formed wattles and comb.

We need to check with Anne again, but I think they basically stay with their Mum (in this case in the 'other' hutch or in a run in the calf house) till they are feathered up, which is 6 weeks. They are too vulnerable, when just 'fluffy' to the cold and wet, especially in November, so they can't go outside and, if they are for any reason abandoned by their mother, we have to supply an "electric hen", a hot pad under which they can huddle for warmth. We are hoping our surviving two are both girls so that they can join the flock (all be it we'd have to watch out for any broodiness because any progeny would be father x daughter 'line-bred' birds).

We have named them CJ Cregg and Donna Moss after characters in the West Wing TV series. 'CJ' and Donna may turn out to be boys but if so, so be it
and they may be for the stock pot or a coq-au-vin. You can't have more than one "William" after all. That is possibly the less palatable side of small-holdering. We are not running a retirement home for geriatric farm animals.

Sad to relate that the 6 eggs we rather optimistically rescued into the incubator when Broody Betty got fed up with them just to see if they might survive, didn't. Today we decided they'd gone on long enough so we checked them one last time, then cracked them open by the compost heap and found them all to contain almost fully formed but dead chicks. Either this happened at some point after we'd candled them and the hen knew, and gave up on them or she gave up anyway and the eggs got chilled to death. Either way they are, sadly, no more and Betty can get on with rearing the 2 babies who are now 11 days old.

Wish her luck.

Maternity Unit

Behind the scenes of all these descriptions of routine normality, we have 2 exciting little dramas going on. The first is the broody hen, the 2nd is the rabbit nest. Both are nail-biting, wait and see stories and neither are yet very photogenic.

The broody hen featured in the previous post. She is, like all our hens, a Sussex Ponte, a modern utility hybrid designed by one of the big commercial hatcheries to produce 300 eggs a year with no health issues and with almost all the tendency to go broody bred out of her. An egg laying machine. This is probably why so far, in any attempts this year by any of them to go broody, the hen has generally got bored after a few days and gone back to the girl's gang, abandoning her eggs to go cold. Not, it seems, this time. This girl went broody on the 30th Sept and is still sitting tight an a clutch of 10 eggs, brooding them like a pro. Well, the best sort of 'pro' she can be in the circumstances, her being a bit thick and silly with it.

She gets off the eggs once each day to go eat, drink and scratch a bit in the run before hopping back into the nest box BUT does not always get into the correct box. This happens particularly when one of the other hens decides to lay her egg while Miss Broody is out, so she is sitting on the clutch when Miss B comes back. She can occasionally be found brooding an empty nest next door to a little stack of 10 eggs and on one occasion was sitting in the end box with her neck craned round the divider, looking at the clutch and presumably wondering how to shuffle her feet to draw them round into her compartment. Dad has to keep a close and regular eye and correct her little mistakes lest the eggs chill but so far we think we are OK.

If that's true then we might be seeing some eggs 'pipping' on around the 21st, just in time for a visit from Niece Madeleine who is over for a visit on Monday 22nd. If that happens, we then have all the excitement of learning how to keep tiny chicks alive in October and November. We are hoping Miss Broody will become Miss Excellent, Caring Mother or we will have to be messing about with heat lamps and the like. Wish us luck.

In the Rabbit Nest story we have a lot less information. Rabbits are notorious for destroying the nest and babies if you disturb them so that, having discovered the nest back on the 7th Oct, we have basically built a roof over the area with corrugated and then retreated to watch and wait, while increasing the 'meusli' feeds to almost ad-lib status in case Padfoot should need the extra energy in order to feed milk to the kittens. We just see the grown up rabbits bouncing around in their run and periodically Padfoot sloping off to the compost heap where the nest is and we HOPE she is doing that attentive mother thing rabbits do of un-burying their nest and the babies, getting into the nest to feed them and the re-burying the fur-ball with the babies inside back under a plug of grass and compost.

We have no way of knowing if this is what IS going on. The rabbits may be just retreating to the hay of the compost after eating their extra rations of food to sleep it off just because it's nice and dry under the corrugated. The nest may be ancient history by now. All we can do is wait, but Dad says his nerves are shredded from watching the young cats prowling around, he imagines catching a whiff of milky baby rabbits and warm nest hay and thinking evil thoughts. When they do prowl, Dad thinks he sees the rabbits getting anxious, milling in the nest area, rebuffing curious cat noses by punting them with their own noses but they might just be saying 'hello'. It's a nervous time. Dad has now decided that next weekend, when the bunnies should be 2 weeks old and no longer pink, naked, blind and too vulnerable to being killed by Padfoot, Mum and Dad will lift the lid, have a proper explore to see if there is an active nest and, if there is, rescue it, the babies and Padfoot into the Maternity Unit in the calf house, warm, dry, rat proof and protected from cats.

Wish us luck on that one, too. We'll give you more info on all this when things happen.

Deefs

Hum Drum

It's a bit of a 'same old same old' week this week, finishing up on a drizzly Sunday where all of us are now sitting indoors at midday, all dogs snoozing, cats asleep in various beds, Mum still in the dressing gown playing on the computer, Dad resting in the easy chair. It might be a good opportunity to describe a typical day here on the 'farm'.

Nobody uses the alarm clock any more, except on special occasions, so we now wake up (That's Dad and I) at about 0730 as the day starts to brighten. We head downstairs, where pups and kittens now have free run of the kitchen and dining room with a mission to unlock the back door and get everyone out into the yard before anyone does their 'I've just woken up' wee or poo. We leave the back door open but the kitchen door shut so everyone stays out for a few minutes. Dad chases round the various livestock releasing and feeding chickens, and throwing a handful of 'meusli' to the rabbits and a handful of 'nuts' in each of three buckets for the sheep. By then the kindergarten have all done the first 'business' and they (and I) all get breakfast. Dad takes the chance while 5 noses are focused on 5 food bowls, to clear up any overnight presents in the dining room etc, but there are very few these days as the kindergarten are all approaching 5 months old.

Then we take a cup of tea up to Mum and open her door so that she can been invaded by lots of excited, well breakfasted, wide awake animals, which she loves, of course! Soon she's been woken up enough to come down and have breakfast and start the day. For Mum, work is now all the domestic goddess-ing you'd expect plus , food shopping and lately a battle with the hedge between the front lawn and the 'Primrose Path'. For Dad it is what ever's come up next in the allotment gardening, path-laying or chain-sawing depts, or a chunk more digging of the enormous pond. In between this the sheep now get an hour's 'out' morning and afternoon, grazing the front lawn and browsing bramble leaves, ivy and herbs in the woods.

There's a break for a lunchtime sandwich of soup around 1 p.m. and around 5 p.m. Dad lights the range. Supper is around half 6 after which, recently, we've been enjoying quiet evenings in watching our way through our boxed set of the US political TV show "West Wing". Interspersed between all this is also some playing on the internet, Facebook, chat forums on poultry, emails and blogging, for example on the Cambria barge blog.

It's all very relaxing and settled after the hectic hard work of the house build.
We love it.
Deefer