Dogs…

…may be man’s best friend, but leave much to be desired should you be a chicken.

(I think you see where this is going.)

I came home on Friday to the carcases of the legbar and the white orpington.  In front of our neighbour’s drive were bones, entrails, wing feathers and one foot of a splash orpington.  The other splash was just a pile of feathers in front of the neighbour’s drive two down from us.  Saturday morning, I popped on a jacket and rubber boots over my nightshirt and trotted off at six a.m. to the coop in the vain hope that one or more had miraculously survived and returned to their ‘safe’ place, only to discover on the return trip a pile of feathers next to our steps that used to be the blue-laced hen.  I can only assume the two cockerels are rotting in a field somewhere.

The culprits? A yellow lab and a weimaraner from about two miles to the back of us.  None of my neighbours had the number of the owner, but they knew where he lived, so at 9:30pm I drove over.  Those who know me know I hate confrontation and will do almost anything to avoid it — unless you’re immediate family and I’m not sure what that says about me — so why I felt completely fine going over there by myself and addressing the issue is beyond me.  Perhaps because I knew I was completely in the right to do so.

The guy who answered the door was dog-sitting.  The chicken murderers dogs had taken-off when he was walking them and were gone for about seven hours (at least three of which can be accounted for at my place).  They’d since been brought back and had been locked in the shed for taking off.  The owners are away until Tuesday.  The man looking after them was properly uncomfortable and repentant and polite and had not realised the dogs had destroyed my flock.  To be fair on him, he’s been put in an awkward position.  They’re not his dogs, and I have it from the neighbours that the same two dogs have been seen around here before.

Two of my neighbours have chickens, and they’re rightly worried that the dogs will be back now that they associate this place with fun and food and (blood) sport.  The dogs had better watch out, though, because they’ll be shot should one of the farmers find them worrying the livestock.

What do I find the most…interesting…about this situation?

I find it most interesting that I’m not angry.  What’s done is done and I can’t change it, and as the adage goes: there’s no use crying over spilt milk.

If it were to happen a second time…w-e-l-l that changes things.  Then I’d be pissed.

RIP little chickens.

 

Alpha

 

All Growed Up

Remember these cute little chicks from back in April?

And how they turned into dinosaur chickens with attitude, smokin’ weed?

Well the f’ugly dinosaur stage is over. Take a look at these beauties.

Leftmost, you have the blue-laced orpington.  Centre is the black orpington.  Rightmost and back are the splash orpingtons.

(I’m thinking the feathers on the first two would look lovely on a hat.)

And *sigh*, as always, click on the picture to see a non-fuzzy version.  I’m at my wits-end, trying to figure this out.  It’s not the size of the picture I upload, it’s not the theme type.  Is it the way WordPress interfaces with what my camera outputs?  Or maybe the way WordPress interfaces with my photo software programme?  It’s time to break out the big guns…and go ask for help.

 

Jonesin’

Not me. I have a steady supply of good quality chocolate that I can get my hands on at any time.

I’m not kidding.

No.  I’m talkin’ about my chicks.  (Of course.)  Don’t worry, once I finally end up with kids, I’m pretty sure I’ll be bloggin’ about them all the time instead of the chickens. This, of course, means I’ll be talking about poo and lack of sleep.  I know this because I have a lot of friends with kids.

Anyway, see these chickens?  Are they there because they think I’m so frickin’ fantabulous?  No.  They’re there because I wasn’t fast enough with the crack cocaine porridge oats.

[Editor's note:  the chicken in the door frame is no more.  Unfortunately, she had a prolapsed oviduct that took its tole and it was best to not let her suffer.]

 

Chick update

It looks like I have a flock of hoodlums on my hands. 

Or maybe they’re just pre-teens with attitude?

Is anyone else humming the prologue score to West Side Story?

 

‘Chick update’ update

Turns out I’ve got my grade eleven — or was it grade ten? (female biology teacher; not Mrs Schnablegger) — biology lesson in the back yard, and I’m not talking photosynthesis.

Remember how I was a bit miffed that two of the new chicks are most definitely not Blue Orpingtons and I wasn’t sure what they were? Turns out they’re Splash Orpingtons. Turns out that when you breed Blue on Blue you will hatch 25% Splash Orpington, 25% Black Orpington and 50% Blue Orpington. Info taken from this breeder’s website, which also says: Sometimes I have the breeding pen setup with Black hens over a Splash cockerel – this produces 100% Blue Orpington chicks.

Okay. I just tried doing the little dominant/recessive gene chart we were taught in said biology class, working backwards to get the above results, and I can’t get it to work. Looks like this is a step up from Mendel’s peas…either that or my memory of the lesson is a bit hazy after *cough* twenty years. Yay for Wikipedia, though! Looking at the handy-dandy charts half way down Mendel’s page, it could be that it works like this. (Happy to be set straight by any biology geeks out there.) (On a side note: I’m sure I’ve read a good (semi-?) fictional novel that I cannot for the life of me remember the title of about Mendel’s relative who was a [midget/little person/insert PC term, please, because I don't know what it is]. Anyone know which novel I’m talking about?)

And now that I’ve got that out of my system, here are the latest chick pics, taken when they were three weeks old. Word to the unwary: they’ve reached the beginning of their f’ugly stage.

Mama on the lookout.

Mama on the lookout.

 

Chick update

At exactly two weeks old (when the pics were taken), here is the next generation of our flock:

Not sure what happened, mind you.  They’re all supposed to be blue orpingtons.  Looks like we’ve got two blue and two black — or maybe two black and two lavender?  Never having raised chickens before…maybe the darker ones roan-out?  What’s that?  No, I didn’t really think so, either.  Do I go back to the Ebay guy and say, “Hey, I paid a bit over the average specifically for blue orpington eggs and two of them weren’t?” It’s not as if he can send me more eggs — our hen is no longer broody.  To be honest, I don’t really care what colour the birds are, I’m just miffed that what was advertised and what I paid for is not what we received.  Was it active dishonesty or an honest mistake?  The former makes my blood boil.  I can happily forgive the latter.

May's plum blossoms (Look, Ma! No contrails in the sky.)

 

Don’t mess with Colin

What hubby received in his inbox this morning:

Dear Mr Anderson,

After protracted negotiations with your cockerel, I managed to carry out the requested survey.  The structural report will be ready roughly by the end of this week.

(I can’t stop giggling.)

(Truly.  I can’t.)

Oh.  And who’s Colin?

Colin is our cockerel — christened so just this week by our neighbours, because that’s what he does.  Constantly.

 

Chirpy-cheep. Chirpy-chirpy-cheep-cheep.

Cottontail, our white orpington, went broody on us back in February when there was a foot of snow on the ground.  (For those who’d like a good description — and a funny story — about what happens when a chicken goes broody click here and here.)  As we were still in the depths of winter, we were having none of it and locked her out of the coop (i.e., her nesting spot) during the day until she cooled down.  After about three days, she was back to her non-broody self.

Now fast forward three weeks when hubby and I came home to this after work:

Specimen A

This, my friends, is what a broody hen looks like.

So, seeing as the snow had gone, and seeing as how the hen was hell-bent on raising a brood of her own, and seeing as how we want to build our flock of hens up to beyond three, and — most importantly –  seeing as how the idea of playing with cute balls of yellow fluff sends shivers of excitement running through me…it was decided that we’d let her go to it this time and see what happened.

But where to get eggs?  Ours are fertile, but the cockerel and the orpington are siblings and we aren’t too keen on the idea of inter-breeding.  At this point, hubby would prefer to stay with pure-breeds so that knocks Flopsy and Mopsy’s eggs out of the running (not that they didn’t try; remember when I returned from London to find a clutch of eggs under the broody hen?).   So I went on the internet.  You know where you find fertilised eggs in the UK?  You find fertilised eggs on E-bay.   That’s right.  E-bay.  When they arrive at your house they look like this:

Specimens B through G

Go figure.

So, on April Fools day, using a pencil, I marked the six E-bay eggs with an X and placed them under our hen.    Then we waited, removing any eggs without an X out from under her in the mean-time.   Now fast forward to yesterday.  Yesterday, I heard the tiniest cheep-cheep coming out from the pile of white feathers that is the hen.

Please meet three of the four newest members of our flock (click on the picture for a larger image):

And here’s a sneak-peek of what they should look like when all growed up:

(Yes, yes, yes.  I know it’s ‘grown up’. )

And in case you’d like to hear the pure awesomeness that is their peep (and who wouldn’t)…

 

Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been…

This past weekend, I went to:

Where Graeme and I ate breakfast at:

Lady Bertram sat across from us on the tube:

(She was disguised as Lindsay Duncan, but I saw through the facade.)

With friends, we went to see Six Degrees of Separation:

(Yes, that’s Giles. *swoon*)

At:

The next day we chilled in our friends’ back yard.  (No pictures were taken using my camera the whole weekend — very unusual.)  Then I returned to Aberdeen, an inch of snow on the ground, and a broody chicken with seven eggs under her.

Neighbour:  Not an egg was laid while you were away.  We looked everywhere!

Crystal: Did you look under the broody hen?

Neighbour: No.

Crystal:  Take a look under the broody hen.

Neighbour:  Oh my.