New Roosters

Our hens have been without a rooster for a couple of months, ever since our wonderful rooster, Red, died. I think every flock of range poultry needs a gentlemanly rooster or two. Here are my reasons which are pure opinion based on observation:

1. Order - a good rooster is the flock leader. Squabbling between hens seems to be much less with a rooster in charge.
   
2. Locating the flock - in our pasture we're restoring, having a crowing rooster helps both me and adventurous hens locate the flock when it's not obvious
   
3. Fertility - you can hatch your own chicks. This is really easy with a broody mama hen.
   
4. I like roosters - they strut, they crow, they tackle hens in torrid spats of (brief) passion

So some of our friends up the holler raise hens, and had some excess roosters that they begged us to take. I picked them up this morning before work. They are beautiful Rhode Island Reds. When I introduce birds to an existing flock, I always do it at night. From experiance, any sex of chicken introduced during the day ends up getting it's butt kicked by every bird in the flock, or chased into the woods to be a bobcat snack. Introduced at night, the squabbling isn't too bad.

Thier business is the ladies and business is good!

Turkey Dinners Dining

Here are some future Thanksgiving dinners having dinner. I found it ironic.

Here is a young Tom who is doing everything he can to show us that he's much better keeping as breeding stock that as someone's meal. Turkeys are pretty neat.

Molting Chickens

Our egg productionis really, really low still. This is because the hens have taken a break to shed then regrow new feathers, a process called molting, just in time for winter. This can be very awkward looking, like the hens have mange - check out the black hen in the (crappy) pic blow.



The low egg production can be pretty depressing, and sometimes it feels like the hens will never start laying. Having extra eggs is always a great thing - they make great holiday gifts. I'm looking forward to Carla's deviled eggs at Thanksgiving...they're so stinkin' good.

Cheap Insulator

Part of the hotwire that I'm running down to the pasture from the charger at our house goes through parts of the holler in which there are no good trees to nail insulators on. I talked about this project here. I can't hammer a post or a piece of rebar in the ground to attach an insulator either because much of the sloping hillside is limestone bedrock and outcroppings. So I started making the insulators like the ones above.

It's just some plastic tubing and baling wire off of a straw bale tied in a loop. That is, I had some hollow plastic tubing which I pushed some wire into. I twisted this into a loop around the hot wire. Then I attatched another piece of wire around a tree and through the loop. The tension on the line keeps the hotwire in place. I can use smaller, scraggly trees as posts this way, and there's no shortage of those downslope. It costs me like 5 cents an insulator this way, if that.

Fridge Magnets

Our young son Simmey's toy fridge magnets. We noticed that the little guy had put them all in a line. The crazy thing that really suprised us is that all the magnets are the front magnets. We're really wondering where all the back magnets are...

Wired Woods

I got some more work done on the hotwire that I'm snaking down the mountains to power up the fence down in the pasture. You can see the line on the right along with the yellow insulator. That's a bench looking up the holler. Most of the going was A LOT steeper.
Fossils - the land I love used to be ocean. Most of the fossils we find are crinoid rings and anal spines, shark teeth, various types of corals and today I found my first shell.

Here's an old homestead wall down near the creek at the bottom of the holler. Squirt (the Yellow Dart of the Woods) is pretty proud of himself here - between you and me sometimes he acts like he owns the place. You can see the hotwire coming down the center of the pic.

Tommorrow I need to tie into the fence, run a ground wire down to the fence, mount the charger on the cedar log post I put in the ground today, and wire an outside outlet to plug the charger in.

Hotspot Healin

Feta, our classy female Pyrennees, developed a hotspot on the back of her neck last week. A hotspot is a topical infection on a dog. A lot of things can start it, usually some type of irritant - a burr, insect bite, cut, or even stress. In Miss Feta's case, it was two ticks that had latched on to the back of her neck. She started scratching, and scratching. The fact that it's rained cats and dogs the past couple of months didn't help.

At first, I noticed a reddish rash one night. By the next morning, it had blown up into a full fledged infection. The spot was large 4x4 inches, and the skin was white, exuding pus (gross). I trimmed all the hair from the area, all the way down to the infected skin. At first, I was washing the site with hydrogen peroxide and covering it with Neosporin.

Ms Feta, you're healing up quite nice

Apparently, this was the wrong thing to do. I called a great local vet, and they set me straight. On a wound like this, you actually want it to dry up. I left it alone, and the wound has healed up nicely, aided by the long needed and happily greeted current dry weather we've had this week. Her hair is growing back nicely, and in a couple of weeks, the spot won't even be visible.