Travelling tails: The animals of Minneapolis

On paper, spending time in a new country should provide plenty of opportunities for spotting the local wildlife.  There are certainly enough wildlife ‘teasers’ around - the Minneapolis student American football team is known as ‘The Gophers’, the basketball team is ‘The Timberwolves’ (another name for the common grey wolf, thank you Wikipedia) and I’ve passed at least three different foot outlets whose logo features a moose (although possibly an elk).   Even lowering my expectations, which may be necessary given the (hopefully) tiny chance of a moose encounter in downtown Minneapolis,  then the intrusion of raccoons into American cities is complained about as much as foxes are back home.  Honestly, I'd leave a trail of rubbish leading to my door if it meant I could see a raccoon! Sadly, the only native wildlife I have seen near my flat so far are grey squirrels, a million of them filling the trees in my local park. 

Part of the problem is my lack of transport.  After several near-death experiences on my borrowed bike I’m refusing to drive over here until everyone agrees to join me on the correct, left, side of the road, something I inadvertently keep trying to revert to every time I turn a corner without concentrating.  Cycling is useful for shorter trips (including the 10 mile cycle to the office - distance has a different meaning here) but the sheer size of Minnesota means that I could cycle for hours are still not be in the countryside.

I’d noticed however, that the office which is kindly hosting me during my secondment to Minneapolis, and which is outside of the main city, albeit in an industrial wasteland between the Mall of America and the International Airport rather than in anything that could be classed as countryside, was next door to a ‘National Wildlife Refuge’.  Based on the abundant and typically enthusiastic signage (1km to Wildlife Refuge!’ ‘ Next Exit for Wildlife Refuge!’) I assumed the wildlife refuge must be a hotspot for wildlife, most likely teeming with small and furry creatures who arrive carrying their worldly possessions in red spotted handkerchief, assuming of course that they successfully avoid  the major eight-lane highway that runs past the entrance.  I decided to shift my running to lunchtime in order to check it out.  

Inside the wildlife refuge was extremely attractive, probably best described as a wetlands nature reserve which flanked the Minneapolis river.  The running track followed the treeline along the river, and the shade was extremely welcome given the 30^oC midday temperatures.   Possibly also because of the midday temperatures, I didn’t see much wildlife.  Although the long grass was buzzing with the sound of hundreds of grasshoppers (or possibly crickets) it was too hot for anything to show itself.  In fact the only animals I saw for 20 minutes were frogs, all exactly the same colour as the path and very disconcerting when they leapt out unexpectedly from beneath by descending feet.  Lucky for them I’m not very fast at the moment.  On the way back I saw – to great excitement!  Half a ribbon snake!  Or at least half a Google-says-it’s-a-ribbon-snake, snake.  Half a snake in this case because, alerted by the thud of my feet as I intermittently jumped over a frog, it was whipping off the path and into the grass.  Still, a definite tick in the eye-spy book of genuine American wildlife.  

Luckily I have also been able to satisfy my need to spend time with animals by wiling away several happy hours in the livestock barns at the State Fair.  I discovered an entirely new type of goat, the La Mancha.  An American dairy breed notable for its tiny ears, and another tick in my American wildlife book (OK, possibly a wildlife book that I’ve added additional pages to for farm animals).  Other than that I'll just have to make do with Skyping the guys at home.  Just over seven weeks to go!

Tiberius and Sibelius try out Skype

A LaMancha goat

 

Let there be light!

I recently fished out this rather tasteless lamp from the skips at the back of our local shopping centre, a source of many useful bits and pieces, including the glass drinks dispenser that we used for brewing in our dandelion and ginger ale, here.

Believe it or not, it's Ralph Lauren, and has a nice rectangular silk shade on top of a rather more ugly, heavy glass base with "Ralph Lauren Home" embossed on the front in gold.  Lovely.  The base had a large chip missing from the corner, which is presumably why it ended up in the skip.  Even more unbelievably the price tag proclaimed this lamp to be £99.99 (yes, that's ninety-nine pounds for a lamp!).  I can almost feel myself turning into my dad as I type that ("It's how much?!").



Tiberius is unimpressed by the lamp.

What was interesting about this lamp was that all the electrical gubbins (another dad word there) including the flex for the plug, was attached to the metal frame that held the light bulb, rather than passing through the base of the lamp and trailing out from the back of the base.  This made me wonder whether I could prise the top of the lamp from the base and reattach it to something else.  Something nicer, which, let's face it, is pretty much anything. 

After checking that the lamp still worked(!), I had a rummage through the log pile and came up with this interesting piece of sycamore from one of the trees in our garden.  I stripped off the bark and lightly sanded it all over.

 

Next, I took a hammer and chisel to the lamp, and with one enthusiastic whack managed to cleanly separate the metal top from the glass base.  While this was surprisingly easy, the next step was more difficult.  The sycamore chunk was relatively flat on the base, but slightly angled at the top.  In order to make a level surface to attach the lamp to, I was going to have to chisel out a wedge from the top of the sycamore. 

Jeez, what a faff!  The sycamore had been weathering for over a year and had dried out, hardening in the process.  Furthermore, the grain of the wood meant that chips of wood splintered off with the chisel, rather than neat strips. 

 

This made it very hard to control the depth of the wedge.  In the end, I hacked out a large hole, that was the right shape to fit the lamp, although not the right depth.  Then I mixed up lots of the wood chippings with wood glue to make a wood 'cement' allowing me to level off the bottom of the hole.  Finally, I set the top of the lamp on the sycamore base with lots more glue and after checking it was (roughly) level, weighted it down until it was dry.

 

 



And here is the finished lamp in action!  I love it, and it's certainly not bad for a morning's work and free materials!



The Trouble With Sheep

The hot weather we've been having recently seems to have affected the sheep. 

No, not heatstroke, our flock decided it was high time they took a holiday.  This was instigated by the top ram, Kai, and his second-in-command, Flake, who decided that their field, well it was OK, but just look at the neighbouring wheat field!  And that vegetable patch!   There, it seems a sheep could be free to truly enjoy the summer.



Kai in the vegetable plot (hand-sheared by Ian!)

Time and time again we herded them back into their field - from the neighbour's fields, from the vegetable patch and from the back lawn of the farm, but each time the boys tested our workmanship, leaning on the fences until they found a new weak point, and then with a wriggle and a flick of a woolly tail it was over, out and off. 

An emergency workday was called.  For several hours we reinforced fences, added tension wires and knocked in extra posts, until the perimeter of the sheep field bristled like a wonky pincushion of wood and wire.

For the rest of the week the sheep watched balefully from the confines of their enclosure, but, happily for us, they remained enclosed.

Until Saturday.

It seems almost planned that the boys would wait until several farm members were around for a Saturday workday before staging their latest escape.  Like Steve McQueen before them, they knew that a watching audience (if not a video camera) was the essential ingredient for turning a regular escape into a great escape.

Just before elevenses (we model the frequency of our snack breaks on those expected by Winnie-the-Pooh), someone working on the vegetable plot shouted over that Kai had once again escaped.   By leaning his weight on the fence he had caused it to sag in the centre, leaving a gap between the fence and the new tension wires above which was just enough for him to wriggle his way through.  As we gathered to watch sheep after sheep followed Kai into the adjacent field (luckily, ours), bleating joyfully.

The breached defences.

After much joking about the consequences of us all counting sheep jumping over a fence, it was decided to leave the flock where they were.  While it may be true that the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence, in this case the sheep had grazed their current field to the extent that the grass actually was greener in the next field and the sheep were due to be moved there in the next few days. By all squeezing through the fence, the sheep had saved us the trouble of herding them all through the gate.

All apart from one that is.  Little Lamb, the, ahem, littlest lamb of the flock, wasn't tall enough to hop over the fence and stood at the perimeter bleating pitifully.

Little lamb was born unexpectedly a few weeks ago to a yearling mother who wasn't supposed to be pregnant. As the flock was newly-bought earlier this year, it seems that Kai must have snuck into her field, or perhaps she into his, for a fleeting night of sheep loving before the flock arrived on the farm. 

If Little lamb's arrival into the world was unexpected for us, it was downright alarming to her mother, who is no more than a teenager in sheep years and who initially dealt with the situation by denying all responsibility towards her tiny runt of a lamb, headbutting her viciously when she wobbled over to feed.  This behaviour earned her mother some time in a head restraint, to prevent her from taking a sufficient run up to do real damage to her baby.

Several hours after her birth the mother was still keeping her distance from the newborn and Little Lamb was beginning to flag. If she was to survive the night it was vitally important that little lamb took on some colostorum substitute.  Ian and I took a bottle and sat with her.  It was an agonisingly slow process as the exhausted lamb sucked weakly at the bottle. Happily, Little Lamb showed a surprising amount of resilience for such a tiny creature and after a sleepless night for Ben, who stayed up to continue the bottle feeding, the mother sheep decided that she did want to get to know her baby after all.



A scale shot- Little Lamb and Ian's legs

Ian as 'Mummy Sheep'





Unfortunately, it seemed that motherhood was an easily forgotten role for this particular sheep, because once in the new field on Saturday she studiously ignored Little Lamb's bleats in favour of stuffing her face with fresh grass.

Alone in the field, Little lamb began to panic, running frantically up and down along the fence line. 
It was clear that we were going to have to move her ourselves.

Three of us slowly approached Little Lamb, smiling reassuringly.  She tensed, her whole body moving in time with the rapid pattering of her heart.  We reached for her, friendly arms trying to lift her over to join her mum.


Little lamb on the run

Unfortunately from her point of view I suspect we were a terrifying group of two-leggers trying to back her into a corner while showing their scary omnivorous teeth. 

She ran for her life to the opposite end of the field. 



We gathered reinforcements.  Six people were now spread across the field, three carrying hurdles to make a temporary pen around Little Lamb.  Or that was the plan anyway.  What actually ensured was 45 minutes of hot, bruise-inducing charging around the field, each time cornering Little Lamb only to have her spring away from us at the last second and race away at top speed.  Finally, in what I can only image will go down as the worst rugby tackle in history, I managed a slow motion dive between some thistles to grab hold of Little Lamb. Seconds later and she was into the next field and trotting happily towards mum, leaving a team of sweaty farm members stood in the empty field. 

Elevenses had most definitely been earned.


And she definitely didn't say thank you.

"D" day for the chickens

A while ago we inherited seven young cockerels (see Hatching our Dinner).  They were part of a home-hatch by a work colleague who wanted to expand her flock of layers.  Rather than her dispatching the boys as soon as they could be sexed accurately, we moved them to our garden with the aim of raising them for meat. 

We always try to buy local meat that's had a good life and we're very lucky to have a source of beef in the 'Cam Cattle' cows that graze Midsummer common in the centre of Cambridge.  I cycle past these on my way to work and they always seem blissfully content, taking no notice of my bike rattling past and their mini celebrity status with tourists.

Raising our own chickens seemed like a logical step.  We could learn how to kill, pluck and dress the chickens, all important in increasing our awareness of the process from field to plate, while knowing that these particular birds had enjoyed a longer life than would otherwise have been the case.

Recently the chickens, or more specifically dispatching the chickens, has been on both our minds.  How do you take the decision that any particular day will be their last? Particularly if the weather forecast for the following day is glorious and you know how much they enjoy their sunbathing.  We had become quite attached to our magnificent chaps, with their daily displays of neck ruffling, and were unlikely to wake up one day with a burning desire to put someone in the pot.

Luckily, as it turned out the boys made the decision for us via a strangled attempt at crowing at 5am.  This wasn't a full blown 'Cock-A-Doodle-DOO!' more of a trial run, testing out variations on the theme without ever hitting the correct sequence.

I like to think that the other cockerels were gathered around watching and taking notes from the morning's performance:

'COCK-a-COCK- a- DOO!'

Dammit, that's not right.

'A-Doodle-Doodle-DOO!'

No, still not got it.

etc.

Anyway, even a trainee crower is not appreciated in central Cambridge.  Still less now as we experience an intermittent summer and of neighbours have their windows open.

As the advice was to deprive the chicken for food for 24 hours prior to killing, so that the crop and digestive system wasn't full of semi-digested grain, we decided to do the birds in pairs and a three.  This meant that our 5am singer would have company in his penned-off section of the chicken run, something that we felt was important for his welfare.  It was also for welfare reasons that we decided to kill our first chickens at Hempsal's Community farm, because although a drive in the car wasn't necessarily in the chicken welfare handbook it seemed to us that the consequences of trying and failing to kill a chicken, and the associated needless suffering that would entail, tipped the balance firmly in favour of taking them with us.

Over the past weeks as people have learnt that we are raising chickens for meat, we have been on the receiving end of many horror stories.  It seems that everyone knows someone whose neighbour's friend's father tried to kill a chicken and ended up chasing it around the garden with an axe, merely giving it a crick in the neck or pulling the head off. 

This did not inspire confidence in taking a self-taught 'You-Tube' approach. 

At Hempsal's farm we were able to kill the chickens calmly and quickly under the supervision of Ben the head farmer (we used the broom handle technique).  He also taught us how to pluck the birds (when warm), hang them so that all the blood gathers in the head, and prepare the carcass for cooking.  (Ben then confessed his ulterior motive which was to give us the skills to join the goose plucking and dressing team at Christmas! Which of course we will do.)

What better end for our first bird, than a really slow, considered, recipe carried out over a whole of a day (Moroccan chicken pie from The Guardian, here), which included cabbage grown by us at the farm and was served with home-grown broad beans.

 

It was a thoughtful meal, but I'm no vegetarian, and I can honestly say I'm happy to know this chicken had a good life.

 

 

 

 

 

Foraging - lavender and garlic soda bread

Is it 'foraging' when actually you’re walking round the neighbourhood with a pair of scissors and snipping lavender heads from neighbouring front gardens?

Let’s say yes. 

This is Ian’s made-up recipe for garlic and lavender soda bread. 

At some point it started life as a 'real' soda bread recipe, but over time it's been fiddled with and fussy ingredients such as buttermilk have been jettisoned in favour of simplicity and speed.  We've played with lots of additions, but lavender and garlic is the current winner (try also, cumin seeds, toasted sunflower seeds or crumbled goat's cheese)

All amounts are approximate, what you are aiming for is the consistency.  You will need a cast-iron griddle pan and this takes around 5 mins to prepare and 15-20 mins to cook.

Makes a dinner plate-sized flatbread, around 2cm thick, serves 2 hungry hippo's or 4 nibblers.

Approximately 200g flour,
A flat teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
Approximately 200mls milk and 1/2 a lemon's worth of lemon juice (this is important as it acidifies the milk which makes it substitutable for buttermilk - vinegar also works, but use less), or 200ml buttermilk
About 10 heads of lavender with the flowers scraped from the stalk (pick highly scented ones with open flowers).
Three gloves of garlic, finely chopped (this is medium-garlicky, add more, add less, or roast for a totally different taste!).

First mix together the flour with the milk and lemon.  You want to add enough milk/lemon to make a good sticky dough - this will be way stickier than you would expect from a 'proper' leavened bread recipe. 

Add the garlic and lavender.  Once the ingredients are mixed, STOP.  Don't overwork it or it will become stodgy.

Generously pat the mixture with flour so you can handle it and press/roll it out to a thickness of around 1.5 cm. 

Drop in heavy-bottomed griddle pan which has been pre-heated on a medium flame.  Turn after 5-10 mins, depending on thickness.

 

I should point out that no lavender plants were decimated in the making of this bread; we took the 10 or so heads from 5 or 6 plants.  However, if you’ve seen a couple walking around Cambridge making an exaggerated show of sniffing the lavender in your front garden.  Apologies, we stole a bit. 

But it was amazing.

In sickness and in health...

Tiberius has been ill. 

This one fact has dominated my and Ian's lives over recent days to the point where it is simply not possible to write about anything else. 

Tiberius, a goat who is capable of watching the back door for hours just in case Ian comes home, long after Sibelius has been distracted by his own reflection or wandered off to eat a falling leaf, has been bearing his illness in a typically stoic fashion: standing quietly in a corner with his head hanging down. Occasionally he moved his front and back legs closer together, hunching his back in what looked like a heartbreaking attempt to curl up around his poorly stomach.  Even more distressing was when he decided to lie down in the dirt with his head stretched out on the earth in front of him.  I thought we were going to lose him and reacted hysterically.

What happened?  Well, we think that on Sunday he managed to break into the temporary chicken house that's currently holding the smaller chicks and gorge himself on grower pellets.  Tiberius' obsession with chicken food is well known to us and for weeks we have been engaged in an arms race to build better defences as he learns how to break them down. On that particular Sunday we didn't see anything untoward happen, but in retrospect when I checked the small chicks that evening I was surprised by how much food they had apparently eaten.  We should have been more vigilant.

When we let him out on Monday morning Tiberius was clearly ill.  Although he has managed to snaffle pellets before, we have always managed to intervene before he has done anything more than give himself a small bout of diarrhoea.  This time it was spectacular.  A volcanic eruption of poo.  Even worse the rich pellets were now fermenting in his stomachs and producing gas.  Tiberius developed bloat, a painful build up of gas further exacerbated when his rumen bacteria began to die as a consequence of his not eating, and produced more gas.  Bloat can be deadly in ruminants.



A small goat with bloat

Unfortunately this all happened at the worse possible time for Ian, work-wise, and he was hit with the double whammy of guilt about not working when he was tending to Tiberius, and guilt about not being with Tiberius when he was working. 

'Tending to Tiberius' in our case consisted of us trying to administer a 'drench' as taught to us over a year ago on our goat husbandry course.  This was not the full blown stomach-tube technique, but an simpler, easier technique that mainly consisted of pouring the liquid down their throat.  The theory behind this is simple: first you open the goat's mouth, and keep it open, by inserting a finger into the gap between the front teeth and molars at the back of the mouth, then you tilt their chin back and pour in the liquid, shutting and holding the mouth closed to stop them spitting it out.

The practice - for us - most definitely was not.  It turns out that administering a drench to a calm and healthy goat, as we did on the course (with water), was nothing at all like attempting to do the same with a panicked and sick goat, who clearly just wanted to be left alone.  Trying to ignore the plaintive look in Tiberius' wide eyes, Ian enveloped him in a bear hug while I, hands shaking, tried to open his tightly clenched mouth.  It was difficult. In the snatched moments when we were able to pour the liquid into his mouth, he jerked his head and almost immediately dislodged the bottle occasionally letting out a heart-wrenching bleat.

We felt awful.  Mainly that our ineptitude was causing additional trauma to an already-distressed animal.  By the time it was dark, we had managed to pour a 100 mls or so of 'pro-rumen' into Tiberius, and several hundred more had been poured over his face and over our clothes where it dried to a sticky-sweet smelling mush whose smell followed us into the house as a reminder of our guilt. 

That night was sleepless and full of self-recriminations.  I didn't blame Tiberius, how could I expect him to know not to gorge himself on 'bad' food when it's not a character trait I possess myself? Every Christmas finds me lying on the sofa with a chocolate-induced stomach ache, the difference being that I don't have highly-evolved digestive system, including a rumen full of sensitive bacteria which is liable to being thrown out of whack by the occasional binge of rich food.

The following morning Ian was up at 4am and I joined him by the goat shed at 5.  We tried again to pour more medicine into Tiberius and tempt him into drinking some warm water.  However, we were now almost 24 hours into his illness and with no visible improvement overnight it was clear that more expert help was needed.   I called the vets.  They were wonderful.  Calm and professional, they had a stomach tube into Tiberius before he had time to blink. 

As I was leaving the vet commented it would be good to have me bring in a poo sample at some point in case the diarrhoea was being made worse by a heavy worm burden.  I motioned for him to follow me to the car and opened the boot, which, despite the use of a protective sheet, had suffered in the journey.  The vet stared in silence at the poo-plastered interior for a few seconds, taking in the splattered window, backs of the seats and wheel arches, and then visibly pulled himself together saying 'well, I'll just go and get a pot then!'  Luckily the vets were well provisioned with cleaning products, and Tiberius spent the journey home stood knee deep in puppy training pads.

As well as the wonderful vet, we were also supported by work colleagues, albeit somewhat bemusedly, as we both missed time from work to ferry Tiberius back and forth.  My office in particular is located between colleagues who both have children under the age of 1, and I like to think that we have reached a new level of camaraderie as we met each other coming and going from the office at odd times, or on one of our many trips to the kitchen for coffee to stave off the tiredness that comes from being awake since before dawn with our respective 'kids'. One of them also recommended an excellent baby monitoring app as something that could be extended to monitoring goats. 
On the other hand both Sibelius and Charles have reacted badly to our focus being elsewhere over the past few days.  Charles has started misbehaving in the house and I found him sitting on the sofa, something we thought we had trained him out of (whereas I am quite happy to sit amongst the fluff - possibly because I also leave lots of my hair around the place - Ian finally broke after leaving for work with hairy trousers yet again and decided there was only space on the sofa for a moulty human and not a moulty rabbit too).

Charles: part-time patent attorney

Similarly, Sibelius has become even more attention seeking than usual, flitting between trying to guzzle the medicine we were unsuccessfully trying to feed to Tiberius, and repeatedly slamming into him with a 'playful' headbutt.  At one point I was bending down when I heard the clatter of running hooves and suddenly found myself with Sibelius standing on my back like a noisy rucksack.  I didn't want to stand up too quickly and knock him off - a broken leg at this point would have pushed us over the edge- but slowly raising my torso resulted in Sibelius marching up my back to the new highest spot - my shoulders, where he pawed at my head with his front hooves as if to say - lift me to the leaves!  My white T-shirt still has a set of perfect muddy hoof prints.

Now, as we approach the end of day four, Tiberius has started tentatively eating again and the vets have passed the responsibility for his medication over to us.   We have been left with a newfound sense of responsibility for the animals in our care, and a still-raw realisation of the guilt that comes when our errors impact the lives of our herd, who we are very attached to.



Day three, feeling well enough to be a scamp.

Made do and mend

Picture the scene:  It's a beautiful day in early June.  The sun is shining and the only clouds in the sky are the acceptable fluffy white ones as seen in a child's painting (and mine too, to be fair).  The baby bluebirds up in the cherry tree are tentatively sticking their beaks out of the nest box and on the ground the chickens are enjoying a dust bath under the elder. We had spent all morning working on the farm, and now all I fancied doing was sitting in the garden and finishing my book.  I decided it was time to declare the official start of 'summer hammock season', characterised by hours spent in a semi-doze, book open on face and one foot on the floor to rock the hammock like a cradle.  Bliss.

After a sticky 20 minutes spent fighting my way past sawdust, hay bales, bikes and a million almost-empty cans of paint, I finally spotted the edge of the hammock rolled up at the back of the shed. 

Unfortunately for my afternoon plans, when I unrolled the hammock became clear I was not the first to fancy spending a bit of time in it.   Moreover, the unknown critter had enjoyed their hammock experience so much that they had decided to take a large part it back with them to their nest.   It was a sorry sight, with a huge chunk of one corner missing and a hole the size of my head at the other end. I could have worn it as a tabard, but it was no longer any use as a hammock.

The devastation, with Charles for scale, although he's doing a good job of looking guilty.

So, instead of spending my afternoon swinging in the hammock and basking the sun, I spent the rest of the day at the dining table illuminated by the tiny light on my sewing machine.

As far as I could tell the body of the hammock had constructed as follows.  Loops had been made in the fabric at each end of the hammock body.  These were formed by making 3 inch cuts into the material along each end; these flaps were folded in half and stitched to the back of the fabric under a cover strip.  The hanging ropes had been fed through these loops and each rope passed through a hole in a spreader bar  - a strip of wood at each end to hold the fabric open.  It was clear to me that it was going to be difficult to use a completely new piece of fabric for the hammock without undoing the entire structure, ropes, bars and all.  However, as there was an intact strip of hammock fabric adjacent to each of the spreading bars (below), I decided that it would be far easier to just sew a new rectangle of fabric directly to these. 

The down-side of this plan was that I would have to feed a piece of fabric through my sewing machine that was attached to a large strip of wood.  It was for this reason that I spent the remainder of the afternoon in the increasing gloom of our house.  Sewing the new material to the remnants of the old hammock was difficult and slow.  I used a double-thickness of replacement fabric to provide extra strength and managed to shear two sewing machine needles trying to sew this to the thick fabric of the original hammock.

I have added a new hook to the shed so that I can store my lovely 'new' hammock up off the floor, and I'm also planning on rolling it in a bin bag for extra anti-furry-creature security. I may also move the rat poison nearer as a warning.

Unfortunately since repairing the hammock it has rained pretty much constantly while I've been home!

A tale of chickens and poo.

In addition to the five chicks that we successfully hatched ourselves (see hatching our dinner), we were recently offered some six-week old male chickens from a work colleague who had also hatched chickens but was only interested in the ladies.  She was going to dispatch the men, unless we wanted them instead?  Of course we did!  At this point our chicks were still scraps of fluff scuttling around inside a brooder box so we were completely unprepared for dealing with seven ‘teenage’ boys, as were our neighbours! 

That weekend was warm, and even though we drove the chickens home with the air conditioning on full blast, they were showing definite signs of overheating.  When we lifted them out of the cardboard boxes they simply flopped down on the ground looking slightly dazed and panting, or, more alarmingly, lay stretched out on the patio. 

A sweaty chicken

After a few minutes in the cool of the garden, the chickens gradually recovered and started looking more alert.  We had surrounded them with a ring of water containers but the chickens simply huddled together in the centre watching us warily. 

 

Already feeling guilty at this point, we then made a major error.  We knew that these chickens had not really been handled and so assumed that our presence was causing them additional distress in an already confused and unfamiliar period of their lives.  We decided that it would be better for myself and Ian to go inside, leaving the chickens to discover the garden at their leisure.  As we got up leave, followed as usual by Tiberius and Sibelius who had wandered over to be nosey, the chickens panicked, and flapped, and ... flew.  Ah yes, we had forgotten about the whole ‘flying’ thing.  We had previously spent several years living with Indian Runner ducks, some of the least aerodynamic birds in existence, and somehow chickens had been slotted in alongside them as things that could fly in theory but generally won’t.

 

And of course for adult chickens this is generally true.  Adults have large bodies in comparison to their wing span and it takes a lot of effort to become airborne.  They might flap up onto a low branch but sustained flight is rare.  However, adolescent chickens like ours have pretty much adult-sized wings but only one third of their adult body weight.  For them, flying is much easier.

And so it was that we watched the smallest chicken, a little white one, disappear over the fence into next door’s garden. 

Our neighbours have been very tolerant of our growing menagerie, and we’ve always done our best to keep the quacking/chirping/bleating down to acceptable levels (i.e. none), particularly on a Sunday morning.   Back in our runner duck years we often resorted to bringing Sandi Toksvig (the duck not the human) into the kitchen for the night because she developed a habit of quacking loudly whenever it rained; presumably broadcasting the availability of insects.  Unfortunately her delight at finding worms at 4am was not shared by our neighbours and once inside our house, her furious quacking for release meant that we spent the remainder of the night with our heads under pillows. 

More recently, when the ducks were replaced by goats, our garden has become something of a petting zoo, particularly during half-term, and we hope that this goes some way to alleviating the occasional bouts of noise.  Unfortunately our adjacent neighbours do not have children, and therefore we were slightly concerned at their reaction to finding out we had added yet another species to our garden.

We fixed our brightest smiles and knocked on the door.  Hello!  We're really sorry but one of our chickens has just flown into your garden.  The beginnings of an answering smile became a rictus grin.  You have chickens?  Yes we did. We apologised, and explained they would be no trouble at all, apart from the current trouble, in fact we were planning on eating them, so could we come and rescue our chicken from your garden?    You’re going to eat it?  Well not right now obviously.  At this point I felt our neighbour was imagining a scene from a horror film as we chased chickens around the garden with our log splitter.  I  quickly launched into my explanation of our welfare aims.  Really we just wanted to give these cockerels a few additional months of a full and happy life than they would otherwise have had.  Unfortunately as our neighbour helped us chase a panicked chicken around their garden, I felt that we were not being the best advert for our welfare project. However, he seemed satisfied with the knowledge that we were going to dispatch the cockerels as soon as they showed signs of beginning to crow.

We returned our errant chicken to his brood and carefully clipped all their wings.  Actually, here we dispatched our one piece of chicken knowledge and removed the flight feathers from just one wing of each chicken. Clipping both wings means that the chicken can still fly, given sufficient effort and incentive, but clipping just one wing means that the chicken is off-balance and will simply spiral back down to earth (I can’t remember where I read this, but it works).

The next morning we propped open the door of the chicken house (a converted rabbit hutch), so that our newest arrivals could spend the day exploring the garden, and went to work.   

 

I was first to return. 

 

The garden was covered in poo.  Lots and lots of puddles of poo.  Large ones.

 

I was shocked, how could such small chickens be responsible for producing such large volumes of waste?  As I shuffled round the patio with a dustpan, brush and watering can, sweeping up and brushing off as best as I could, I worried about the effect that this would have on the other residents of our garden.  I seemed deeply unfair to let Tiberius, Sibelius and Charles out onto grass that was so liberally covered in drippy muck, yet keeping the chickens inside their house all day did not fit in at all with our welfare aims.  

At this point I noticed two things: the first was that Sibelius had disappeared up the ramp inside the chicken house, and the second was that as Tiberius was following me around he was leaving large drippy pools of diarrhoea.  Ah.  So here was an explanation for the poonami.  It turned out that the goats had spent the day happily eating all of the chicken food and quite a lot of chicken poo, and were now feeling the after effects.

 

We now lock the door of the chicken house as soon as the chickens are out in the morning, much to the disgust of Tiberius and Sibelius, whose sole objective in life is now to gain entry to the chicken house.

 

Spot the chickens...

 

Growing with goats: How to build a goat-proof herb bed

I’ve been catching the train into London quite a bit recently for work.  In theory the journey could provide around 45 minutes of working time, meaning that I could leave that little bit earlier.  In practice, it’s difficult to type when standing up in the isle of a muggy, overcrowded train, particularly when the man next to you insists on shouting into his mobile every time the reception drops out- which is about every 2 minutes.  Possibly he thought that mobile phones work in the same was as two paper cups joined by a piece of string, and that distance can be overcome by raising his voice?

So what I’ve mainly been doing is staring out of the window at the sunshine, while wishing the train would turn the heating off. 

Not a smallholding...

On one journey I started thinking about how we could grow some crops in our garden.  A garden occupied by two goats, occasionally a rabbit, and currently seven chickens many of whom like to eat, taste or stamp all over plants, as evidenced in particular by the bare stripe that runs all along the bushes to a height of around 1.5 metres.  A project worthy of at least 45 minutes train musing!

My thoughts eventually coalesced into making a cold frame, something that would act as a mini greenhouse to get the seeds started, (we have shutters in our house that don't leave any space for seeds on the windowsill), and then could be covered in chicken wire to keep out the various animals once summer arrived. 

A few day's later I was walking the back way to the supermarket so that I could carry out my usual nonchalant glance into the bins (I have collected a lot of broken-but-fixable stuff this way, including the jar we used for brewing dandelion and ginger ale).  Propped up next to the bin were six large sheets of thick plastic, perfect for a cold frame!  I took it as a sign, although after the three slow trips it took to transport all the (unexpectedly heavy and slightly-too-large-to-be-carried-comfortably)sheets from the bin to my house, my enthusiasm had taken a bit of a battering.



Week 1

I returned to the project at the weekend with a spot of amateur brick-laying.  Amateur in the sense that I watched half You Tube video in bed and then decided to jump straight in (although I did at least get dressed).  We had already fished out a surprising number of bricks from various muddy mounds in the garden, which we think were once the previous owners' attempts at a rockery, so I used these side-on to build a cold frame that was about 2m by 0.5m and two bricks high.  As this didn't leave a lot of room for plants to grow, I also laid an old fence post across the back to raise the height, which added to the recycling element of this project and also gave the overall structure a pleasing cold frame shape.

Sibelius demonstrates the successful goat proofing

We planted whatever we had at the time, namely a multipack of herbs (dill, basil, sage, oregano, chives) and a pack of cut-and-come-again mixed lettuce.  Goodness knows how long we had had these but it was evidently long enough for almost all the herb seeds to fail.  Apart from the dill, which has grown tremendously, we have a total of two basil plants and three sage.  I also learnt that my plant identification skills are really poor and I can't tell the difference between the seedling of a weed and the desired plant. Luckily, my sense of smell is better than my eyesight and once the seedlings had unfurled their first proper leaves I was able to gently rub them to identify out the usurpers from the incumbents. 

The cut and come again lettuce also flourished, and, after Sibelius managed to get his head in under the plastic to carry out the first 'cut', proved true to its name by growing again.

Unfortunately the original plan of replacing the plastic with chicken wire as soon as the weather improved had to be revised because the goats quickly realised that by standing on the chicken wire their combined weight depressed it enough to get a hold on the leaves and yank them them up through the holes.  I've no idea if this teamwork was conscious or accidental, but I do hope they never apply it to breaking into our kitchen! I've kept the chicken wire in place, because it adds extra height for the plants to grow, and replaced the plastic over the top of it.  I just need to keep it watered a bit more often as the rain can't get in, but at least the plants should be nice and cosy - and intact!

We have now harvested our first lettuce crop, (although I acknowledge that 'crop' is possibly too strong a term for something this easy to grow), and apart from a few strange-tasting leaves which I subsequently decided were probably weeds, it was delicious. 

 

The dill is ready to be harvested as soon as we want it - I'm thinking a weekend breakfast with our scrambled eggs from Hempsal's community farm, and I've planted more dill seeds in the empty spaces left by our failed chives.

 

And the leftover plastic sheets were made into a rain shelter by the back door for the boys.

 

 

 

 

Hatching our dinner...

Spatchcock

I think it started with a conversation about turkeys.  I love turkey at Christmas, but with just the two of us for the last few years our Christmas dinners have tended towards the vegetarian - it's just easier to cater for fewer people that way (and just as tasty!).  However, after spotting that one of the farm shops just outside Cambridge was advertising (prohibitively expensive) turkeys that had been bought to the farm as young poults and raised on site, I wondered if we could do the same.  Surely it would be far more satisfying to know that the animal we were eating had been given a full and happy life, rather than some ethical unknown from Sainsbury's chiller section.

We decided on a trial run with chickens.  After several hours' intensive research on the internet we purchased a Brinsea mini advance ex incubator; an all-singing, all-dancing affair with automatic turning, temperature and humidity control.  We also ordered 6 hatching eggs.  The breed I selected was the Ixworth, which is primarily raised for meat and they arrived through the post in a heavily padded foam egg carton.

The internet is an amazing resource for projects like this, ranging from photographs of a candled egg taken during each of its 21 days of development to discussion forums for every aspect of housing and illness.  I spent several evenings watching You Tube videos which showed the first 'peeping' noises from the unhatched eggs, which apparently stimulates the other eggs to hatch, followed by the first 'pip' as a chick breaks through the shell with its egg tooth and finally the emergence from the egg of a bedraggled chick.

We carefully bought Cambridge's most over-engineered incubator up to the correct temperature (37.5oC) and humidity (45%) and added ('set') the eggs. After 7 days we candled them to check which ones were fertile and developing.  Only one egg out of six showed the spider-like veins which are indicative of a developing embryo.  This was upsetting, not least because a single lonely chicken was not part of our overall plan for improved animal welfare; however, a friend in Cambridge had set some of her chickens' eggs into an incubator on the same day as us and promised that we could have one of her chicks as soon as they hatched.

Day 20 came and went with no peeping from our egg.  We reasoned that this could be because the egg had no fellow eggs to respond to, or maybe the incubator was unexpectedly soundproof.  Day 21 also passed without incident, then day 22.  Finally at day 24 we decided it was time to acknowledge the failure of our first attempt.  It was day 25 before I could bring myself to throw away the egg  - I had nightmares about it hatching alone in the bin.  It didn't (I checked).

Again the internet was the source of much advice.  It turns out that eggs delivered through the post, although commonplace (and I love the idea of hundreds of eggs whizzing around the country in the post), are associated with increased failure rates due to the uncertainty regarding the conditions during transit- they might have been left overnight in a freezing warehouse, or baked in a delivery van.  For our single egg which had clearly started developing but died, we could just have been unlucky as even within a 'normal' incubator hatch there can be cases of late stage death in shell.

We decided to try again, but this time using eggs from Hempsal's community farm. This would mean that we would have no control over the breed of the chickens, as the cockerels at Hempsal's are experts at hopping over the fences that separate birds of different breeds, but it would remove the uncertainty of having eggs arrive through the post.

This time 5 out of the 6 eggs were developing at 7 days.  Promising.  However, once again day 20 came and went without any signs of life.  The next morning we ate breakfast willing the eggs to do something, anything, to show that there were chicks inside, but there was nothing.  On the evening of day 21 I spoke to my parents on the way home from work and told them I thought the hatch had once again failed.  As I opened the door to our house I was already mentally planning my evening of  Google searches for 'late stage death in shell reasons', 'incubator settings eggs failing to hatch' and 'why, why, why are all my eggs dying?!'; however, when I checked the incubator one of the eggs had pipped!  Again there was no further sign of life - contrary to my You Tube videos in which this stage of hatching was often accompanied by peeping noises and vigorous egg rocking, but this was a definite improvement on last time.

First pip!

 The next morning we woke up to our first chick, damp, floppy and feigning death in the bottom of the incubator.  Like the anxious first-time chicken parents we were, we pressed our noses to the incubator to watch for breathing.  It was alive!  We had a chick!  If it hadn't been 7.30am on a Wednesday morning I swear we'd have broken out the champagne Prosecco.

First chick!

Over the next 24 hours all five eggs hatched, producing four black chicks and one yellow.  For the first few days of their tiny lives we felt the weight of responsibility for keeping them alive particularly heavily- was the heat lamp too close?  Would they drown in their ramekin of water (I actually got up during the night to check).  This was not helped by their habit of feigning death while sleeping.

Playing dead while sleeping

Amazingly, however, they survived, and thrived.  'They're developing feathers'! Ian and I called to each other in the mornings; 'They've mastered perching'! 'They're still alive!'

We mustn't get attached, Ian kept repeating, we mustn't get attached, to their cute little beaks and their tiny little wings... I was cold-hearted in my denial; of course I wasn't attached, I could eat them tomorrow if needs be (safe in the knowledge that there would be no need for a tiny chicken dinner tomorrow).

However, one week in and distinct personalities are beginning to show through.  Nugget and Supreme are the ringleaders and the bravest; the first to master perching and masters of 'bird ballet' stretching out each leg together with the adjacent wing.  Chasseur, tiny and all black, can fall asleep anywhere, including standing up with his head in the food bowl.  Provencal and Spatchcock are the adventurers, flinging themselves up at the top of the brooder, tiny wings flapping madly.

Spatchcock, Nugget, Supreme (bottom only!) and Provencal.

I'm still confident that we can kill them, when the time comes.  Not just because the cute chick stage will pass but also because naming the chicks, and caring about their welfare, as all part of the original plan for giving them the best possible life.  I'm not saying it will be easy, but it shouldn't be easy, that's all that is wrong with today's shrink-wrapped nameless supermarket chicken culture.

As for Charles Ryder, he's very grumpy about sharing his favourite spot by the log burner with the chicks. He can't wait until we eat the lot of them.  

 

Voting update part 2

As I was listening to Radio 4 reporting the results of the General Election earlier today; that the Conservatives, unexpectedly, have a majority government, and that Labour have lost many seats, I was reminded that Charles Ryder, our electioneering rabbit, was particularly interested in the voting process. 

I looked back at the results of his pre-election nibbling of campaign leaflets, available here: voting update, and was amazed to see that he was predicting this outcome all along- almost no nibbling of the Conservative leaflet and a total shredding of Labour!



I'm thinking of hiring Charles out for future elections; Paul the octopus has nothing on him!

P.S. Charles' powers clearly only work at the national level since in Cambridge the Lib Dem MP, Julian Huppert, (slightly chewed) lost to the Labour candidate (total shredding).