Bird Sigthings...and Disappearings(?)

This morning, my eldest monkey, who is in charge of keeping care of our flock of ducks and quail, asked me if I would mind taking care of her ducks for her this morning, which is a rather unusual request. Our conversation:

Kid: "Mom, can you let my ducks out of their house later?"

Me: "Of course. Why don't you just let them out now though?"

Kid: "I want to wait because I saw and heard a spotted owl come out of the woods and fly over the bog. It was so cool, Mom!"

Indeed, that does sound cool. We often hear, if not actually see, barred owls calling back and forth in our woods, but a spotted owl is rare.

If you grew up in the Pacific Northwest, then you are probably very familiar with the spotted owl as an enormous thorn in the side of the local logging industry. The owls were driven to near endangered status as a result of habitat loss from massive clear-cuts and harvesting of old-growth forests. When the US Fish and Wildlife Service put extreme restrictions on logging in order to help restore the spotted owl population, the logging industry was hit hard. Displaced, laid-off loggers were infuriated, countering with a macabre campaign to kill the owls and have done with it.

These and other catchy slogans were the logging industry's reply to the USFWS's 1991 court order to prohibit logging in national forests.

I digress, but the point I'm trying to underscore here is how extremely rare and magnificent a sight that a spotted owl, swooping low over our mist-covered bog, must have been for my kiddo to have beheld.

The reason that I suspect that the owl chose our farm for his morning fly-by is slightly less magical - breakfast.

The night preceding, we had a quail jailbreak of epic proportions. Someone didn't latch the door on the hutch and our quail decided to go on a walkabout. By the time the breach was noted, approximately three quarters of our flock were out and about, well distributed throughout our acreage. We literally beat the bushes and climbed through thickets and brambles to try to recapture as many as we could before dusk fell. Upon final head count, we were still 15-20 birds short. Somewhere in the hay field and bog, the little rogues bedded down for the night.

Enter the owl.

The Boggy Hollow breakfast buffet was just too tasty for him to pass up.

At least our loss was a gain for a critter that really needed the help. Not to mention, my kid got what is very possibly a once-in-a-lifetime bird sighting, in her own backyard no less.

So thanks, Mr. Owl, for choosing us for your dining needs. May I recommend a hearty dessert of Norway rat and field mouse?

The Days of our Goats

...or maybe "As the Goat Turns"? "Guiding Goat"?

Well it's a soap opera of some sort up there in goatlandia. Who's pregnant, who's the daddy, is he your brother? - stuff like that.

Using my entirely unscientific method of staring at goat butts and boobies, and visually gauging goat girth, I believe that 5 of our 6 lassies are pregnant.

The one that is most obvious is our dear Blue.


Blue and her steamy goat breath say "Hi".

While our sweet Bluey has always been a low rider of generous proportions, she is now honest to God wider than she is tall. Drink it in, peeps -


Girl knows how to work it!

As a basis for comparison, I snapped a pic of Blue next to our only confirmed non-pregnant goat, a yearling mini-Lamancha named Hop. See the difference for yourselves.



Our other girls are looking pretty rotund as well. Here are Teeny and Oreo, yearling twins who weren't supposed to be bred this year -



Because we didn't get to engineer who was bred to whom and when, we have a whole lot of surprises coming our way. I *think* that Blue will go first, but Chardonnay is looking pretty plump too, so it's hard to say. I'll be keeping an eye on their udders, watching for them to "bag up", as that seems to be the single best way to tell when they're getting close.

The excitement, the drama, the clothes nibbling - are you sure you don't want a goat of your own? 'Cuz I know a lady who might be able to hook you up...

Slip-Sliding Away

I fell down twice today while doing critter chores. I'm in my mid-30's, if I haven't outgrown my clumsiness yet, I think it's safe to consider myself officially, permanently gravitationally-challenged. Maybe my next move is to take preventative measures like wearing a helmet at all times, or sewing a hemorrhoid donut pillow into my chore pants?

All I know right now is this - two wipeouts in the mud and all of the animals tucked in for the night means that pajama/cocktail hour has arrived and that soon, all shall be right with the world again. :)

Cue the Banjos

Guess what the girls found today?



MORE BUNNIES!

Five (we think) teeny, little, incredibly inbred bunnies. Unless Prince Charming's neutering didn't take (how could it not? His huevos are gone), these are the children of Cinderella and Leap, her son that we'd thought was a daughter. Keeping in mind that Cinderella and Prince Charming are brother and sister, and that Leap is the product of their "union", with Leap then going on to father babies with his mother/aunt Cinderella, well... I guess that I shouldn't be surprised if the bunnies hop backwards or have horns or something. Good gravy!

So we're looking to re-home our sweet Mr. Leap, as we cannot afford another $120 rabbit vasectomy. He's extremely tame, since being handled practically from birth. He's also obviously not your average aggressive buck, as he masqueraded successfully as a girl all this time, and he's been the picture of sweetness with these new babies, bringing Cinny mouthsful of hay and his own hair to help her build her nest. Any takers? ;)

In another 6-8 weeks we'll also have the babies up for grabs. Their gender and coloration are still unknown, but if you're interested in a sweet little backwoods bunny with an "interesting" family history, give me a shout.

7/23/11 Update: The babies didn't make it. We're not sure what went wrong. :( We are still trying to re-home Leap, if anyone is interested.

Garden Woes

Garden-wise this year, not much has been happening, let alone on the scale on which we'd imagined it. It's a huge bummer, because a) we're used to having an abundance of organic, homegrown produce at this time of year for eating and canning, which isn't going to happen, and b) because we don't get to try again for another 9 months.

We were foiled on a couple of fronts, mainly, that this Spring and Summer were both slow to arrive and then failed to dazzle weather-wise. This is the second ho-hum summer in a row here, and it's bumming me out.

Our other failing was our soil. We saw it's richness and deep black color, and foolishly assumed that it would be adequately fertile, as it had not been gardened for nearly a decade. Wrong-o! We amended with goat poop, bunny poop and a worm casting/bat guano liquid fertilizer, but everything except the weeds seems to be growing in slow-mo.

This sorry state of affairs leaves me to wonder if there will be any way at all for Bill and I to carry on with our Farmer, Feed Thyself challenge. There's just nothing there to eat yet! The pumpkins look promising, and the lettuce is kicking, but most everything else is still in it's infancy. So our planned FFT start date of August 1st is looking quite unlikely. :(

And They Lived Happily Ever After...

You guys remember the bunnies, Goldie & Cinderella, right?



My girls got these girls last March. They're from the same litter, and have always got along like peas & carrots, happy as clams, etc. The guy we bought them from assured us that they were both girls. Well, guess whaa-aat???



BAM!

Scarlet discovered the babies this morning during "critter patrol". She came in from feeding them with a handful of bunny fluff, highly concerned that the bunnies were suddenly shedding so much. Her Dad went with her to check on things and saw the mound of fluff wiggling. So Scarlet came bounding in to fetch me and my camera and here's what I saw-



And yes that's me cooing like an idiot over those little hairless rats. I can't help myself. They're horrifically ugly but so darn cute at the same time. We're not really sure where to go from here. Should we take the daddy out of the cage? I mean, it's been 24 hours, and so far, so good, so????

One thing is for sure, he's getting "clipped" PRONTO. In the mean time, minor adjustments have been made. It was decided that Goldie was just too feminine a name for a boy bun-bun, thus he has been re-named "Prince Charming". Charming indeed, the way he knocked up his sister. The scandal of it!

And so, at this point we've decided to let them be as they are. Goldie Prince Charming has actually demonstrated some very protective behavior over his babies, standing in front of the nest like so, every time we try to take a peek and count the babies.



Bill said that Cinderella was giving him the stink-eye too, but he managed to do a quick count of the babies, and we believe that we have five. The critter population at Boggy Hollow went up 50% overnight!

Now, what in the heck am I supposed to do with all of these bunnies?

A Series of Unfortunate Events

This is my Spikey-boy-



This is Spike saying Hello!



This is Spike discovering my camera strap-



This is my camera being hurled to the ground, landing in wet straw and goat turds.



Archie - Wasn't me.

You win some, You lose some

That statement is particularly true of home brewing and wine making. Our homegrown cider seems to be fermenting well.


Note it's promising "krausen" as Billy, the beer snob would doubtless have me point out. ;)

Let's just hope that it keeps on keeping on and doesn't go funky. We unfortunately lost an entire 5-gallon batch of cider last year to some sort of mystery contaminant and had to compost the whole thing. Talk about heartbreak! I feel pretty confident that we will not face that same problem with this batch though, since we not only washed and dried our apples well, but also used a steam juicer rather than a fruit press to juice them, effectively pasteurizing the juice and hopefully, hopefully killing all the bad guys before adding our little yeasty friends.

So, we have 2 1/2 gallons of apple cider, 3 gallons of dandelion wine, 24 bottles of grape wine, 1 gallon of rose hip wine and 1/2 gallon of apricot schnapps to the good. Alas, we lost the blackberry wine this week.

It, like the others, had been somewhat neglected during our move. Somewhere along the way, something funky snuck in and messed it up. My first clue was a bit of white mold in the airlock. Though most of the home brewing websites that I googled said that a little mold in the airlock was no big deal, I'm not really one to gamble with food poisoning and/or going blind. So of course, I had Billy smell it. Our eventual conclusion was that it had probably turned to vinegar, which would have been fine if I could have been sure that it was safe to use. I wasn't, so it too ended up on the compost pile.

Drink up, little wormies!

Sometimes it's the Little Things...

We've been packing up this house, bit by bit, for more than 2 months now. I started with our least essential items - baby books, my wedding dress, Christmas decorations, and slowly progressed toward our more everyday items - towels, clothes, dishes. In this weird period of living without 90% of my stuff, I've had a chance to rethink my take on simplicity and which material goods have truly become essentials, as in, the stuff you should pack 10 minutes before you leave your house for good. Here are my findings-

Stuff I actually needed:

-Cell phone chargers
-An old-school paper phone book
-Corkscrew
-Deodorant, hairbrush & toothbrushes
-Diana Gabaldon Books
-My Knitting
-Towels
-Sharpies
-COFFEE MAKER

Stuff I thought I needed:

-DVDs (As if I have the time. These were actually more for the girls, but they prefer to follow me around asking Whatcha doin'? every 10 seconds instead.)
-Curling Iron (I curl my hair a few times a year. Did I think that someone was going to ask me to prom between now and the weekend?)
-Toilet plunger - I'm pretty glad that this turned out to be unneeded.
-Blankets (It's been in the upper 80's and 90's all week, which is like living on the surface of the sun to a born and bred Washingtonian.)
-My P-touch labeler (Who the hell am I, Martha Stewart?)

Ahhh... live and learn.

Do you suffer from dangerously high self-esteem?

Try running from yard to yard through your neighborhood, wielding an 8-foot long salmon net, in pursuit of an 8-ounce chicken. That should destroy your dignity quickly enough. Should you insist upon trying it for yourself, allow me to share my insights with you regarding my experience -

What you will net:

-Innumerable scratches from blackberry brambles.
-Looks from neighbors and strangers, ranging from surprised to highly amused.
-Poorly timed, very specific questions about the pros and cons of chicken husbandry.
-Half a dozen spider webs on your person.
-Intimate knowledge of your neighbors' back yards.

What you will not net:

-The escapee

In the end, she flew back over the fence herself. I love my birds, but I was about ready to write this one off.


Scarlet, with the white menace herself, aka &%$@#&! bird

Strawberry Surprise

With each hen that has commenced to lay, I have been delighted anew by the pride that I feel in my healthy, happy bird, and in the comfort of the forthcoming abundance of the near-perfect food that is an organic egg.

Having three hens that were laying fairly regularly, we've been "in the eggs", reaping on average about a dozen and a half per week. Enough to meet our holiday baking needs and still give some away to friends & family. All of our girls were up and running, with the exception of one.

Strawberry, an Americauna hen, was our lone holdout. She was by far the gangliest and most high-strung of our flock, and the very last to show signs of maturity or maternity. Frankly, she had me a little worried that she was either infertile or unwell in some capacity. That is until last week, when she started exhibiting a few of the behaviors that I have noted in our hens that are laying, namely, a heightened startle response and a LOT more vocalization. Sure enough, a few days after the onset of "the signs", the girls went out to feed the chicks and said that Strawberry was in the nest box. Hurrah!

Alas, poor Strawberry labored and clucked for the better part of the day, with nothing to show for it by day's end. The next morning though, upon letting the chickies out of the hen house, I find 2 eggs in the nest box - both brown. Ok, this was weird. We have 4 hens, three of whom are Americaunas and one Silver-Laced Wyandotte. Americaunas are a favorite chicken to keep because they lay beautiful and unusually colored eggs - light olive green to sky blue. The Wyandottes lay a lovely pinkish-brown egg. So, I should have 3 blue/green and one brown per day. How in the heck had I ended up with 2 brown?

Well, as it turns out, the chicks sold to me as Americaunas, were in fact, actually "Easter Eggers". Essentially, they are mutts, but with a large enough slice of the Americauna/Aracauna features to be sold as such. Though she looks every bit an Americauna externally, Strawberry's mixed heritage was outed upon her laying her first milk-chocolate colored egg. Easter Eggers, it turns out, can lay just about any color egg - brown, white, olive, pink, blue or green.

Though we were surprised by her eggs, we were not in the least disappointed by them. After all, our family are essentially mutts as well - Ukrainian, German, Welsh, Scottish, Cherokee and English, among others - and are better for having so many varied and rich influences in our blood and in our traditions.

We now can expect in the neighborhood of 2 dozen eggs per week! Besides giving some of our surplus away, and perhaps letting the girls sell a few for pocket money, I'm hoping to find a beekeeper or orchard owner who wouldn't mind swapping some eggs for honey or fruit, to be made into jams, wines, ciders & meads. Oh the possibilities!

Freaky Egg

When I went out to lock the hens up tonight, I checked the nest box just for good measure, and this freaky mess is what I found -



Amelia hadn't laid for 2 days previous to this. By the way - the shell is basically non-existent. It felt like a warmish water balloon. Ew...

So, my questions now are -

a) Should I be concerned about Amelia's health?

b) Can I eat this egg?

c) Do I even WANT to eat this egg? (At the moment - NO.)

Help!

Satan's Fruit Roll-up

Cherries are expensive. And, I may have gone a little overboard and bought a pound or three too many, just as my family's infatuation with the short-lived fruit abruptly ended. So, I found myself with a mountain of cherries, going south fast. What to do?

I froze some, turned some into wine, and my old standby for fruit on the cusp of funkytown, made some into fruit leather. Thumbs up on the first two! The wine is coming along well and I have a good amount of cherries frozen and awaiting their final destination in the form of a crisp or a smoothie. The fruit leather....not so much.

As they usually do, the girls tore into the fruit leather the minute it came out of the dehydrator, as did I. In fact, we all took our first (and last) bite at the same time. Whereas Livy tried to muster a compliment for my efforts through her just-ate-a-lemon pucker, Scarlet cut straight to the chase - "Ewwww!". Yes, they were hideous. Inexplicably foul.

Needless to say, we all promptly spit out our horrid cherries and composted the remainder. Unfortunately, fruit leather has a nasty habit of glomming itself onto your teeth and staying there as long as it pleases, toothbrushes be damned. How could something so good go so horribly, nauseatingly wrong?