dog days redux
Back in Texas, it’s dog days. Definitely not chicken days. One of our chickens died yesterday, probably just from the heat. I feel terrible about it. I think she got trapped in the shade island out there and didn’t want to go out in the sun even for the short time it would take to get to the water supply.
She’s in the freezer now, poor thing. Not to be eaten, but we can’t bury her in our rocky yard, and interment in the trashcan on a Monday is not going to happen when trash pickup is Friday and it’s hotter than fsck outside.
This is a dishonorable end for our Frieda. I think I need to move somewhere with dirt and a family graveyard.
The only thing thriving around here is the unknown cucurbit taking over one of the garden beds. It won’t set fruit in this heat so we don’t know what it is.
pointy kitty
A couple of days ago I noticed that we were going through rather a lot of chicken feed out there in the coop during the dark hours when I know the ladies are getting their beauty roost. It’s the old chicken tractor, but I removed the bottom at one point to put better wheels on, so it’s not critter-proof. And so far so good; the only real predator at hand is our own dog. But we were certainly feeding something uninvited. So I picked up the feeder last night before dark.
Took it back out there this morning and all was well, until Milo the PITA dog came outside and promptly went ape shit. Barking snarling digging slavering biting at the deck–and from underneath, hissing and gaping mouth and teeth, which I had to quick make sure wasn’t a rattler. Between the decking I couldn’t see much, but finally I got a look at fur that didn’t seem to be dog, and then a snout. And then an eyeball, followed closely by resumed teeth and hissing.
I saw a baby possum once on my back porch and it was cute, but there is nothing cute about this grownup one lurking under my deck, actually fighting back at my fighting dog. There’s a malevolent look about the masked eye, the pointy snout. And you know there’s a ratty tail hanging there somewhere. I hope the dog has convinced it that this is not a comfortable neighborhood. The free night-time buffet is definitely closed for the foreseeable future.
All of which is to say, I’ve promised to get some writing done this summer–it’s close enough to summer already, here–and this is the writing hour, and I hate like hell to pull up a blank page and get back to work on Annie. Blogging seems a fair warm-up.
fowl holiday
I know you’ve been quite worried about whether I’d be able to integrate themes. But never fear: a Christmas chicken has joined the Christmas moose on the mantelpiece.
I’m really more into fusion than integration. It’s just easier.
the duplicity of hens
Milo has never, to my knowledge, crawled underneath our deck. Until yesterday.
We have a floating deck off the back patio. It’s low, only one to two feet off the ground most of the way. Nobody much hangs out under there except the chickens and the occasional toad. Mojo doesn’t fit and even Milo, the smaller dog, would have to scrape along under there on his belly. I crawled under as far as I could, which wasn’t very, a while back when we were trying to figure out where all the chicken eggs were going, but reached no conclusion. Lately I’ve been gathering three or four eggs a day from the straw bale nest so we figured we were getting them all.
However. Yesterday Milo was in the backyard, and then disappeared. I called him, and, being the very very good dog he is when he isn’t being horrid, he came crawling out from under the deck, chewing madly. With a large quantity of egg yolk just dripping down his chin. He had to have grabbed up least two eggs before reversing position and snaking his way out of there. Proof positive, finally.
This caused me some concern, since I have no idea how many eggs might have been under there, or how old they were. But he seems to have come through without harm. We’re greedy for eggs ourselves, so this morning T. stapled a chicken-wire skirt around the deck. The hens looked mildly put out but they get over themselves faster than any human alive.
I spent the morning setting up my baby glass studio, out on the patio. The two cherry tomato plants are showing their first open blossoms. All’s right with the world here, as long as we don’t listen to the news–
doing our bit
Overheard in our backyard today: “Would you shut up? It’s just an egg!”
I turned 47 last week. It was a very poultry birthday. There’s no limit to the amount of chicken stuff you can find out there in the world of things, and a lot of it ended up wrapped in pretty chicken paper. For me. Thanks, I love ya!
My real birthday present I went and fetched at Blue Moon today, a bunch of lampwork tools including a whole wrist-and-arm support, torch bracket, mille-marver setup. Glass shears, a masher, a fiber blanket. Even leather elbow rests. It’s going to be a whole different art form now that I can sit down at it. Now that it’s nearly cool enough outside to embrace the torch.
And then, I guess I lost my mind. I’ve been thinking about a coverstitch machine. More than thinking about it; in fact, I swore off spending any more time trying to get a good hem on a knit fabric until I had one. And…notice the subtle shift of verb tense there?
I really needed a coverstitch machine. Since I was in Austin anyway, I went to the only dealer I knew in town to see what they had. Accidentally I bought the Elna 434. It was on sale. It’s the same as the Janome 1000, I’m told. But it’s an Elna! So it’s cuter!
Ahem. I don’t think very many of my readers sew. Heck, I can count all my readers with the digits at hand, and most of them are looking for computer info. Suffice it to say, I’m spoiled. And I have a brand new coverstitch machine. And no chickens on it, at all.
I guess T. is getting that miter saw for his birthday after all. Parity or bust. Probably both, at this rate.
happy chicken
Frieda, the Ameraucana, is happy and healthy again. I realize I forgot until this minute to mention she was sick, but your long anxious vigil is over…she’s looking okay. And wonder of wonders, she laid a small egg today for the first time in months. A green one. Perfectly normal for an easter-egg chicken such as herself.
As the spring warmed up she began to lay soft-shell eggs, then eggs without shells, and then she really looked and acted very ill. For about two weeks there I was expecting to find a dead chicken every morning–for several days I had to carry her from the water bowl in the people yard back to the chicken tractor in the late afternoons. Little by little she perked up and then I began to see her running down June beetles pretty well and figured she was recovering. And now an egg–we got four eggs from our four ladies today, and it’s been a while. They’ve officially adopted the under-bale nest for all their egg-laying needs. It’s a good spot for them; not so great for me as I have to stick my hand in there blind and feel around for eggs. But that’s fine as long as we don’t get snakes. Big snakes, that is. These ladies quite relish the small ones.
(not) smarter than the average chicken
Rain, a blessing. It’s been a long hot summer, which started in April or so, and the city went on first stage water restriction in June…the river got low…the crepe myrtle refused to bloom…tomatoes gave up the ghost…and the chicken yard dried to a powdery dust bath that promised instant slime at the first touch of water. So when it looked like rain, I asked T if he could find us some straw to spread around out there.
Well, that was easy, just give the boy a chance to do a truck chore and he’s on it. He came home with a bale and spread it around, and you’d have thought it was Disneyland for chickens. They were entertained for days. We let them out every day in the people yard, where there’s a lawn and bushes and junebugs and a great chicken cave under the deck, but when they are in the chicken yard, they are busy scratching through the straw. The rain came and the straw did its job and it’s much nicer walking out there in the chicken shit yard than it could have been.
But the weird thing is that upon experiencing straw, the ladies immediately rejected their nest box, which up until now has been filled with shredded newspaper (see, we didn’t have a truck or the wherewithal to haul bales of anything). Instead, they laid eggs out in the rock garden, in a funny little hollow not so well hidden behind a piece of wire mesh. Once we found that cache, they moved back into the chicken yard, under the tarp that covers the remaining half of the straw. Then they scratched out a place under the bale itself, which is propped on a couple of pier beams. Quite a few days I don’t find any eggs, or only one, and I don’t know if production is down or stealth is up.
So I put straw in the nest box…didn’t help. I put straw in the garden in their preferred spot. I set out an extra nest box in the human side of the yard. I get down on my knees and peer under the straw bale every day, I search both sides of that moldy tarp. I suspect everyone of thievery–the dogs, the snakes, the neighbors.
But meanwhile, it’s raining. Just nicely, a couple times a week. Not all the grass is dead yet; and maybe the lawn will spring back. The girls are doing a good job on the junebugs so the grub problem should be under control. The crepe myrtles are beginning to bloom–weird, at the end of August, but so be it.
School starts on Wednesday, so the men will be off on their respective pursuits. It’ll be just me and the hens. I’ll be working way too hard–and they’d better get busy, too. I want my eggs.
dog days
The Fourth is not a happy holiday for Milo. He’s terrified by the popping and zinging of fireworks, sounds which start around here at about midnight on the 2nd and will doubtless continue through Sunday evening–unless somebody burns down the neighborhood first, which is not so unlikely this year. Last night he spent a couple hours trying to worm his way underneath the bed, though there is no room under there for him to even breathe once he’s wedged in.
I was feeling sorry for him until this afternoon after I finished cooking the key lime pie and took a jar of sun tea outside to set on the deck and heard him growling at me as he gnawed on…something…
Something with feathers. And feet.
So the two little Things met a tragic end today. I’ve been letting the two roam the yard as they hadn’t integrated with the big-girl flock yet, and I trusted Mojo out there with them; Milo only with supervision. But somehow I lost track of my yard management duties this morning.
I failed my chicks. And I have certainly failed this rather horrible little dog, long term.
And I even lost my potato salad recipe. Tragedies abound.
chicken progress
The little girls are growing. We’ve introduced them to the big girls, who seem mildly interested, all except George who will peck them severely on their tiny little heads if they stand too close to the edge of their fence. This is Rose here; both of the littles are of the same breed so will eventually look much like her.
Two or three weeks later they are so much bigger, we’ve upgraded the halfway house.
We let them out to explore. They stuck together, Things One and Two against the world, but once they gained the underside of the deck, they wanted to stay there.
I suspect the big girls are laying eggs under there too. The ingrates. They are not any happier with the hot weather than I am, and in the afternoon, once I let them out of the hot dusty chicken yard for the relative cool of the shaded lawn and deck, they seem disinclined to make the long trek back to their nestbox.
peeps
Peeps hugely bigger than they were on Saturday:
At the moment I’m calling them Thing One and Thing Two. The boys have informed me that these are not proper names. I’ve informed them that they’d better hurry up with names, then, or One and Two will be stuck.
All they want to do is fly upward. This may be a problem, but I expect they will settle down eventually. I see a new chicken tractor in the future. Our present one could probably handle six, but for now I have E in captivity here. The lure of power tools is very great.
