Bucket o' Beetles

I tend to turn everything into a song. It's how my brain works. That said, when I discovered a serious grain beetle infestation in my chicken feed, my brain did this:

I got a bucket, got a bucket full of beetles
eatin' up my grain and being very leetle, oh, no no no
chew what you want but you're never gonna survive
here come the girls and they're gonna eat you a-live, oh, oh oh oh!

Eat them all up, a crunchy treat
They taste so good, for lunch today
Eat them all up, they taste so sweet
Eat them all up, a bug buffet!

 Natasha Bedingfield had a pocket full of sunshine. I just work with what I've got.

Heartbreak

Some farmer I turned out to be, crying like a baby over broken eggs. I candled each egg, all sixteen, just in case she’d gotten it right and there was an embryo inside any one of them. Unfortunately, there weren’t going to be any chicks. I’d been warned, “You’re going to have to break her heart and destroy the nest, and it won’t be pretty.” I get a lot of warnings about my chickens: game breeds are too aggressive, game chickens aren’t smart enough to be mean, you have to clip their flight feathers to keep them tame, never clip their flight feathers or they’ll never trust you, they’ll destroy the garden, they’ll weed the garden, you get used to the way they flap after they’re dead, you never get used to the way they flap after they’re dead, they taste good, they taste terrible… But I wasn’t prepared for the noise my beautiful Sussex made when she discovered all her eggs were gone.

I am a biologist. I know things. Chickens are feathered reptiles that chew their food internally and produce adaptive immune cells in a specialized organ called a bursa. The pulmonary circuit allows double circulation of blood through a four-chambered heart that separates blood that is oxygen-poor from mixing with blood that is oxygen-rich. What I didn’t know was that the sound of that heart breaking is universal. It sounds like loss and despair and horror and disbelief, all at the same time. I don’t think I’ve ever apologized so sincerely in my life.

I really am sorry, Ginny. The nest was built in a bad location and you’d have been eaten by a fox before any of those eggs hatched. It hasn’t been an easy summer, old girl. You watched your clutch mate get torn apart by dogs and all your girlfriends get carried off by hawks or eaten alive by bacteria until you were all alone. Make friends with the pullets – they’re not so bad really; you were young once, too. On the upside, I probably got Hantavirus crawling under the outbuilding to destroy the nest, so at least you’ll get to watch me die of pneumonia.

The universe took revenge on me by putting a nail in my tire on the way to the dump, where I intended to leave the rotten eggs. I had to turn around and put on the spare, mosquitoes gleefully pushing aside the gnats bathing in my sweat to feast on my guilty blood. As a result, the trash is still waiting to go out, and the eggs are producing gas in a hot utility room. Certainly I’ll be haunted by chick spirits and hydrogen sulfide all night. The cockerel in the exclusion pen will crow bright and early, reminding me that I was going to kill him before I felt so bad about myself.

Because while I can look into the face of a desperate college student and tell them, “No, there isn’t any extra credit I can give you to save your grade and your scholarship, you moron,” I can’t bear to look at a chicken that’s lost two weeks of hard work and hope. But I can hope Ginny’s tiny brain forgets all about her troubles by morning, when she finds split cherry tomatoes and bits of popcorn on the lawn. And I can hope that I won’t ever have to hear her heart break again.

Badness

Sometimes it seems like all I ever post is bad news. Of all the OEGB chicks I hatched last summer, most were taken by hawks while I was out of town. This isn't shocking. Hawks have to eat, too. The couple that survived were taken down by a bacterial infection months ago. I can keep them alive for a little while with antibiotics, but they appear to go septic (maybe they're being injured by Hef or eating small bits of metal?). Alas, I lost my last one to another infection this week.  I found her curled up next to the back door, in a little pile of leaves. Bless her heart.

Denise as a Teenager

Denise (foreground) and Her Sisters

Show Bird

Hef won a photo contest on backyardchickens.com! He was selected Best of Breed! He is not surprised.

Game Chickens

As a gift, I received thirteen Old English Game Bantam chicks. As it turns out, these chickens are neither bantams nor are they OEG (at least not pure). They look like mixed breeds: a little OEG, a little American Game, a little Modern Game, a little... Cubalaya? As happens, I have many more roosters than I need, and it seems like someone else discovers how to crow every morning.

Not a Rooster?

I had six "fawn" colored chickens, six "spangled" chickens, and a pure white chicken. The white one is definitely a rooster. A very LOUD rooster. A very loud and moderately insecure rooster.

Can You Find Five Boys?

Four or five of the spangled are boys, and at least two of the fawns are boys. This leaves me with more boys than girls. Ain't that always the way?

Rooster?

I have options - there's a goat sale every other Saturday and there are poultry swapped beforehand. I could take them. I can put a sign up in the feed store offering roosters. I can eat them. This seems the most useful option. They're really only good for stew or soup so I could skin them and not even worry about removing the feathers. Truthfully I dislike this part, I get hesitant and sad, which means I run the risk of hurting the chicken instead of outright killing it. And that makes me more nervous, which makes me even more likely to screw it up. I like to think this makes me NOT a sociopath.

There Are Definitely Two Roosters There

And truthfully, there are some cockerel that would be too hard to kill, like the ones you rescued from the bottom of the coop and nursed back to health only to find out they're boys.

 

Totally a Rooster. Dammit.

Dog Attack

My beautiful Wyandotte, Hermione, was killed today. I came home to find two neighborhood dogs in a pile of feathers. I'll spare you a picture of the carcass, but it's clear she fought for her life but died a horrible, painful death. She might only be a chicken, but she didn't deserve to be torn apart by dogs and finished off by fire ants. I chased off the dogs and followed the trail of feathers to Hermione's body. I was so upset. She suffered because people can't keep their damn dogs on their own property. I don't clip flight feathers on my chickens because I hoped it would give them an advantage against predators. But a laying hen doesn't stand much of a chance against two pit bulls, especially not when they're bored and/or underfed.

Site of the Attack

Trail of Feathers

Lone Feather

Hermione Before the Attack

Things Get Biblical

I was preparing notes on a lecture in my dining room when I heard distressed cackling from the chicken yard. What really captured my attention was the sudden, intense vibration cause by something slamming into the house itself. I briefly wondered if the DirecTV dish had fallen off the roof. When I opened the window I saw that the chickens were in Velociraptor Mode, and they'd surrounded a large rat snake and were driving it away from an injured pullet. The chicken was missing her tail, and the snake had a mouthful of feathers. A very bad situation, indeed!

I flew into a blind rage and screamed at the snake, "MY CHICKENS! MINE MINE MINE! NOT YOUR CHICKENS!" I ran outside, thrashed the offending reptile thoroughly and was in the process of choking it to death before regaining my senses.

Snakes are predatory. They eat live prey. It was unfair of me to punish this snake just for doing what it is supposed to do. Using my training as a person who watches Animal Planet, I placed the snake in a pillowcase and released it 5 miles down the road. When I returned, I found another, LARGER rat snake in the chicken yard. And so went the rest of my weekend. I don't have a rat problem, but I appear to have a rat PREDATOR problem. I thought the snakes would be more interested in eggs. Why they are attacking the chickens is beyond me. They can't possibly swallow one. It begs the question, what have I done to deserve a plague of snakes?

I suppose I can take comfort in the fact that the chickens did exactly what they were supposed to do. Hef sounded the alarm and the girls went ballistic. Hef got several good jabs in before I caught the snake, which is fairly brave for a 1 lb rooster. David Bowie was not so brave. He headed for the other end of the chicken yard, screaming his fool head off. He gets upset easily. It's not an easy life for him, being the number two rooster. Here you can see that the wind has blown the door of the hutch closed and he's taken it personally.

Of course, Hef is unfazed. He and his ladies just kept foraging through the yard normally, stopping by the wading pool for some crunchy waterlogged bugs. I also dropped a fig in the carport, and they tore that up quickly. Ginny gets most of everything, because she is greedy. I don't discourage this behavior. I find it hilarious that when I yell, "Ginny! Gin-Gin-Ginny!" she comes running. She's convinced that if she doesn't get there first, whatever I'm holding will be eaten by someone else and that is totally unacceptable.

Hef doesn't eat much at all, because he's more interested in finding food for the girls than for himself. The exception to that is when he finds yogurt. Hef loves yogurt and does not care to share it.

Blow Beryl Blow

We're waiting on Tropical Storm Beryl to sweep through, but it feels like she might never get here. We're in desperate need of rain - the creeks are dry and the grass is crackling - and I was hoping for three solid days of storms to bring the water table back up and wet down the garden. When the wind gets strong I worry about the chickens roosting in the crepe myrtle, but then I remember that wild birds don't all blow away with every storm.

The pullets are still sleeping in the coop, all piled into two nesting boxes underneath David Bowie, the spangled Silkie roo. The pullets make such a mess of the boxes that the hens won't go in there to lay eggs so I've set up two "emergency" nests for them. This has also solved the problem of them squeezing into the doghouse with Buffy. As a hoarder, Buffy kept the eggs for herself, either burying them or carrying them around in her mouth until they were coated with dirt and slobber. She proudly presented me with an egg each evening, but it was so filthy I simply cracked it into the dog bowls over their supper kibble. I hate giving up my eggs.

Getting rid of the extra cockerels has made life in the yard easier on everyone. David Bowie doesn't have to compete with his brothers anymore, so he stays away from Hef and spends most of his time babysitting the pullets, who have two speeds: stop and run. He also likes to follow me around, dancing and begging for cuddles. He's quite friendly, and is easy to handle and pet. My Olde English Game bantam, Hugh Hefner, is happier as well. Without so much fighting to do he's been very attentive to his ladies, leading them on foraging adventures and picking out all the best nibbles for them. Ginny can be quite greedy, so he has his hands (beak?) full trying to make sure Denise and Hermione get enough to eat as well. The pullets aren't on his radar yet, as they're sexually immature, but he does give them a good tug on the head if they don't respect their elders at the feed trays.

The sun is out again. I'm not sure we're ever going to get this storm going, it's 18 hours late already! I suppose I might as well run the garbage down the road. The dogs are already milling in the kitchen, ready to ride with their heads out the window and their paws on the trash bags.

Zeke

It's very hard to be a cat, especially when there are only dog beds in the house, and clearly cats do not fit in dog beds, because dog beds are for dogs.

9:00 am

10:25 am

11:04 am

12:15pm

1:30 pm

Ridiculous

I hear homesteading rumors about docile flocks of chickens, bountiful milk goats, and loyal working dogs. I have none of those things. I have chickens that sleep in my crepe myrtle and lay eggs on my front porch. My collard greens are 48 inches high, brazenly growing taller despite my talent for neglect. There is a cat living inside my sofa. I tend to attract life's most curious offerings, like a magnet beckons sparkly lost earrings and bent cafeteria forks. It's been this way all my life. It's as if the Universe said to itself, "You know what we need here? Someone with an aptitude for the ridiculous." And lo, I was born.

I'm from Royal Oak Michigan, which is just outside Detroit. If you started on the north end of Detroit, somewhere near the somewhat famous 8 Mile Road, you'd need to walk two miles to get to the appropriate suburb. I grew up at the intersection between an eight-lane intrastate freeway and a six-lane interstate beast that runs from Sault Sainte Marie (MI) to Hialeah (FL). There was no FFA or 4-H, although we did attend the Sate Fair every year to eat fried food and play carnival games. There were livestock at the fair, and I have memories of petting goats and sticking my fingers into rabbit cages, but I lived in the city. It never occurred to me to ask for a pony for my birthday. I asked for a bike or roller skates. We all asked for bikes and roller skates. We were city kids.

My father's parents lived in a wooded suburb further from Detroit, in a neighborhood with a pond and an excellent sledding hill. There was a thicket out front and tall climbing trees in the backyard, making it possible to forget that there were neighbors on three sides. I rescued toads from the backyard fountain and caught snakes in the woods near the pond. We spent a lot of time having picnics in the thicket and playing Clue on the sun porch. Theirs was one of those neighborhoods, the kind that didn't have sidewalks or straight lines. That made it less like the city, where everything is on a grid and the only wildlife were the homeless people.

My mother grew up on a small family farm, although you wouldn't know it if she didn't tell you. She's not a huge fan of "roughing it" unless you count the slow food movement. You can't blame her, really. Her first pet was a chicken. Her house didn't have indoor plumbing until she was 13 years old. I doubt she ever had her own bed. My grandfather raised all manner of livestock, and when I was a child he farmed a small bit of land beyond the pig pen where we were offered twenty-five cents for every jar we could fill with pest caterpillars plucked from the plants. I say offered instead of paid because I'm not sure we ever finished the job. I kept the caterpillars as pets, of course. They always died. Surely it's the thought that counts. While pursuing my PhD in ecology I often thought he would be tickled to death to find his eldest granddaughter driving tractors through cotton fields rather than riding buses through city traffic.

So here I am, a 35 year old woman in a community so small that the postal system incorporates it into the neighboring town, which has a whopping 6000 people in it. I live in a creaky 100 year old farmhouse on property formerly farmed but now converted to slash pine. People often ask if I feel scared out here all by myself, but truthfully I don't. The stars are amazing on a clear night. The woods are full of wildlife and it's not unusual to have to stop the car to let a river cooter cross the road, or urge a king snake to end it's nap early. If there's ever any trouble, I've got a twelve-hen early warning system and a sheriff's deputy right across the street. Let's face it, nobody ever thought I was going to grow up and be normal.