Jerry's back!

For a while this summer Jerry the stray cat stopped coming to eat at our house.  We wondered if he was still alive.  But now he's back about three times a week for breakfast!  Possibly someone else was feeding him and now they stopped, who knows.  He hangs out in the housing community about a mile away from us.  We see him walking down our dirt drive to the houses, so we figured he secretly had another home that also gave him handouts.  Otherwise he would be here more often.  The other outside cats live here, outside our house.

While I was feeding the outside cats this morning, the guineas attempted to steal the cats' food.  They always steal the catfood unless I sit out on the porch guarding the bowls.  Here Casper, the while male guinea, is leading a sneak attack around the pillar.  Casper has 2 wives who he was trying to impress, plus the rest of the flock was tagging along.

I had to chase the guineas away so the cats could eat in peace.

Happy Saturday!

Chicken update

Our chicks have grown up so big.  No photos for this post, but I promise I'll get some soon.  We are trying to figure out who's a cockerel and who's a pullet.  Mama hen still hates the 3 reject chicks.  If she is free in the pen with them she will hunt them down and try to kill them!  I don't know what her problem is!  So she is always locked in a cage in the pen.  The chicks are free in the pen running around her.  The chicks accept each other just fine.  At night time Mama hen is allowed to sleep with her elite chicks and the 3 rejects sleep by themselves.  They have gotten used to being separate at nighttime.

Mama has started her chicks roosting up high off the floor at nighttime.  Just yesterday the 3 rejects starting roosting up high off the floor, too.  I guess this is just a natural thing, for them to not want to sleep on the floor.  Right now everyone is sleeping on top of nest boxes.  I attempted to put the 3 rejects on a regular roost last night, but they would have nothing to do with it.  They wanted to sleep on the nest box.

The adult chickens are doing well.  We recently trimmed some of the chickens toenails.  A few of them get really long toenails, especially Freckles and Luna, and it makes it hard for them to walk.  We checked everyone's toes one night and trimmed Luna and Freckles.  However, Luna's toes bled really bad.  We barely cut them.  Freckles didn't bleed at all, and she was cut down much more than Luna.  Guess every bird is different.  We put sugar on Luna's bleeding toenails, which stopped the bleeding, and put her back to bed.  In the morning I checked on her, she was fine.  She and Freckles are able to walk better now.

The red sex link, gold laced wyandotte and white leghorn pullets have just started to lay.  Their eggs are small, but they lay regularly.  The leghorns are such hyper birds - they are constantly running around the pen like crazy.  If someone looks at them funny they take off running.  All these new pullets are at the bottom of the pecking order.  It's funny to see little tiny Jade or Dottie, who are very small bantam birds, send a tall thin leghorn who's twice their size running away in fear. I need to come up with names for all the new pullets and the silver wyandotte cockerel.  I never named them!  I don't know why...  Any recommendations?


I will post chick photos for the next post!

Happy Saturday!