Chicken slaughter

I've been putting off reporting this, but I suppose it's time. Our chickens were killed overnight by a predator. All of them.

I went out to the barn Christmas Eve and found 8 dead chickens strewn around the run and inside the barn. One even flew out of the run and got taken over in the field.

They had puncture wounds on their bodies, but they weren't eaten. It looked like they were grabbed on their backs, and whatever it was just held them down and ripped feathers out until they died. Feathers were everywhere, but their skin wasn't terribly torn.

When the hawk killed chickens, it ate the insides. When raccoons killed a chicken, they ripped off the head. This is... something else. We're pretty sure it wasn't wild dogs either, because none of the bodies were eaten or carried away. A cat wouldn't kill 8 birds for fun... maybe one or two.

A have a friend who studied weasels in California, and he's pretty convinced it was a weasel. He says, and google backs this up, weasels are known to kill entire chicken coops for fun. Also, all the eggs were crushed and eaten. He says a weasel would eat the eggs first, then kill the chickens.

So, for those interested in chicken predators, a quick rundown:

Hawks like to eat the crop and intestines.

Raccoons like to rip off the heads and drink the blood. (Ew.)

Dogs will carry off their prey to munch on later, or at least eat some of it.


I'm working on plans to build a coop. I'll be building one in a few weeks. I'm getting an order of baby chicks Feb. 1st... so we'll have eggs again in... 5 months or so. ::Sigh:: The new coop will be tight wire, and we'll make sure they sleep in it at night. The lean-to, even with the barn door shut, isn't tight enough to keep anything but dogs out.

I will update on the baby chick order soon.

Christmas

Merry Christmas from Dia dog and her Christmas presents... a stuffed 'Max' from the Grinch movie, and a huge, nasty knuckle bone.

Roger got me an egg incubator, so we can now hatch our own eggs... even if we can't get a hen to sit on them! I am so excited... I can't wait to see little chickens pop out of eggs!

Christmas

Well, once again, there's not much to report. The chickens are laying about 6 eggs a day. We're going to order 25 more layers to come in February. I'm still deciding which breeds to order... still loving the Australorp, but am a sucker for some of the stranger looking varieties.

We have foster kitties from the shelter right now. They are about 3 years old. They came to the shelter as strays, but they think they were owned together, and may possibly be brothers. They're the same age and both front declawed. Rhett is a black and grey tabby and Ashford is a red tabby. Rhett almost died... he was so skinny you could feel UNDER his ribs, like they were wings. He had horrible sores all over from fleas. He didn't eat for a week and I had to take him to the shelter for them to hook him up to an IV. They gave him B12 injections and iron supplements, and I was forcing baby food in him with a syringe. He also had some kind of virus/infection so bad that the mucus was coming out of his mouth because his nose was so blocked. Very gross.

They have both made dramatic recoveries and are eating, drinking, playing, and being great cats. They're scheduled to go back to the shelter Jan 3rd to go into the colony, where we're hoping they'll adjust nicely while they wait for someone to fall in love with them.




And Merry Christmas from the fam!

Double Yolk

First, let us apologize profusely for not updating in two weeks! The day after Dia got the Cone of Shame we went on a cruise for a Caribbean Thanksgiving. We were there for a week, and now back, we've been pretty unproductive on the homestead.

We did get a 'double yolk' egg. A double yolk is a HUGE egg, with, well, two yolks in it. Thinking about it, we feel really bad for the poor chicken that laid this monster.

Here's a video of our cracking it:



If you are interested in seeing pictures of the cruise, you're welcome to go to our facebook album: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2733315&id=6822433&l=7677ec9205

I will post this one for good measure, because it's one of our favorites, and we never dress up:

The cone of shame

Rog and I discovered a bad rash on Dia's belly last night. I took her to the vet today, and they think she just itched, licked, and chewed on an itchy area so bad it turned into a rash... she has some allergies, probably seasonal. So they gave her more antihistamines (she was on benadry), an antibiotic, and a wide spectrum cream. She also has to wear The Cone of Shame (a la, the movie Up)

She keeps running around and whacking the cone on things.

Persimmons

Being a couple with roots outside Indiana, neither of us understand the persimmon craze here. Everyone has a persimmon tree, and those who don't buy persimmon pulp from their neighbors. We are lucky enough to have two large persimmon trees in the backyard, so we inquired from friends as to how to tell when they are ripe. Everyone said they would ripen and drop right after the first frost, and to pick them up off the ground.

We've had several big frosts, and the most I get off the ground at a time are 5 or 6.

Yesterday I went out with an 8 foot tall stick and banged on the branches. Remember, we live on a busy road, so there are many people who saw me waving an 8 foot tall stick in a tree. This knocked about 10 off the branches. Here's all I was able to collect:


Here are the chickens eating them: (What the crap was I supposed to do with 10 persimmons?)


And a video...


But the story isn't over! Roger went out and shook the trees for me and we gathered about half a gallon! I decided to try my hand at cooking a staple Indiana persimmon dish... persimmon cookies. (Not pudding, sorry, I've had it and it's not very good.)

Without a cheese cloth or netting, we made pulp by squishing the fruit in a colander with a potato masher. True to the rumors (UNLIKE the rumors that persimmons will just drop off the tree) all that fruit made about 2 cups of pulp. We saved out the stuff in the colander for the chickens.





And here's the cookie batter:



And the recipe:
1 cup sugar
1 stick butter
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups persimmon pulp
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cloves

Bake at 350 for 12 minutes.

The batter was pretty gross, but happily, the cookies were tasty!

Hawks

It's not a raccoon. We've been setting the traps for about a week now, and besides the chickens and possums, we haven't had any luck. And two days ago I went to check on the chickens and I went into the lean-to (at about 5pm) and there was dead chicken with a HAWK standing over it, ripping it apart. I yelled, and it flew into the back corner of the barn and all I could think was a string of expletives mixed with the desire for a gun. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could but let it fly out of the barn.

Turns out, it is a federal offense to kill any bird of prey. Not that that knowledge would have stopped me if I had had a shotgun with me. I mean, it's killing my livestock!

The good news is, we've probably seen the last of the hawk for awhile... all the teenage birds are dead now, and the big birds are about twice the size of this hawk. The hawk was on the smaller side... perhaps a teenage hawk.

I'd like to get a rooster... a really mean, big, ugly rooster. But as it is, I think the big birds can hold their own... neighbor Bill says he saw a big bird chase off a hawk last week.

Chicken update and persimmons

First, some pictures of the chickens, because we haven't posted pics of them in awhile. They're getting large and heavy.





Also, we have two persimmon trees on the property. Neither of us being from Indiana, Rog and I have been baffled by the persimmon craze here. From what people have been telling us, we're supposed to pick them off the ground when they fall... they fall off the tree when ripe. Well, there's a very fine line between on the ground and ripe and on the ground and rotten. They keep telling us the fruits all fall off after the first frost... well, we've had two good frosts now, and the trees have lost all their leaves, but the persimmons are clinging onto the trees. Whenever I go out there to see if there are enough to bother picking up I usually only get five or six. Then I throw them in to the chickens. The chickens love persimmons, ripe, rotten, stepped on, whatever.

Here's a picture of the bare trees, dotted with fruits that just will not come down.

Raccoons and possums

You know you're living on a homestead when you go home for lunch and have to change before returning to work because a possum bled on you.

A raccoon has killed three of our chickens. Ripped the heads right off and then left the bodies relatively uneaten. Raccoons, we have learned, kill for sport.

I bought a larger trap, this one with two doors. Pictures to come. I set the old trap on one side of the barn and the new one with the chickens and baited them with stale bread and catfood.

The first day we caught a chicken. I went down in the morning and noticed it was sprung and got excited... especially when I saw what we caught was huge and striped.

But it was just a black and white chicken, standing rather dumbly waiting to be freed. It of course had seized the opportunity to eat all the bait while it was waiting for me to find it.

The second day I caught a possum. Neighbor Bill shot the possum for me, and while disposing it of I got blood on my pants... big clots of blood. It was pretty disgusting.

The good news is that the chickens are laying like crazy! We had 5 eggs yesterday!

Walnuts and camping

We have a huge black walnut tree on the back property. We've been trying to figure out how to save the walnuts. From what we could tell from the internet, you pick them up once they fall off the tree, peel off the green hull and meaty stuff, then dry the nut for a few weeks before cracking the nut and removing the 'nut meat' or something. Here are the nuts after being rinsed and laying out to dry in the basement.


And here are Roger's fingers after peeling a hundred or so walnuts, even though he was wearing two pairs of gloves. Our fingers still have black streaks on them.


We went camping over the weekend. It was a bit chilly. We stuffed the trunk and backseat full of stuff, and there was about one square foot left in the backseat to stuff Dia. It was a 30 minute drive to the campsite, and Dia was pretty resigned.



Here she is with her backpack on and her crate covered with a blanket. She had to sleep in the crate the first night, although Roger compromised and let her sleep in the tent the second night... the low was 35 degrees. She slept really good in the tent... she curled up next to us and became deadweight for the next 8 hours.