Happy Mother's Day

I know it's been a few weeks since I've posted anything here.  

In that time we've integrated the bay chicks into the chicken flock.  They are getting big and are all doing fine.

Some of the new pullets

Our oldest hens and also the 2 roosters are now 3 years and 7 months old.  

Except for Freckles, she's even older, we got her as a hen and have no idea how old she is.  

Freckles

We have a few hens that are a few years younger that we raised and adopted through the past 3 years.  

Bonnie, a former shelter hen

Our egg production has diminished greatly, that's why we got 10 new pullet chicks this year.  It was time for some new life in the coop.  This time we purposely purchased all pullets, so we wouldn't have to deal with a bunch of them turning into roosters.  

I'm hoping the new babies start laying this summer - got got them real early to get a good early start.

Also since I've posted we got a new roof.  Yeah to no more leaks in the back hallway when it rains!

We haven't lost any guineas lately - that's always awesome.  We've seen lots of fox and hawks and heard lots of great horned owls, but the predators have not killed, just come and looked and backed off.  Because I'm such a girl I can't actually kill a fox, but I'll shoot at it's feet and give it a good scare.  Maybe I've scared them away?  Often I see a pair of red-tailed hawks scoping out the baby chickens, they circle above the chicken pen.  But the pen has a roof and they know it, so they just watch the chicks and then fly away.  In their hawk minds they probably dream of a chick escaping from the chicken pen, and they swoop down and get their own young-un's a nice dinner.  But not in real life.  

The guineas love the warm weather.  I'm happy they all survived the winter.

The guineas have been laying eggs in the woods.  Sometimes we find their nests and enjoy a month worth of guinea eggs.  I usually have 1 chicken egg and 1 guinea egg for breakfast.  I don't want the guineas to attempt to raise their own keets, it's certain suicide, so I take their eggs.  Most of the time the eggs disappear before I find them, probably taken by fox or coons overnight.

Benjamin and Brindle kept me company as I walked through the woods this morning.

Also since I've last posted our lawn mower broke.  We need to do something and soon!  The grass is taking over!

Lots more is going on, but I'll save it for the next post. 

Don't want to give you too much information (TMI) in one sitting!

Happy Mother's Day!  Hope you enjoyed these pictures of my Sunday morning.

Hope everyone has a great Sunday today.

Shadow and Jack

The Old Brown House and the Little Bridge in the Deep Woods

This weekend we went for a visit to "The Old Brown House."  The Old Brown House is a historic abandoned house deep in the woods on our property.  I believe it was built in the early 1800s.  The weather was nice so we thought we'd see how it was doing.  I also was looking for a black vulture nest.  The vultures have been flying around this area quite a bit. 

I think it's kind of large for such an old house.  It has 4 large rooms, 2 upstairs and 2 downstairs.  No bathroom, no kitchen, just rooms.  There are 2 fireplaces so all the rooms had heat back when people used to live in it.  I really like this old house.

Here's The Old Brown House from the side view.  It's skinny, isn't it?

The poor old house is falling apart.  When I look at it I imagine the hands that built it.  Someone put all those boards in place with care.  I imagine the woods were all fields back then, and this was a working farm house.

In the corner of one of the rooms is a pile of old doors and windows.

Wait - look there!  What's that behind the door?  

It's a black vulture nest!

Black vultures are weird birds.  They don't make any kind of nest, they just lay their eggs on the ground.  The vultures were flying around overheard as we walked around inside the old house.  They were not happy with our visit.

I'll keep an eye on the vulture babies as they hatch and grow up.  I love vultures - they are good birds.

We walked outside The Old Brown House looking for the outhouse.  

I know there was once an outhouse, but have not been able to find it.  We figure it must have been destroyed.  It would be neat to find remnants of it.  

While we were walking around we found a turkey feather...

...And a big bunny rabbit.   

The rabbit wasn't afraid of us at all.  She just sat there.  We didn't disturb her, but walked around her carefully.  Maybe she had babies under her, who knows.

We also saw an old teapot.  I don't think this was that old - it certainly doesn't look like it's 200 years old.  There's a lot of trash in the woods where people dumped back in the 1980's.  We're always cleaning up trash.

As we left The Old Brown House we went by The Little Bridge in the Deep Woods.  

It's so cool - it's a little bridge in the middle of the woods.

Again it makes me think of the people who built it.  The bridge is old and falling apart now.  It sits on a dirt road and covers a tiny creek.  Maybe the creek was a larger stream at one time.

Well, that's it for this trip into the woods.  I'll keep an eye on the vulture eggs.  I can't wait to see the babies!

Guinea Fowl Videos

Here are a couple short video clips of our guinea fowl.  The large dark one with white spots is the male who sings to his 2 ladies who are beside him.  However, I didn't get a video of his beautiful melodious songs.  He's not singing in this video.  He wouldn't sing when I had the camera.  Of course he's shy about this talent, as it's not normal for guineas to sing and he must know it!  The guineas are making what I call "happy sounds" - which are their short chirps that are not obnoxious.

You can also hear a pilated woodpecker in these videos.  They are all around us.  You can't see him, but you can hear him!

 A few evenings ago I arrived home from work right when the guineas were roosting in the big pine tree.  And sure enough they all were singing their beautiful melodious song.  I grabbed my cell phone and recorded a video (with sound) of the pine tree.  However, after I went inside to preview it, I couldn't find it on my phone!  Somehow it seems it didn't save it!  Drat!

The guineas seem to sing mostly first thing in the morning and last thing at night.  The rest of the time they are out and about.  I'll keep working on getting a video of their unusual songs!

Chick pics

Our chicks are in that scruffy age.  They are growing quickly.  Hopefully today will be their first day with the rest of the flock, the first day they get to venture out in the chicken flock.  We'll see if it gets a little warmer outside first.

Here's mama hen Charlotte.  She is the best mother hen we've ever had.

It appears as if 2 of the silver laced wyandottes are actually gold laced wyandottes.  I think we have 1 silver laced wyandotte.  The red sex links are the scruffiest looking of all the chicks. The white leghorns are pretty and white already.  The gold laced wyandottes are the friendliest of all the chicks, although none of them are shy around us.

All the chicks are healthy - we lost none.  These were store-bought chicks and they were started on medicated chick feed.  We were concerned about the hen Charlotte because she was only broody a few days before we gave her chicks, and it was as if she wanted to still be broody at first. She still had the desire to sit on eggs.  But after a few days the active chicks got her up and running around like a normal mother hen. 

I wondered if the store-bought chicks, who had never seen a hen, would accept a mother hen.  The answer was - without hesitation they went right to her.  It must have been born into them to want a mother hen.  They went right under her wings and snuggled with her just like it was natural to them.  They refused to leave her side.  One wanted to ride around on her back at all times.  It was a normal thing for a baby to want a mother.

This will probably be Charlotte's last time to be a mother hen.  She is an old gal now, we are surprised but happy she went broody this spring.  She was one of our original chicks.

Tomorrow I'll make a guinea post.  Stay tuned to hear about the guinea fowl songs!

Beautiful Guinea fowl & Mockingbird songs?

Last week I noticed a beautiful melody coming from the fields near my house.  When I went to investigate the beautiful and melodious bird song, I couldn't figure it out.  I only saw my flock of guinea fowl walking in the front fields.  Hmmm.

This morning I went outside and there was that beautiful melody again!  It was so close to the house!  I looked in the bushes and saw a big spotted male guinea and his 2 mates.  And sure enough, the guinea boy looked right at me and sang the beautiful melody.  The melody had high notes and low notes, and is truly breathtaking!  And then a bird repeated the melody from up in the treetops!  The guinea answered, the bird answered back, and before I knew it other guinea fowl and other birds in the area were all answering with the same melody.  I was speachless!

Normally guinea fowl noises are ugly honks.  Every now and then the guinea boy added a honk or two to the song, but then continued with the melody.  I believe the birds which were singing overheard were mockingbirds.  Also other guinas in the area were honking every now and then, don't get me wrong, there were random guinea honks, but the melody was louder than the honks.

I know that mockingmirds repeat after other birds, but I never knew that guinea fowl sang such beautiful songs!  I only saw the same guinea singing, the 2 females with him were both silent.  He was singing to them.  They followed him everywhere we walked and sang.  He often stopped and waited for them to catch up to him and sang to them.

I called my husband outside (he was inside) and asked him to listen to the melodies.  He said he noticed the past few nights the guineas have been singing this beautiful bird song in the evenings before they fly up into their roosting tree.  He called it their happy song.  He was amazed the mocking birds were repeating it throughout the area.  He wasn't sure if it was only the males that sang.

Has anyone else heard their guinea fowl singing a beautiful and harmoneous song instead of honking?  Please do tell!  I will try to record this and post it in a future post! 

The bird song made me think of the mockingjays' music in The Hunger Games trilagy by Suzanne Collins.  In the books, the mockingjays repeated songs and tunes, which truly sounded beautiful.  Now I have my own bird music right outside.  

Chick & Guinea update

The chicks are doing fine.  They are all running around their coop, they are as active and hyper as chicks can be.  The foster mama hen is a great mother and is showing them what to eat and how to scratch.  Soon they will be able to go outside with the other chickens.  We want to make sure the mama hen will protect them and the babies will stay with their mother before we let them loose.  Plus the babies have to be big enough to survive a peck or two from the other chickens before going outside.  The foster mama is getting anxious to get out of the coop.  I can tell she's tired of being inside cooped up when spring is starting outside.

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The guineas are all separating into pairs.  I guess over the winter they were dating one another and now they decided who is going to be mated.  I thought they were just surviving the winter, who knew they were actually flirting and dating one another!  During the day they separate all around the house.  Before they used to stay in one big flock.  Now there's groups of guineas everywhere you can see, and there's guinea calls coming from everywhere.  Every now and then a few of the pairs will join into a small group.  I cannot figure out how many males and females we have.  In the evening, they all join back into one big flock again in front of our house.

I'm assuming the female guineas will start laying eggs in their nests all around the house, if they're not already laying.  We'll have to start looking for their eggs again.  We are now ready for the guineas to become broody - Randy acquired some small cages to put over the female guinea at nighttime to protect her from fox and raccoon when she's sitting on her eggs.  The females become broody after they get about 20 eggs in a nest, and they constantly sit on the eggs to hatch them.  The wild animals are sure to kill her overnight if she's sitting blind on the ground in the woods.  There's a better possibility that she will not be killed when she's sitting during the day as the fox and raccoons are not that active during the day.  It's always very tough to separate a broody guinea hen from her eggs, I've gotten in fights with hens trying to separate them from the eggs, trying to encourage her to go fly up into a tree and roost at nighttime to protect herself.  The hens attacks me, hissing at me and biting me.  The fights get bad because the male guinea comes to protect his mate and fights me, too.  The male will fight me, but he still leaves his wife alone on the ground in the woods overnight to fend for herself.  But now we are ready to help her, protecting her with a cage.  We'll see if this tactic works if/when we get broody guinea hens.

We are already dealing with fox issues this spring.  A couple weeks ago I heard the guineas screaming and looked out back behind the house and saw all the guineas running as fast as they could run, and there was a fox galloping alongside them!  I flew out the back door and started running after the fox.  If anyone could have seen they'd have laughed - a flock of guineas running, followed by a galloping fox, followed by a running human!  The fox took off, there was too much commotion that day for a guinea dinner.

Last week I looked out back and saw the guineas way behind the house, about 250 yards out.  And there was the beautiful red fox crouching low, getting ready to ambush the guinea fowl.  It was drizzling and freezing cold outside that day.  Before I could even open the door, the fox started it's crouching dash at the birds, mouth open ready to bite a grey guinea on the outside edge of the flock.  I just knew that bird was a goner.  I flew outside, barefoot, into the freezing rain, screaming at the top of my lungs, my arms swinging overhead trying to make myself bigger.  The fox was running at the birds, the guineas all stood looking at me like I was insane, all their heads were up and their necks were long with surprise.  I screamed "Nooooooooooo!  Stoppppppppppppp!!!!!!!!" and ran as fast as my bare feet would take me.  The fox looked right at me and then back at the guineas, still running for the grey bird, mouth open, ready to bite.  The fox must have been hungry.  I screamed again, getting close to the fox and guineas.  The guineas were all frozen in place, terrified of me, thinking I was nuts, not even realizing that there was certain death so close for one of them.  At the very last second the fox swerved to the left and took off bounding away, jumping in high leaps, leaving the guineas after all.  I was still screaming at the top of my lungs.  I had acted on reflex, I didn't take the time to get a weapon, or even shoes or a coat.  I quickly ran back inside, got a gun, shoes, a coat and hat, and dashed back out.  I herded all the guineas up to the chicken coop and hunted for hours until the sun set for that fox, but he was long gone.  I don't think I could have killed him, but I would have shot near him, scaring him for sure.  I think that if he actually had a screaming guinea in his mouth that I could shoot him to save the bird.  I have never actually killed a fox, I'm not a hunter, or even a real farm girl, for that matter.  My husband is the farmer, I'm just getting by here on the farm figuring it out as I go.  But I don't want my farm animals, the livestock, to suffer and die, and I know that fox will kill every single guinea and chicken in my flock if they have the opportunity.

Since then, for the rest of the week, there have been no fox sightings. 

Hike in the woods

Spring has finally arrived at Razzberry Corner!  The weather was very nice, and so today I took a hike by myself in the woods.  Come along, it was just a short walk, but still interesting...

Not far from my house, down past the chicken coop and the big pine tree, deep along beside the fields, is a natural spring.  I like to check it out when I start my walks.  It is just amazing how water comes from underground and forms into a stream.  And that stream joins other streams from distant places and they make a little river.

And even cooler than that, there are what I call underground caves here.  The caves are not really caves, as to me real caves are made out of rock, and my caves are formed in hollow areas of dirt and mud, but not rock.  But it's still amazing to see caves underground, where the ground wells up and there's space underground.  This cave goes under the roots of a tree.  I climbed under the roots to see how deep it went.  There are other caves, too, but I only photographed this one.  I have always wanted to discover a cave, so I guess this is one thing on my bucket-list that I can check off.  I felt like a groundhog when I was investigating the caves.

Funny thing was that I saw cat footprints in the mud outside the caves.  I don't know what cat comes down here, evidently one of the stray cats.  There were also coon prints and of course deer hoof prints in the mud.

After the caves I checked out the little white house, which is an empty historic house on the property.  A huge flock of black vultures circled overhead, keeping an eye on me.  They must have a nest nearby, probably in the brown house.  There's another historic house not too far from the white house.  I call it the brown house, and it has no glass in the windows.  I bet the vultures chose the upstairs of the brown house for a nest this year.

The little white house has an outhouse, which I walked by.  It's all falling apart, but is still interesting to see.

I walked down past the little white house in the woods and started up a group of deer.  They bounded away snorting.  The song birds were scratching in the leaves for bugs, making a lot of noise in the dried leaves.  I found the remains of a raccoon.  I don't know what killed it.  I found it's tail and some fur.  The vultures probably cleaned up the rest of it.  Near the raccoon I found some old red bricks.  I wondered about the people who made those bricks, and how they ended up in my woods.  Was there once a house there?

I continued to climb through trees and vines in the deep woods.  I followed deer paths.  A hawk screamed overhead, and a pack of crows called to each other.  Eventually I came upon part of an old hunting stand.  It's all falling down now.

I even found an old broken shell from a box turtle. 

The walk in the woods was very peaceful, but I have chores to do before the day is over.  Thanks for coming along.  Springtime and warmer temps will be here soon and I always do more hikes in the summertime.  Next time I'll check out the brown house and will look for the vulture nest...

Chick photos

The chicks are doing fine.  They are a few days old now and are getting big.  We got 4 white leghorns, 3 silver laced wyandottes, and 3 red sex links.  They all are supposed to be pullets.  I would have taken more wyandottes, but the store didn't have anymore.  I really didn't want the leghorns, but Randy really wanted some leghorn hens.

The foster mama hen, Charlotte, is a great mother.  However, she was only broody for maybe 4 days at the most.  And now she still wants to sit.  She's not walking around with the chicks, she just wants to sit.  For the photos below I drug her out of a nest box & sat her out in the coop.  The chicks are active and run around her, she clucks to them and shows them what to eat, but she doesn't even stand up.

What amazes me most about the whole foster mother hen and store bought chick process is how well the babies adapted to the hen.  They had never seen a hen before, but as soon as we put them under her wings they cuddled and snuggled and loved her.  They listen to her clucks and want to stay close to her.  They climb all over her and snuggle up under her wings when they are tired.  I think they would have grown up fine without a mother hen, but they truly seem like happier chicks now that they have a mother hen.  I raised chicks without mother hens & with mother hens, and I will always choose to use a mother hen if I have one that's broody.  

Charlotte has raised several broods of chicks in the past, so we knew she'd do fine with chicks.  My only concern is that she wasn't broody, sitting on eggs, long enough.  Hopefully she doesn't sit like this for another 2 weeks, which would have been her normal broody cycle if she had eggs under her and they hatched after 3 weeks.

Chicks!

Last night we got 10 chicks!

We wanted to start early this year with chicks.

We gave them to Charlotte, who was broody.  She had only been broody 4 days, so we weren't sure how'd she do with chicks so soon.  But she's been a mother hen several times before, and she accepted them just fine.

I'll keep you updated!