Maternity Chaos

Hubbard chick at 2 days

The little list of birds currently keeping us waiting grows ever longer. There is turkey hen Barbara, of course, possibly still AWOL, out there in the fields sitting on eggs or possibly hatchlings and maybe, just maybe, planning to walk them all back up here to the farmstead at some stage. At the other end of the 'hope' scale, of course, there is no Barbara and the bones of the former Barbara are drying out in the midden heap outside some fox's lair. We can only wait and see but turkeys are famously mainly grass-grazers, so if she is out there somewhere in the lush Roscommon grass, dodging the hooves of clumsy cattle and teaching the young 'uns to eat grass, we could be waiting a while.

The broody geese, sharing the manger 'trough' and swapping eggs between the two nests each day are also devoid of fluffy goslings. Day 28 for the first eggs we knew about, was 16th May, so we are fast running out of 'late hatching' but regular readers will know that our goose 'breeding' is fairly chaotic and the sister birds have been happily dropping new eggs into the trough for the last few months. There will be eggs in there coming due every day from now till Heaven knows when.

Class of 2016. 18 Hubbard chicks.

We have three separate broody chickens on the go at the moment. One is a-top a 4-bale high pile of straw, wedged up into the door lintel. I suspected when she started that she was sitting on nothing and today she hopped off and confirmed this for me. She has sat for 28 days on fresh air and straw. Might be time to move her on and break the habit. I was toying with the idea if she even hatched ONE egg, of sneaking a few 'ringers' in there (of which more soon).

Gone broody in an old dustbin

One is, rather daftly, in an empty feed bin, 2 feet tall and only containing a few bits of rubbish plus any straw that has fallen in. I was using it as the shed dustbin. This nest has also been plagued by all manner of other poultry hopping in there, squeezing the 'clocker' aside and laying 'cuckoo' eggs in there for her to brood. She had 11 including some Guinea Fowl eggs last time I looked. But think it through, hen! Once they hatch, how do you get them out into the world? I can see me having to do some surreptitious tipping over of the bin at some stage. The 3rd broody hen is the only one doing it sensibly in an actual nest box in the actual coop. Yes, it happens occasionally.

Holding up the beekeeping jobs. Blue asleep in a commercial
'super' box. 

The antidote to all this failed Maternity Suite malarkey is, of course, the annual purchase of our day-old 'Hubbard' meat birds. Hubbards are our most delicious and fast growing (free range) meat bird of choice and we are generously included in the run made by friends Anne and Simon up to an industrial scale hatchery up by the N. Ireland border where they know the team and are allowed to buy small quantities of day-olds (as opposed to the 10,000 bird batches the 'factory' would normally supply to commercial growers.) We 'ordered' 18 this year and these arrived on Wednesday. We had the brooder box set up ready and the 'electric hen' heater plate running. The babies quickly settled in while we fed tea, cake and home-cured 'serrano/palma' style ham to Anne and Simon and chatted. as usual, poultry, gardening and small holdering in general.

Neat and tidy now with a 'super' box (dark
green) added to the top of the stack and
the roof straightened out. 

Meanwhile, outside of poultry and broody birds, I have been settling in the new bees - after a few days of just sitting, getting to know the area, we tidied up the new hive removing the straps and gaffer tape that we'd secured it with, adding an empty super to give them more space (trying to discourage swarming) and settling the roof straight. In the dark we'd not lowered it on quite right and it was a bit drunken looking.

Although I know of no proper 'bluebell
 woods' within our 365 patch, once you
get your eye in, there are plenty of small
patches in hedge bases etc. 

This manipulation also gave us a chance to see if any more work was needed to set it up for summer, and we found, as T McC had said, that the upper brood box (painted white in my pic, above the silver gaffer tape) had some dummy blank frames in it. These will need replacing with proper frames and wax foundation for honey comb next time we are delving around in there.

Lough Adreen, in Cloonargid (Silver Field)

I have been out and about some more on the 365 project photography and as this week is 'Bio-Diversity' week I have been asked to go get pics of flora, fauna and 'natural' stuff. I found myself exploring one of the local cutting bogs down south of Lisacul, in 'Cloonargid' (Silver Field) and found this lovely little lough - I'd known it was there from the map; it is called Lough Adreen (there's no real translation unless the "dreen" is one of those transliteration jobs from 'small oak' like for Ballaghadereen (Bealach an Doirín)). I am convinced that even after 366 days of photography, I will still not have seen the whole patch. Which is good.

Cat and Mouse, Wren and Butterfly

Liz and Sparks do 'beekeeper'

Monday afternoon sees us playing host to 'Sparks', Liz's brother, who is down for an overnight visit. He's on his own this time and is looking forward to a chance to have a good look round the place, relax, consume some of Liz's lovely food and have a good long heart-to-heart into the evening as he's staying the night. He is, as the Chinese (allegedly) say, "living in interesting times" at the moment and has some key decisions to make but distracted or not he is always welcome here; he pretty much built the place, after all (see all the posts from the first quarter of 2012).

So he arrives, grabs a quick coffee and then enjoys a tour of the latest livestock, taking in the pigs, geese and goslings, sheep and the baby Buff Orpington chicks. His afternoon coincides with our weekly bee-keeping tasks, and when offered the chance to suit up in the bee keeping garb and go assist Liz, he jumps at the chance, never having done anything like this before. The job today is to open the hive for an inspection and then, if the existing top 'super' is a buzz of activity, to stack a 2nd super on top, with the queen excluder board underneath it. Typical of Sparks, though, he doesn't just want to parrot this job and do what he's told, he is full of questions and interest, and we talk about the bee keeping for ages, finding him books to dip into and the Association magazine. Once Liz and I get going on that subject, it is difficult to stop us.

Well, the task went to plan and the new super is on, so that can now start filling with drawn honeycomb and hopefully some honey, but it is mid August by now and the big honey "flows" (that is how bee keepers refer to the busy periods of bees bringing nectar back to the hive from the peak flowerings of, for example, fruit trees, dandelions, clover, bramble etc) have almost finished. When I am doing my bumble bee surveys, I often add notes in the 'margin' telling which flowers I have seen my sightings foraging on, and lately these have noted that bramble is almost over and the bees are limited to knapweed, thistles and clover in the verges, with lavatera and lavender in gardens. The honey bees must be seeing the same dearth of flowers so that if you have not made a honey harvest by about now, then you are unlikely to get one. With getting our Nuc' (colony) only in late June, we've missed the boat a bit this year and will have to wait till autumn 2015 before we see any amount of honey

1st class travel arrangements for the chicks -
an old washed out paint bucket!

Other than that the place chugs along in its normal routines. We had one tiny hiccup when one of the 'Baker's Dozen' Buff Orpington chickens dies on us overnight. I have a sad little corpse to retrieve in the morning. We have, as ever, no idea why. There are almost never any symptoms These things just happen and they usually happen very fast, one minute the chick is a healthy and active as the rest, the next near-death or dead. We assume it is some kind of 'runt' development, thing, the weakling chick that would never have made it in the 'wild'? Anyway, we are down to a real Dozen now and , of course, all these look healthy and happy... but who knows?

Purple loose-strife in the pond.

One of our lambs is also concerning us in a small way; it is the ewe and she has gone lame, walking with a slight limp at the back end and seemingly a bit stiff when she gets up from the ground. Our sheep-man Kenny, has promised to turn up soon (!) to attach these ear tags to the sheep, so we will get him to invert the lady while he has a grip on her and he can cast his expert eye over her feet. She may have just taken a 'puck' from one of the boys (this is how they describe a 'clout' or a 'whack' here) and is bruised, but we know that sheep famously spend 23 hours of each day trying to commit suicide, so we had best get Kenny to check for foot root or other lameness issues.

Water mint. Sorry about the rubbish
picture. I was leaning out over the
pond, worried I'd drop the camera
in the drink!

I had a nice surprise this morning, a sight that I have never seen before (all be it not very 'nice' for the 'mouse' party) - a fluttering outside the kitchen door caught my eye while I was making coffee and turned out to be a tiny wren playing 'cat and mouse' with a big peacock butterfly. The wren was not much bigger than the butterfly, so the two looked at first like a pair of butterflies mating, but closer inspection showed that the wren had damaged the butterfly but not stopped it flapping. The wren had to peck and tweak at it for several more seconds before she had it subdued enough to grab the insect's head and fly off to some secret place, presumably to consume the prize. As I said, not a lot of fun for the butterfly, but a wren has to eat too and it was a charming sight.