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If I pretend like I’m not interested in them but in something *near* them, maybe that will draw them in closer.
Now quick, look over here, like something else is fascinating to me!
SWARM! SWARM! ATTACK KITTY MODE!
The chickens are unfazed by this mode of kitty.
So excited I am about blogging again, I am scheduled out a couple of weeks in advance. You are reading this in August but it was written on the 28th of July. :) YAY me.
We have just had a huge weekend of chores and jobs, and the first one on the list was clean out the chook pen and enclosure.
The raked up leaves, branches, and assorted biodegradable chook leftovers.
So the people who have the block behind us have a lot of trees and while it is lovely to look at it means a lot of leaves, branches, gumnuts, and associated tree junk end up in the chooks yard. The chooks do not mind this because these leaves will often hide little yummy insect friends, so the leaves are really a constant entertainment to them. They spend their days turning the leaves over hoping for a treat. I mind, because it looks messy. But in keeping chooks you soon learn you have to give up on what you want, it is all about what the chickens need and want.
Over winter there is not much point trying to do anything about it. If I rake it all up guaranteed the next week there will be strong winds and it ends up just as messy as it was before. So yesterday I did rake and made a lovely pile in the back corner which will be left to biodegrade – that is if the chooks can leave it alone long enough – and there is now a strong wind warning for our area. Of course.
And clearly, there is little chance of the chickens leaving it alone for very long. If you move something to a new place, it suddenly becomes fascinating and exciting and must be explored, pecked, scratched, and not left alone until every possible treat has been exposed and eaten.
Little Kitty looking in – why can’t I be in there?
Well, little kitty is not used to chickens yet. She thinks they are great fun to chase. The chooks respectfully decline this, and gave her several decent peckings to convince her they are a formidable force. She does not seem to mind and continues to chase. I will slowly teach her this is a bad thing, over time. At this point she’d got annoying and the chooks were clucking and tut-tutting her, and there was even a few wing flaps and bagerking in her direction, so she was sent back to the regular yard for my sanity and for her own safety.
Usually we will clean out the coop in the last week or two of autumn, and then leave them be other than occasionally scooping the poop out of their coop, throwing them their many treats and collecting any eggs. You can’t be so lax in summer because in the heat the poop gets quite smelly but in winter you can leave it a few days – some people actually leave it the whole winter which is perfectly ok – they use a system called deep litter. Long story so google it if you want to know more.
The chooks laying area cleaned out.
The chooks laying area with fresh new wood shavings. They will make some very fascinating circle shaped nests in here. I will have to remember to take a photo.
One thing I do not clean out is the spider webs. There is only one place (in my mind) where a spider is welcome and it is within the chicken coop. If they can survive the pecking beaks of the chooks, they can eat a multitude of flies. If I spot a poisonous one I do usually squish that because I’m none too sure on whether they are poisonous to chooks or not.
The girls hanging out, here are a couple more shots. :) Happy moments for my girls.
With a tiny hint of Kitteh Tongue!
Almost a year. Is anyone still out there?
You can thank Jocelyn from Mama’s Style for my return. :)
We nearly lost the other kitty as well to kidney failure but after a long time at the vet she returned home to us. She’s not the same kitty as she was. She’s super grumpy. We thought this would fade with time but it has been over 6 months so this seems like a permanent new thing. So her name here on the blog is now officially Grumpy.
She is a regular domestic short hair but she has some secret tabby hidden within her.
Big Kitty had a penguin which she would always bring us at night, with plenty of miaowing. Happy has this mouse on a stick. She picks up the mouse in her mouth and the string and stick trail along dragging on the ground making this somewhat terrifying yet always funny sound.
Anyway, I’m sort of back – in a place where I have a bit more free time than I used to, some bad stuff going on I can’t type about but looks like I will be jobless very shortly – while this sounds like a bad thing the bullying and harassment going on is a lot worse than being jobless so it is actually a good thing even though it sounds bad and wow what a run on sentence that one was, lol.
I’ve scheduled a couple of posts for this week, and we’ll see how it goes from there.
So what happens with you?
I wrote this comment on Dancing with Frogs just over a month ago now. I have an update, and some photos. :)
My favourite (Red Comb) was attacked by a hawk this morning. She is sort of ok. We have not been able to find any injuries. She did have some blood on her beak but my thought now is that blood belongs to the hawk and that is why she is still with us now. She is no shrinking violet and I am sure she gave that hawk one heck of a pecking.. and was thus unceremoniously dumped as too much trouble.
I don’t think this can have happened too far from the ground because she was still in the chook pen..
She was unsteady on her feet, but I think maybe that is shock, and also that she was probably dropped though none of us saw the attack, we did see the hawk sitting in a tree nearby right after. Nothing is broken, though I suspect she might have bruising we can’t see. She is still alert and still her regular loopy self personality wise.
She stayed in the nesting boxes all day with all the other girls comforting her, except for one girl on the lookout in the run, anytime a bird flew by there was much bagerk-ing and posturing from the lookout. They took it in turns – one keeps the watch, the others comfort – until it was roost time. As soon as it got dark and the other girls put themselves to bed, we took her inside because it was going to be a cold one tonight.
Right now she is safe in a box, all toasty warm (but not too warm) by the gas heater. I am resisting with all my might the constant urge to check on her. She needs her sleep. I must not touch that box until 5:30am at the earliest.
If she survives the night, before the other chooks wake up in the morning, I will install her back in the nesting boxes in a warm box she can get in and out of with food and water nearby so that she will not lose her place in the flock. My hope is that she’ll have had enough time and rest to be back to normal – if not, we will keep up the night time warm inside sleepovers until she is.
It does not matter what it is, if anything happens to the chooks it is always her it happens to and I think this is because she is my favourite. I have now officially un-favourited her, and I am going to have no favourites now. I must like them all equally. It isn’t fair to the favourite!
We will now be installing bird netting over their area, to keep them safer from flying predators. Though it is entirely possible that hawk will not return – too much trouble for no reward. If the hawk had picked one of the other girls the hawk might have had better success.
It might be time to re-visit the design of the chook pen, too.. I really want to just suck it up and bite the bullet and make them a huge totally enclosed area like the one on henblog..
Red comb did survive the night. At 6:05am I opened the box, which had been in front of the new gas heater overnight. I tell you, this was the warmest chicken I have ever held. And she was so happy to see me, and I was so happy to see her. It was raining outside so I wrapped her up in a towel so she wouldn’t get wet, and took her back out, putting her in a safe box in the nesting area.
I knew she was not out of the woods yet, that there might be internal injuries we could not see. The other half – who grew up in the country – had checked her over very carefully and could not see anything wrong. I crossed my fingers and went to bed about 6:30am (night shift) and when I got up that night she was still fine. Each day that went by and she was still here, I got more hopeful.
She did have a limp for a while and it took her a while to get back up on the roost but otherwise seemed fine.
She has made herself a new chicken friend by the name of Rosie and all appearances suggest she has been lowered on the pecking order. She used to be second chook, right after White Sussex. Now, it is White Sussex, the other two game hens, Ancona, Red Comb, and then Rose Comb (Rosie).
Now Red Comb and Rosie are inseparable. Where one goes, the other must follow. Rosie is the black chicken below next to Red Comb, eating a corn treat.
I think the reason for the demotion was that Red Comb had a limp for a while, was not on the roost at night, and was not her usual speedy self.
The chooks were locked in their run/coop for a good couple of weeks. They were not a great fan of this, being it is winter and they like to be out scratching up a storm of bugs and worms in the softer ground. On Sundays they would get let out early when the other half got home at 4 and he would be out there with them for a couple of hours so they could free range a little under his watchful eyes. Many healthy treats were given in the coop/run to keep them from being bored.
Then a couple of weeks ago, we re-did the outdoor pen. It now looks like this –
You can see the height of the pen has now been doubled to walk in height. It used to look like this – this photo was taken just after we put in a fresh sand floor back in the summer –
Chicken wire now covers the top of the enclosure. It took a good couple of days for the other half to sew it all together with binding wire.
We put in a beam at the back to support the wire some.
After this photo below was taken, I got out the pitchfork and made some holes in the dirt, for the girls digging pleasure. They had a blast.
I don’t know. I think if a predator is determined to get my girls, no amount of chicken wire or protective measures is going to be enough to save them. I think this is a reasonable compromise for the time being. In the summer, it might be rethink time. I want to build me a chicken batcave safe enough no fox or quoll or other unfriendly predator can get through. For now, I think this will prevent further hawk attacks during the day while they free range, at least.
The other great thing about this is pigeons can no longer get in and steal the food. I like the pigeons, don’t get me wrong, and I mean to set up a proper bird feeder for them. I just am not a huge fan of the lice and mites they can sometimes carry with them. Our girls have been lice and mite free for a fair while now, though.
I’ve been on the overnight shift for a month or two now, as in starting work at 10pm or midnight – I have been meaning to post this for ages but events conspired against me.
I am not sure yet if Red Comb knows she has been un-favourited. She doesn’t get treated any differently, it is just in my mind I am not allowed to call her my favourite anymore.
As I type this, White Sussex has begun her ba-gerking. There are a tonne of cockatoos and galahs flying about overhead. She will ba-gerk for that or anytime one of the other girls lays an egg.
Speaking of eggs, these crafty girls were hiding theirs somewhere. Now that they are in this enclosure, hiding is no longer an option. I also suspect our resident blue tongue lizard was eating some of the hidden eggs! But maybe one day when spring rolls around and I get back to the garden, I’ll pull out something which has gone rogue over the winter in the garden only to find a huge clump of eggs hidden there.
Zucchini plants have gone nuts!
There are some lettuces – the ones the chickens did not get to when they escaped to the “outside world” while I was giving them a treat before leaving for work – and I could not get them back in. Out of 5 only 2 lettuce survived.
A couple of secret tomato plants have sprung up. I did not plant any – these plants grow from the seeds the chickens have eaten.
The yellow Zucchini are not quite as successful as the green ones. This could be because instead of growing just one zucchini at a time, they are trying to grow many!
Testing out the iPhone app thingy for WordPress – if this works you might hear from me more often..
Can’t see how to insert a pic yet I was going to show you the chook pen with freshly added and raked sand they now have a large area to wander in during the day. It once had lawn but apparently they are not fans of that and they dug it up and ate it all.
Chickens are a little crazy!!
Ok I found the pic thing will give it a try
Broody!!
My favourite chicken has taken to sitting on the eggs the other chooks are laying. She isn’t obsessive about it, she is more than happy to be kicked off the eggs when I collect them, but if the eggs are there she wants to sit on them.
Today I cleaned out the chook pen and took some pics.. Here is the empty pen –
Zeolite is a nitrogen absorber. Once it has absorbed all the nitrogen in the chicken coop I can use it on the garden as a fertiliser.
Here is the Zeolite in the bags we buy it in – it is $10 per bag. It lasts somewhere between 2-4 months just depending on how often one is able to scoop out the poop. If I don’t touch it at all, it’ll need changing in about 2 months – if I scoop regularly it’ll be 4 months.
Here is the outgoing zeolite and rice hulls. It is probably about 3/4 of the amount initially put in – the chooks scratch quite a lot of the material out across the months but thankfully a large portion of that material ends up on the pavers we have out near the door so that can be scooped up with a shovel and put into the garden. And of course there is quite an addition of chook poo to the material!
This material goes onto the garden as mulch and fertiliser and the garden loves it. There are some seeds in there so it does need a little more weeding than your average garden but it is so worth it with the results one gets.
And here is the pen when the new material has been added. The chooks come out and cluck and scratch up a storm, they love the new stuff.
I try to keep the zeolite in the middle of the pen and put the rice hulls (the cheaper material) out towards the edges in the hope more zeolite will stay in the pen.
So there you have it – a clean chicken pen, happy chooks scratching about, a happy garden thanks to the awesome fertiliser, and a happy me because I feel better when it is all clean and purty.
I kinda like this photo.
As soon as I take the iphone out she stops posing in whatever cute pose I wanted to take the photo of, so I keep ending up with shots like this. :)