Six Chix

4 more chicks hatch among the duck eggs.

I left you with a bit of a spoiler in the last post. We had just saved the life of the first chick from the broody hen whom we had named "Cat Basket Lady" having found the little mite hypothermic and revived her with the warmth cradled in my hands. She had been returned to Mum and went on to survive the night. We had sat back happy with our one chick. Elizabeth even made the conciliatory comment that she had "always wanted to find out whether that cliché about being 'as fussy as a hen with one chick' really worked". However, the story did not end there - there was plenty more drama to come and a plot twist or two.

Feeding the new babies indoors before reintroducing them to
Mum

On that first day, Mum decided to come off the nest, which is usually a sign that she is done, has hatched all the good eggs and now has to rear those babies and leave the duff eggs behind. Ready or not, those eggs get chilled and die. When you clear the nest they usually prove to be infertile, or part-developed and dead-in-shell, so you find out that she is a good Mum and knows what she is about. This lass, though, is a first time broody, so she came off the nest with her one (we thought) then went back on, and off and on and so on. We just had to wait and watch.

Mid morning, the hen came off properly, fed the one, and went for a sit down elsewhere, so I knew I could clear the nest but wait, another hen had nipped in to lay today's egg, so at least the abandoned eggs would be kept warm. Meanwhile a fully dry, mobile black chick appeared with Mum. It must have been with her all along, but staying hidden under her skirts, perhaps carried between Mum's wing and body. Then there were 2. Eventually, the laying hen finished her task and hopped off the nest, so I was able to clear the old nest. Another surprise was in store.

Mum with 4 of the babies.

When I looked into the nest I could see a fully hatched but still wet baby chick in there and at least 2 more eggs 'pipping' (starting to break open with the baby pecking inside). I decided to gather up all 8 eggs and bring them into the incubator where there was just enough space between the nearly 'cooked' duck eggs. By evening, 2 more had hatched and overnight another bird emerged.

Mum with all 6

We were fairly confident we could introduce these to Mum, giving her a total of 6. Hens do not, in our experience, reject 'foreign' babies in these early days. You would normally sneak them in when it gets dark at roosting time so that Mum would wake up and just take on board that there were a few more mouths at breakfast.

Upside of being woken early by the dogs. This lovely 05:30
sunrise over the East Field.

We went with a slightly earlier (braver?) method. We fed them all indoors that afternoon and found them all to be very quick learners, all happily copying our chop-stick 'pecking' mime at the food. So we went out to the Mum+2, put a plate of food in front of her and our 4 'foreigners' beside her. Like magic, the 4 merged with the 2 and Mum accepted them all seamlessly. We now have a hen-and-six wandering round the yard in the sunshine, and she is mothering them like a pro. Happy days.

Short back and sides? Anything for the weekend, Madam?

On Wednesday, we were back at the sheep shearing, this time, over at Sue and Rob's where Rob was actually in the UK (Mum's 90th!). I knew that if I took my Help-X volunteer, Laura, along we'd be able to give her some real work, not just standing watching the "experts" (ha!) at play. That was exactly what she got - she was as exhausted as the rest of us. There were 4 ewes to shear, those same 4 to be given liver-fluke meds and 6 lambs to ear-tag.

First up was the tagging. I showed Laura how to do the first one but after that I was the only one nimble enough to catch them. I was grabbing them, holding them up for Laura, and she was banging in the ear tags. One for the CV - "I have ear tagged 5 lambs". The shearing went well, too. Laura wound up as chief 'holder', hanging onto the collar and lead that kept each sheep fairly still, whispering 'sweet nothings' into their ears to keep them calm, while I sheared.

I am delighted with this ewe - my 'personal best' ever shearing
job.

I was delighted with one ewe in particular, a 2nd-time sheared Suffolk cross Galway. For some reason her fleece was beautifully clean right down through and she was a big calm lady who stood for the cut as good as gold. The sides came off almost in one piece each and I never needed the trimming 'scissors' (Jakoti hand shears) or nicked her by mistake, even once. I'm calling it a 'personal best'. By comparison the other ewes just got 'normal' treatment and I should confess I made one bleed a little (oops).

Next.....

Sue introduced a bit of mischief into the job by spotting one of the girls with so many squirts of the blue anti-septic spray, she looked like a Dalmatian. Anyone passing their place is going to think I have cut the ewe to ribbons. Sue has told me since, that it was foot-rot spray she was using, so it all washed off or faded in the night, to save my blushes.

Can we go back out now?

What else have we been at? Actually some good honest, Help-X partnered 'garden' tidying. We have cleared through some big nettle patches up what we call the 'Primrose Path', the 'Keet Run' and into the East Field. Sitting here by the Dining Room window I can actually see through into the sheep. Before we did the job, the new nettles almost reached up to the lowest branches of the hawthorn bushes.

Dressed to kill. Laura and the brush cutter

Today we broke out the brush-cutter and did battle with the tall weeds (docks, goat-willow(!), rushes and creeping buttercup) in the area briefly known as my veg' patch. Friends of the Blog will know that I literally "lost the plot" 2 years ago, and then brush cut part of the wilderness and covered it with black plastic last year. This year I am re-attacking the paths and the beds that did not get sheeted over. One of these days I may even plant something in there.

Somewhere out in that wilderness....

The only other 'landmark' worthy of note is that today was the day for the vote on the all-important Constitutional Referendum on the '8th Amendment'; that thorny abortion issue. These referendum votes are only allowed for Irish citizens, so I had to sit this one out, but Elizabeth, of course, went down to tick the box.

Laura joins the ranks of #PigWimmin 

We now have to try to get a night's sleep with only the data from an exit poll at 11:30 pm, as the real count does not start till 09:00 tomorrow morning. The Woman of the House will be glued to that news feed; of that you can be sure. By the time I next write we will all know the result.

Yellow and Blue

A sports fan? Well, maybe not.....

Go the Rossie Boys! When we upped sticks and moved from our old jobs to the 'Wesht' of Ireland, I seem to have come from one sport mad environment (the DHL/Sainsbury warehouse) to another (this whole country!). The local area is knee deep in fans of soccer and of the 2 GAA sports ('football' and hurling, use the 'football' word round here and everyone will assume you are talking about Gaelic-rules footie. The UK 'permiereship, Man-U and all that jazz is always specified as soccer).

A 365 pic from my "yellow and blue" period. 

All my friends and rels will know that we 3 brothers managed to get born without the 'football' gene strand in our DNA. We have had no interest in the game for our whole lives and what we know about it you could write in capitals on the back of a postage stamp. I have happily carried that on into Ireland and the GAA game but you'd have to be blind here to not know there was something going on.

The strawberry season is upon us.

The whole county is a-flutter with the yellow and blue Roscommon flags; cars, flag poles in front gardens, sheep sprayed in those colours. Roscommon has not, up till now been known for its sporting prowess but while all sporty eyes were turned towards an exciting run in the soccer 'Euro's' which took the national team to the final 16 for the first time ever, The (GAA) Rossie boys have been sneaking up on the final of the Connacht (province) championship. The 'Big Game' was to be against the heroic Galway team and 'we' were definitely underdogs.

Peas and beans from the polytunnel.

Liz had bought me the top for Christmas and had been talking to her boss (John, who is a genuine fan) about my hopelessness as a fan - all in good part, I have to say, and in fun. They had decided that I should wear the shirt for the main games in the run up as it seemed to be having a good and talismanic effect - they kept winning! With tongue in cheek, she also gave me some 'authentic' lines to say should I get asked any tricky questions (like "did you see the match?" for example). I am (allegedly) very happy with the season so far and also delighted that 'they' are finally doing up the (Douglas) Hyde ground because the surface has been unplayable all through the winter when ever it rains.

Summer fruiting raspberries

Well, underdogs or not, I wore the shirt as advised at the weekend and Roscommon drew with Galway, so there is a replay game on Saturday evening. My only other involvement has been that I thought it would be fun to do a series of '365' pics for the project during the intervening week, based on the Rossie colours blue and yellow, so I have been wandering about looking for anything to shoot where blue and yellow are in conjunction and are the main colours.

Coo. There's a whole exciting world out there!

Meanwhile, back in real life my dozen Marans eggs have now 'cooked' in the incubator and have started hatching but in an unusual way. Normally 12 eggs set on the same day in an incubator will almost synchronise their hatching - the theory is that they all feel each other moving within their respective shells, rocking about and hear each other cheeping, so they all get encouraged to greater efforts. You get a great surge of pipping and hatching and so few in the 'tail' end that it is not really worth keeping the incubator going in case of stragglers. Well, not for us this time, it seems.

Early Bird

We got 2 really early birds on day 17 (should be 21), followed by a pause, then a burst of 3 more on day 20 and only one today (Day 21). 6 chicks now, then, and the remaining 6 eggs all quiet with no signs of even any pipping. We are guessing that the strange spread is due to how the eggs were stored before we got them - they have managed to sneak in 4 days of early development before they ever went into our incubator so possibly they were kept warm.

A first try at mould-pressed, matured, harder goats cheese

I will give the final 6 eggs till tomorrow (Day 22) evening before I take them out and carefully open them (one at once, obviously) out at the compost heap. They may be sterile, addled or 'dead in shell', ones which failed to make it out of the egg. If any turn out to be alive (oops) I will put the rest back in and give them a few more days but I would be amazed if this is the case.

Blue the floofy cat in one of his more classy sleeping poses.

That's it for this one. I am afraid I have a cold and I am bunged up, fed up and not able for happy creative writing. Forgive me.

21 Days Later

Mr and Mrs Buff, suppliers of DNA and 8 of the eggs

Regular readers will recall my post of 15th July, where we had just set in the incubator, 17 Buff Orpington eggs, 8 from our own 'Mrs Buff' hen, plus 9 from Mentor Anne's Buffs. Well, time flies and 20 and a half days later we were delighted to see the dogs suddenly taking a keen interest in the incubator; they could presumably hear the first, almost inaudible cheepings of baby chicks starting to 'pip'. Obviously the poor dogs get evicted at this stage except under supervision. The incubator is in the Living Room, so we can sit in there in the evenings keeping an eye on dogs, reading books and listening to the ever louder commotion in there as eggs break open and chicks start moving about, steeling ourselves not to peek too often in case we let out the heat and humidity. We are still new enough chicken 'breeders' to be as excited as kids at Christmas watching the tiny cracks appear and the first tiny flakes of shell to be thrown off.

Just hatched this second - still wet and unable to stand.

Well, it's going extremely well. Over that night just 2 chicks hatched (one of Anne's eggs first and then one of ours) but several more started pipping. We are amazed by the speed that these babies burst out once they are pipping; the membrane around the blunt end of the egg seems to tear rapidly right round the egg starting at the pipping 'hole', as compared to the Guinea Fowl eggs where the babies seem to have to laboriously chip their way all round the circumference. 6 more babies 'fell' out in quick succession so that we had 8 hatchlings by mid afternoon of day 21.

First 8 are out and drying. 

The plan is to rescue them to the brooder box (but see also more on this later on) when they have dried out and got up walking about after 24 - 48 hours - they hatch with enough reserves of yolk in their fat little abdomens to go that long without food or water. I was going to leave them till tonight (Day 21 evening) but this morning we had our only failure (so far), one failed to make it all the way out and died half-emerged. I noticed the chicks pecking at the broken shell, and when I put my hand in to rescue this baby, they also tried a few tentative pecks at me - they looked hungry! I decided to rescue the 8 dry ones into the brooder where I could feed them and give them water, leaving a wet, just emerged, noisy one to encourage the remaining pippers and non movers.

A lettuce spinner bowl to transport the chicks.

Now it is 8 o'clock at night, Day 21 and we are still going strong. Anne was delighted to know that of the 13 we now have emerged safely, 9 were from her 9 eggs - a 100% fertility and hatch rate which is quite something in the chicken rearing world; we are both enormously impressed too by this little, reasonably priced (€190 several years ago), unsophisticated incubator for the loan of which many many thanks to Charlotte of the Mini Horses. Last time I looked there were numbers 9 through 13 drying and cheeping noisily in the incubator and at least one more of the remaining 3 eggs maybe starting to pip.

Buff Orpington chicks only hours old.

We will leave all this running through the night after which we may candle any remaining eggs and if they are fails, we will call it a day. What ever happens it has been a very successful incubation and hatch. Not so successful, the other half of this cunning plan. You will recall that 2 days before we set these eggs our 2013 Hubbard hen, Miss White went broody for her first time. We put half a dozen less vital eggs under her and dreamed that she might go full term, hatch them and then adopt, in addition to her real clutch, any Buff chicks we might be able to hatch in the 'incy'. Well she went full term and is actually still sitting there on her day 24, but in the process she managed to lose or break 5 of her real eggs, so she has been sitting for the last week on just one real egg plus 2 dummy (rubber) eggs. We toyed briefly with the idea of swapping the 2 dummies with a couple of pipping Buff eggs so that she might 'hatch' them, but there is a risk she will freak out and kill the intruders, especially if they smell or look different. So, No, we'll 'hand rear' these babies and leave Miss White be, sitting on that last egg for a few more days.

Feta cheese and courgette cake

Meanwhile, not satisfied with being able to cook other people's recipes really well, Liz had a go at inventing a new recipe for using up some of the current mini-glut of yellow courgettes. She took our standard recipe for Dorset Apple Cake, subtracted apples and sugar and substituted in equal weights of feta cheese and grated courgette. She baked it as you would the apple cake and it became our 'carbs' in a meal which included lamb's liver in creamy onion sauce and broccoli. It was gorgeous and will now go into the home 'cookbook' for further uses. We also think you could do any number of versions of it, maybe fishy ones, different cheeses, a bacon/lardon one and so on.

Bee hive 'smoker'

Tonight I am self-catering as Liz is at 'Knit and Natter', and I have used up the left overs (actually that piece I photographed on the plate above) with a thawed out portion of shepherd's pie and some steamed black kale and more yellow courgette. I can vouch for it's deliciousness and texture a second time round.

More news on the Buffs in the next post.

Breaking News

First keet gets his 'lid' off, 

You do not often get posts on here in 'Real Time' but today we have HUGE excitement as the Guinea Fowl keets have started to hatch. As I type this we have 5 out so far (from 16 eggs) and more eggs 'pipping' (starting to crack open as flakes of shell are punched off from within). The exit from an egg can take the baby chick more than 24 hours. They have a little sharp blip on top of their beak (the "egg tooth") which they use to punch upwards by throwing their head back, slowly chiseling their way through two tough egg membranes and then the shell. Egg shell has a very special structure - hard to break into from outside but easier to shatter from inside out.

No 1 still wet from the egg. 

We had a visit from the Silverwoods yesterday who were on the way home from dropping No 1 daughter into darkest Connemara for her 3 weeks living in the Irish language speaking area, the 'Gaeltacht'. Students can go on these 'training courses' to improve their Irish, but our niece (of whom we are inordinately proud) won hers as a scholarship for being Student of the Year. Go Em-J!

Nearly dry - much cuter than the parent birds!

Anyway, the gang had come, eaten, taken tea and departed in a homeward direction and Liz and I had adjourned to the Living Room for a sit down. We were both reading books when we heard a small whistling noise. At first we thought it was a strange snore from Towser (dog) or maybe a blackbird singing in the dusk outside but it slowly dawned on us that it was not a whistling but a cheeping coming from the incubator in the corner of the room; the keets had started hatching! One had broken a small hole in 'his' eggshell and been able to breathe the air and therefore to start cheeping. The dogs all realised that this was a new noise and potential prey animal, so we had to restrain them in a bit of a hurry as they started working out ways to get up to the incubator on the coffee table.

15 hours later and we have 5 out with more pipping.

That was at 11 pm or so. We kept peeking in (we know now, you shouldn't because the humidity in the 'incy' will drop and the chicks may struggle to break through the membranes as they dry out and toughen up) and saw the little guy gradually work a bigger hole and then eventually push off the 'lid' and tumble out onto the floor of the incubator. Other eggs were starting to break too, with the broken flakes of shell visibly pulsing upwards, nudged by egg-teeth.

Bob and Cody having a run around.

This is old hat to a lot of our experienced small-holder chums but this is our first ever 'go' with an incubator and our first batch of eggs, never mind that these are guinea fowl eggs from our own Min and the late (and formerly obviously very fecund) Henry. We are as excited as kids at Christmas. Ah well, I said this was real time. As I type this at 3 pm on the Tuesday we have 5 keets out and more eggs pipping. On the advice of internet experts and Charlotte of the mini-horses we have moved the dividers from the 'incy' floor and taken out discarded shells. The pipping eggs roll about a bit with all the drama going on inside and can fall into an empty half-shell and trap the chick fatally within 2 shell thicknesses. I'll give you a final score in the next post.

Meanwhile we had a complete change  of scene and distraction from keets and pipping, with a visit from Paddy the Dutch Farrier (I kid you not). The mini horses had come round due for their periodic manicure and pedicure; these guys are never shod as they do very little tarmac work, but they do need their 'toenails' cutting. Our friends Charlotte and Carolyn (of the mini horses) currently have one of the boys (Romeo) down at their place but the other two (Bob and  Cody) are in our East Field, so Paddy was happy to go to them rather than have them brought to a central point. He did not mind at all me fussing around taking pictures and asking (probably silly) questions as he worked away quietly and efficiently, the horses well aware that he was the boss and not to be messed with; they were on their best behaviour.

The clippings are like huge toe-nail clippings.You wouldn't want to find them round the rim of the bath if you were nipping round with your de-scaler and J-cloth! Charlotte told us that some dogs go mad for them as a chew treat, so I tried these three on our dogs. The pups, Towser and Poppy, piled in enthusiastically but I wished I had had my camera there to record Deefer's look of total disgust. Do you expect me to eat THAT! It's like a bit of old toe nail. The pups polished hers off - she stalked off in high dudgeon. Sorry, Deefs!

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