New chicks on the block

Yesterday we welcomed some new chicks -  5  Buff Orpington cross chicks 2-3 weeks old.

We've decided to buy chicks young  as a way of adding to our small chicken flock.

The baby roosters will become our own home grown supply of chicken meat ( it's very exciting to take on a new little venture!) and the little hens will give us eggs in exchange for good food and shelter.

For the moment they live in an old wooden box  in the shed protected from the cold weather we are having. When it's a little warmer I'll pop them into the predator-proof chook shed.

Welcome little chicks!

Bye Myrtle and thanks for all the eggs

It happened very quickly.  One moment Myrtle was doing normal  chicken things, scratching and pecking and chasing little insects and eating grass and then the next moment Myrtle was in the chook house sitting.

the chook house

At first I thought she was going clucky but when I picked her up to remove any eggs she might be sitting on I found that she was a little floppy. I knew something was wrong. I made sure she had water and I did a few little checks on her and couldn't find anything wrong but I was concerned. I popped into the chook house every now and then but each time I checked on her she seemed weaker and then, well, I found Myrtle dead, only just. We had a little cuddle, I stroked her beautiful feathers and I thanked her for all her eggs.

Chook mates - L-R Mavis, Myra, Muriel and Myrtle

Poor Myrtie - such a pretty chooky. Myrtle was the chooky girl  I picked out first when I bought her from the Country Cacklers van that visits Gumly Gumly ( a place just outside of Wagga Wagga) every second Thursday.

She had the most beautiful spotty feathers -  quite different to the other Isa Browns available for sale the day I bought her.

Myrtle (top) with Myra enjoying cauliflower leaves

Now Myrtle has joined my little animal cemetery in the vegetable patch. She is keeping company with  the little lost lambs that didn't make it through their birth or that were taken from Highfield by a fox.

Myrtle is on the right - see how beautiful her feathers are - all spotty

I couldn't work out what happened to her, her decline was so fast. She had been in good health as had all the chooky girls. They had good food and water and their house was cleaned out each day and fresh water given. I checked to see if she was egg bound - she wasn't (that I could tell).

Meeting the wildlife - Mavis, Myra and Myrtle.

We think that she might have been bitten by a spider or a snake - perhaps a baby snake... and a tradie that came today said that that was certainly possible.

My chookies free-range all day  finding a huge amount of food themselves having a great time scratching
and clucking together. I have seen them take on small grubs and worms, massive hairy spiders and giant centipedes and I have even seen then attempt to eat a rare and large legless lizard - I stopped them in time - they are pretty special animals.

It is totally conceivable that Myrtie went for a baby snake or a poisonous spider - to be sure there are snakes and spiders around. It's the only thing I can think that happened to her.

Perhaps if I didn't let them roam all day this wouldn't happen. But then they wouldn't get to be real chooks enjoying all the things that chooks enjoy, like dust and grubs and grasses and making a mess of the mulch around the citrus trees.

I am so sorry Myrtie... thank you for your clucky company and thanks for all the eggs.

The odd egg out

This morning, one of the Chooky girls laid an enormous egg.

It weighed in at a massive 100gms.  I zeroed the scale for the cup measure.

Weighing this one made me want to compare  its weight  to others recently gathered. The previous largest egg weighed in at 75g.  The 100g egg is pictured here with a 75g and a 57g to show the difference.

This massive egg looks to be the odd egg out in the egg storage section of the fridge. I suspect it is sitting higher in the egg carton than the others.

I wonder if it is a double-yolker or if the shell is extra thick?

The numbers on the eggs are the date they were laid - do you mark your eggs like this?

Thank you Chooky girls.

Clipping wings

I feel like I have done something horrible. Today I clipped the wings of my 4 chooky girls. They are free-range in daylight hours and spend the whole day eating grass and digging for grubs and slaters. I think they have a good life.

But today I decided to limit their freedom somewhat. I decided to do the 'operation' because, despite the fact that the fence to my veggie patch - Fortress Wallaby - is high enough to keep the bounding, browsing wallaby population away from my veggies, it isn't high enough to exclude chookies.

I had resigned myself to losing produce in my inadequately fenced temporary beds to the probing beaks of my chookies (I reckon I have lost a cabbage, 4 Purple caulis and a Romanesco Broccoli so far), but not prepared to lose produce from the permanent beds in Fortress Wallaby, so, I umm'ed and ahh'ed and today I did the deed.

I took instructions from  a new Organic Gardener mag on chookies, the Lad held the girlies one by one and I did the sniping.

It didn't seem right to take photos of the procedure.

They didn't seemed bothered at all really, aside from the indignity of being  held by a human! I guess they might seem bothered when they try to fly.

I apologised to them all (just like I thank them each individually each day for their cackleberries)  but feel like I am a bad chook mother.

As some kind of apologetic act, I picked a wombok and gave them a generous number of outer leaves.

They will get lots of produce from the garden but I guess now it will be when I chose. I still feel like I have done something bad to them.

Have you clipped the wings of your chookies?  How did you feel about it?

Home improvement

We have made recent improvements to the home of our chooks. A paved entrance using local rock.

bolstered predator proofing by way of a concrete and wire obstacle topped by local rocks - a few more rocks to go, and

a water tank!

Now fetching clean water for the ladies is easy and the shed collects the water. Have roof - collect water is the motto.

The water tank is one of the few things bought to make the chook shed.
Most of the rest of the materials are recycled from around the farm.

The plumbing for the shed is from recycled materials as well. The guttering is a piece of agricultural pipe found on the property. It is very simply constructed by making a slit in the pipe and inserting the end of the corrugated iron into the slit.

The very handsome Lad is the chook shed home improver - thank you! The chooky girls say thank you too!

Which is whose?

Who'd have thought that eggs could be so different. Who'd have thought that you can tell from the egg which of the chooky girls produced it.

Mavis lays eggs with lots of white spots on a darkish background. Strange given that she has the lightest feather colour.

Myra lays lovely even-coloured beige eggs even though she has the darkest feather colour of the four chookies.

Only two of the four chooky girls are laying at the moment but being able to tell which egg belongs to which chicken makes it easy to work out who is laying and who is not.

Thank you chookies for your lovely eggs!

PS: You will tell me if a spotty egg means that the hen is not getting what she needs wont you?

Birds and onions

I love my chickens and I love the wonderful native birds that we share our patch with, I really do!

Myrtle and Mavis eyeing off the baby spring onions

Except when they eat my oniony things! For instance, on Monday morning I emerged from the house to find this.

All my shallots dug up and flung around their little oniony bed. Hmm, a busy tribe of choughs! Thank goodness they had only just started to put down a few roots and no shoots. And there were other casualties in that bed as well.  The shallots were sharing their bed with some onion seedlings  and a row of snow peas that had started to sprout. Gone, all gone.

The shallots have been put into another bed and the soil has been covered with wire to stop the choughs scratchy feet and flicky beaks. Hopefully!

What are choughs (pronounced - chuffs)? Well they are fabulous black and white birds with lovely curved wings and beaks and quite mad red eyes. They hang out in groups and spend a lot of time turning over leaves and other forest litter and they chat to one another as they do. Trevor's Birding has a nice picture of them hanging out together.  They have the most amazing big mud nests. This website has great pictures of them and their nests.

As for my chooky girls, well they like chives,

garlic chives,

and spring onions.

I am guessing that their eggs are going to have a nice oniony taste? Better not make a cake! And better find a solution to their onion tribe snacking.

What irresistible birdie treats do you have in your patch?

Our first egg

I feel strangely proud,  you see yesterday morning I found our first egg.

I am pretty sure that it was Myra who laid this first one. Her comb is the largest and she was acting a little strangely early that morning.

I found it when I went to let the chookies out at around 10am and it was still warm. Myra had made a lovely straw nest to lay her egg, in a spot behind a bale of lucerne, nice and tucked away.

I wonder why she chose that spot and not a nesting box?

I am not sure why I have this little strange feeling in my chest, after all Myra did all the work.

Myra on her first day in the coop -  she's a little older now

It's just that it feels like the beginning of something. We have been here 6 months now and progress has at times seemed slow.

But the winter vegetables are planted and thriving and the new vegetable patch is being fenced to exclude the wallabies. The citrus are in and soon it's time to buy bare rooted fruit trees.

The home paddock is now empty of agisting stock and is resting up but there are plans for a house cow and some sheep and maybe a pig.

I am tinkering with various little rehabilitation experiments to improve and support the native pasture. The dam wall, once scared by eroding hoofs, is now greening up with at least 5 different grass species all in late-autumn flower. I am starting to identify grasses from a distance. I am gradually winning the battle with the thistles by hand slashing and hoeing them and,

we have an egg, a beautiful native grass-grazed egg. And there should be another one this morning...

Trying to be handy / Feeding the chooks

Today I had one of those days when things don't go right.  There were several things that happened to prove the point which I wont go on about, instead I will pick just one of the things that didn't work and then an unanticipated  outcome. Enough of the preamble....

What didn't work
Today I had the brilliant idea of making a chook tractor (portable cook pen) out of an old abandoned BBQ.

This beast on wheels was left abandoned at Highfield. I suspect it no longer worked, in any case we were not going to revive it as a BBQ. I actually don't see the point of gas BBQs.  I like the smokey wood / coal smell that a real BBQ imparts and so to me this beast was just junk or fit for recycling and the idea was to recycle it into a chook tractor.

The idea was to remove the BBQ bit and to enclose the frame with weld mesh. I could roll it out to the bit of grass I wanted munched and pop the girls in and they could do their thing, scratching and eating.
Good idea right?

Disassembly was going well and soon, with a bit of fiddling, I got the beast down to the frame - the bit that I wanted.

I even cut out and fitted a bit of weld mesh to the top. So what went wrong you ask?

Well I took a look at the space under the frame and tried to imagine a little chooky or two inside it trying to scratch away... behind a bit of weld mesh... I decided that there was barely room for one chooky to turn around, let alone the tribe of 4 lasses.  It didn't seem like the right thing to do to lock one girlie into a space that was so small to go to work for me so I decided to abandon the idea. But there was an unexpected outcome.

Feeding the chooks
I can hear someone saying, "Every cloud has a silver lining" or "Make a silk purse from a sows ear", or something equally annoying saying? (Please, please, out of my head!)

In detaching the BBQ bit I found that there were loads of mud wasp nests attached -  7 in total. I was grateful it was not hatching season.

In a re-purposing mood and with chookies in mind, I saw these nests and thought - chook food. I broke the nests off the frame,

 and broke them open.

Inside the hard mud encrustations were not only the larvae of the mud wasp, but also loads of dead spiders, stuffed in each cell presumably to feed the baby mud wasp.

Earlier in the year we had watched a mud wasp build its nest on the front verandah of the house and we had watched as they stuffed fresh spiders inside the egg cavity.

Here on the right is the huge nest we watched being built on the wall of the house under the protection of the verandah. It along with other  smaller nests are being left to do their thing.

Take a look at the three-coloured mud.

As there are loads of these nests all over the property, including ones we have left on the verandah, I didn't feel too bad about breaking into the BBQ ones and feeding the chooks.

Well, the girlies had a ball, some seemed to prefer the larvae, some preferred the more numerous spiders. I had a ball too watching their delight in their new strange food source. I wish I could show you some photos of the happy lasses, but so keen and eager were they to dive in and run off with their loot as I was breaking open the cases, it was impossible to get a snap. You will just have to believe me.  My mood, previously stormy at a wasted day, improved markedly!

I have decided that there should be a new aphorism  for these sort of situations. It might go something like this, "When you have had enough, go feed a chook".

Anyone want a dead gas BBQ?

Meet the girls

We have our first livestock - 4 beautiful Isa Brown chookies. They are named after some of our Grand Aunts - lovely old-fashioned names all starting with 'M'.

L-R: Myrtle, Muriel and Mavis

There is Mavis - she is a little smaller than the others and is also lighter in colour, a ginger rather than brown really.

Mavis

There is Muriel - she has a beautiful buff-coloured chest and is a little dusty in colour.

Muriel

There is Myrtle who has lovely striped feathers near her tail and her tail feathers are quite long. She seems to pick on little Mavis...

Myrtle

And then there is Myra who is a little darker in colour with no particular markings and the most adventurous. I am sure she will be the first one that will allow me to have a cuddle.

Myra

I bought them as point of lay from a free-range chicken farm Country Cacklers in Temora. They have lovely chookies of different breeds and handily bring a van of chookies to Wagga Wagga from time to time.

They had some lovely Guinea Fowl keets for sale the day I got the girls -  I am tempted, they are such lovely things guinea fowl.

I bought them as point of lay but they haven't laid yet, I guess they need some time to settle.

The girls are staying in the house for a few days before being let out to range but they have some nice views in the meantime.