Baby Chicks are no longer babies... We've gone through the awkward partially feathered stage, and now just look like mini adults, from now on it's all about getting bigger. This is Big Bird. Sex unkown, but possibly a cockerel, mostly based on beahviour, Polish chickens don't have wattles, and of course he's a cross between a Polish and my Pekin cockerels. He's so like Cav, sometimes I have to do a second take, everything from the mannerisms, to the head movements. There's even a few white patches on his plummage. The bird in the foreground is most definitely a cockerel, he's even been caught trying out a few experimental (very pathetic) crows! We've called him Millar, partly as it keeps with my cycling name theme, but also because it goes very well with his sister Dusty. She was being camera shy this morning, but as you can see, I have yet another ridiculous chicken on my hands. She's ended up being Dusty because she looks exactly like a feather duster with a head poking out of the top!
The chicks are still doing well, now flying solo, as their Mum left them under a gooseberry bush. Quite literally. The chicks now have their own luxury run among the fruit bushes. Not that they seem to appreciate it as escapes have been made on multiple occasions. Their Mum decided that motherhood was not for her and ran off in to the arms of another man... she's already laying eggs again. How anyone can run off from these sweeties is beyond me. Of course, not having a Mum means that humans are now the creature to pester when you want something new and interesting to eat. I've taken to avoiding the top part of the garden when I'm buys as I am powerless to resist. Pak Choi is the current choice of exotic food, but in reality anything will do. The garden has been denuded of worms because my Mum is a soft touch, and will go digging to find them handfuls of worms to eat. There might only be 3 chicks in these pictures, but Hoppy is still alive and well. Her left leg sticks out at an angle, and she'd rather sit down and peck around than stand, but she has no problem keeping up with the others, or running away from then when she's got a worm. In fact the only reason she wasn't eating the Pak Choi was because her little crop was already full to bursting. This chick is going to be a rooster I reckon, it's already getting a wattle underneath it's beak. I'm not sure about the other chick, it has roughly as many feathers as this one, but no signs of a wattle, though does enjoy a good cockerel style play fight. Big Bird is almost certainly a cockerel, it's twice the size of Hoppy, and bears more ressemblence to a baby crow... Speaking of birds other than chickens. Dad found this Blackbird nest the other day while clearning brambles, at first we worried we might have disturbed the nest and scared the parents off. However 2 days later they will still there, and obviously being fed. They must have been just about ready to fledge as just after I snapped the first picture they all flew off. I was still a good disatnce away, and we'd been and looked from that spot before, so chances are the parents had been trying to entice them out today anyway, and I was the final push! Final photo... the chickens do like Dad's workshop. So much so that it's become one of the egg laying spots of choice.
The two new ladies, now named Penny and Farthing are settling in nicely. They're free ranging with the rest of the flock, and despite dire predictions on the internet of what happens when you introduce new hens to a flock, they are all getting along really well. Boyo and Froome are particularly pleased to have some new ladies. The chicks are growing well, and are already starting to leave the cute fluffy stage, and become gawky teenagers with bad hair do's This monster is now known as Big Bird, he (I think it's a he) is huge, almost twice the size of the other chicks, and as you can see, has hardly any down left. He's also a flyer, just like his Mum, the Pekin's are too dumpy to fly well, but the Polish blood is coming through strongly! Getting pictures of any of the chicks is rather challenging, you open the run door and they all want to come charging out, and if you're not careful you're chasing baby chicks around the garden trying to catch them. They have been out on supervised garden excursions a few times, but Hoppy does struggle to keep up, and gets tired quickly, if we left them to ther own devices Hoppy would probably get left behind, and lost. The other day we were moving the chick's run to a fresh spot to give them some fresh earth to dig over and we found this. We had to level off the ground slightly so there was no gap at the bottom, and found this lump of fungi. Inside the skein was a layer of jelly with a hard lump inside, you can see where `i scraped it with my fingernail, but it was surprisingly tough. Chop it open, and you can see all the developing spores.
My google-fu is failing me to work out what it is, but I'm thinking a puffball of some kind? Any mushroom experts out there? A quick catch up, lots happening over the last week. In fact I have spent 2 non-consecutive nights in my own bed in the last week... I am in dire need of a few days at home to get back in to a routine. I had hoped to be updating the online shop a bit more regularly over the next couple of weeks, but sometimes you just have to go with the flow and do as much as you can. So this was the start of the week In swanky London filming a TV advery for Etsy. It's apparently due on the TV sometime in early summer, I have no idea what channels, but I'm hoping they'll also upload it online for me to share with you all. Much like this picture, you'll have to look hard to spot me, but I will be in there somewhere! I do have more photos, but I can't share any of them until the advert airs. So in a way, this is a story To Be Continued... After I got home I left again almost immediately for the Royal Welsh Showground, and this year's Spring Festival. Just helping on Mum's stall, but the sun shone, and I did lots of spinning. I also bought these lovely ladies. I didn't really plan on buying more chickens... I was just looking at the cages of chickens, and one of them looked up at me, and my already weak will caved in. Chicken count is now up to 14, and had better stay that way for a while!
The chicks are all still alive, still sneezing, but eating, drinking, and in the case of the large black chick, discovering wings and flying. As I hinted the last blogpost, the baby chicks have hatched. The timing was less than ideal. Having baby chicks hatching the day I'm packing for a show, was not in the plan. Let alone leaving young chicks for my Dad to look after. Chick 6 in particular gave us all some nervous moments. Hatching started on Monday I went to bed and there were 2 eggs that had tiny cracks. And woke up to this Chicks 3 and 4 followed with very little fuss. Eggs 5 and 6 however, did not proceed so smoothly. By Wednesday morning however, with the help of a little warm water to raise the humidity of the shell, and soften it, we had chick number 5. Leaving us with egg 6, the chick was definitely alive in there, when you held the egg to your ear you could hear tapping. Come Thursday morning it had finally made a crack in the shell. By then however, Mummy Chicken had decided enough was enough and had taken the hatched chicks off in search of food. Luckily we had broody chickens to spare so the egg went under a surrogate for a few more hours. By mid afternoon it was out, but surrogate decided she was none to keen on it, and original Mum wasn't in the mood to let it recover from hatching either. So one very cold chick ended up being tucked down my bra to warm up. Mum and I ended up cuddling it for the first few hours of life, until the chickens went to sleep that night and I could tuck it back underneath her. Friday morning I left for Wonderwool, not felling very hopeful for poor chick 6, however it's stilll with us. Definitely a little worse for wear after it's traumatic entrance to the world, but it's eating. It's feet are unfortunately curled up, it can apparently happen when the chick is trapped in the egg for too long, it wobbles about the place, but can run around with it's brothers and sisters. Some people try to splint them, but the legs and feet of bantam chicks are tiny, and in our set up any splint would probably fall off very quickly. They're now out and about in the cage underneath their house. Mummy chicken is finding them lots of lovely things to eat. Gwen is back to being besotted with the babies. She spends hours staring at them, and any hint of walking up to see the chicks is accompanied by a big black dog! Chick 6 now looks like this. In total there are 3 who I think are Polish/Pekin crosses, 2 are black, and 1 is a yellowy-grey. The other 3 are pure Pekin, 2 are black and yellow, and one is brown and yellow. It will be very interesting to see what colour adult feathers they all develop. I had a great time at Wonderwool, and will have lots of work to do before Woolfest in 2 months time. Many thanks to those of you who came by the stall. There will start to be new things in the shpo in the next couple of weeks. I'm taking a few days off from dyeing, partly to do some admin, but also beacuse I need a bit of a break. I hope you'll think it will be worth the wait!
This is a really hard post to write, but I know Cav had a lot of fans on the blog, as someone in my Rav group commented, she was a special chicken, and many of you had been following her adventures since she was an egg. Unfortunately Cav was knocked over on the road outside our house yesterday and killed. She didn't come home to bed last night, and despite hunting everywhere I couldn't find her, by then it was dark and bucketing it down. This morning I went out looking for her again, and spotted some feathers on the road. I went down to double check, and unforrtunately she had been hit by a car or lorry. She was never the most intelligent chciken, and always tended to run around in a panic. Once she got on the road she never stood a chance, the road is busy, the vehicles travel past our house quickly, and she was hit on a bend. I would never want anyone to risk an accident that might result in human life being lost just to avoid a chicken. That being said, I am desperately sad this morning. Cav was my favourite, from her speedy hatching, to the way she proudly laid her first egg out in the open, and her ability to work out when Mum was digging from the other end of the garden, she was full of character, and I will miss her. So long Cav, you made every day a little bit brighter.
My little chickens would not make good eating chickens, under all that fluff they're mostly skin and bone, however an ongoing joke in our house is that is Froome (the brown cockerel) isn't careful he might end up as a spatchcocked chicken on the barbeque! Well this week, Cav has nearly ended up spatchcocking herself on multiple occasions. While she runs around like a headless chicken half the time, and is scared of everything, she certainly isn't daft when it comes to food. Particularly if the food is worms! The dry weather has meant that Mum has been doing lots in the garden, planting, weeding, and generally tidying up. Freshly turned over soil means worms, and Cav knows this! Mum often ends up moving her off the patch of soil she's trying to dig to avoid skewering her on the fork. And this is what it's all about, fat juicy worms that can be turned in to eggs. Once you've got the alignment right, it goes down in one! Today we're back to wind and rain after a week of sunshine. I'm very glad to be tucked up inside with the drum carder, and maybe my wheel later on in the day.
Over in the Hilltop Cloud Ravelry group we're hosting an informal Spin Along. Something to fill in the gap between the end of the Ravellenic Games and the start of the Tour de Fleece. It's going to last for approximately 6 weeks, which rather handily takes us up to Wonderwool Wales. Enough time to get a more sizable project done, but not so long that you just put off starting. You can set your own challenge and spin any fibre that you like. Some people are learning to navajo ply, there are first attempts at cabled yarns, and quite a few people are deciding to takle silk for the very first time. I've gone deep stash diving and pulled out some of the oldest fibre I own and am using the challenge as incentive to actually get it spun up! One of the nice things about living in the UK is the weather... I know that seems like an odd thing to say after the past few months, but bear with me. Foreigners always joke about the British obsession with the weather but it's beacuse we have so much of it, and it's always changing. Today in Wales it's like being in the Costa del Sol, the sun is out, there's not a cloud in the sky and it's lovely and warm. In contrast these pictures were taken only a couple of weeks ago. This was a famillliar "look" for Cav this winter, her head feathers are not really wet weather proof! Of course, stepping outside and walkng towards the shed where the chicken feed is stored has inevitable consequences... they might be small, but they are little tyrants, and no one is exempt from the demand for yet more corn! The others are content to eat what's scattered for the, but Cav adopts a rather more novel strategy to enure maximum food before she gets chased away.
The weather is set fair for the rest of the week so for the next few days I will be dyeing everything in sight making the most of the good drying weather. First of all, I am a throughly bad blogger, but in my defence the last couple of weeks have been pretty much non-stop. Holiday are great, but catching up on them almost destroys the good effect of the holiday! Add in a smidgen of club dyeing, and the start of preperations for Unravel and suddenly the evenings are spent propping open your eye lids with match sticks. So with excuses made, I hope you'll forgive me when I show you this. Yes that is indeed an egg, laid by Cav herself! Of course she won't go in the main chicken house, so at the moment the eggs tend to get laid in random places. I'm hoping that wil change soon, because the chickens are getting an upgrade in their living accomodation. 8 chickens is a bit of a squash in their curent house, they'll think the new one will be palatial if they ever get to move in. Cav has already inspected and approved the perches, but as of yet there is no chicken sized entrance and exit, and no nest boxes. We await an afternoon of dry weather so we can run an electric cable up there to use the power tools... and of course, this being Wales in one of the wettest winters on record they might be waiting a while.
When we get some dry weather there will also be a coat of paint applied, the orange stain they put on sheds is hideous in my mind, and I can see it from my window so it definitely isn't staying this colour! Our dogs get fed on a raw meat diet rather than processed biscuits or tinned meat, and part of that diet is a regular intake of proper bones. We get them from the local butchers, and usually they come in rather large pieces, so the dogs don't get fat (again!) Dad chops them in to snack size portions for after their walk. On Thursday Mum and I went in to town to get the Christmas shop done, and this time the butcher handed over 3 turkey carcasses... these turkey's must have weighed nearly 40kg, they were as big as our dogs! The chickens like bone chopping day, anyone who would like to think of their chickens as grain eating birds needs to look away now, as fights will break out at the chance of some juicy chunks of protein! They might be eating bits of their close cousin, but it's rather hard to stop them scavenging the scraps and fragments... First comes the anticipation... how they know what's about to happen is a mystery, but they always appear even before the first bone is chopped! Then if you happen to disappear for a minute they'll happily help themselves! Dad has to be careful as the silly birds do sometimes try to do this just as he brings the axe down... Then afterwards comes the cleaning up. Then comes a little siesta in the workshop to do some digesting. These 2 are of course the little chicks of 6 months ago, now all grown up. Froome in particular is the most magnificent bird, he'd bigger than Boyo, and has a much deeper crow, I suspect it won't be long until he's boss of the gang of ladies.
Cav is absent in all these pictures, fear not, she is still with us, but has grown in to the flightiest, scardiest chicken. She's bullied un-mercilessly by the other chickens so usually spends her time hiding out under the caravan, and comes out when they've all gone to do the last bit of tidying up. She also now has her own private bedroom, not that she goes in to it... I've become an expert at spotting her in the twilight and climbing trees to retrieve her! She does however love to be cuddled and eat from your hand so her life isn't all bad! Today is my last official day of work, parcels will be going out on Monday as usual, but not on Thursday as that's Boxing Day. I'll still be answering messages, just no new stuff for a little while, though the new wool free blends are dyed up ready for photographs in the new year. |
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