I had noticed the chooks panicking the past couple of days whenever they crossed a certain area in the yard, but it was not until I went up there myself today that I noticed this! Almost had a heart attack until I realized it's dead. Not sure what type of snake it is.
The
only snakes I have seen around here before are tree snakes and carpet
snakes. This one doesn't look the right colour for a tree snake, though.
Closer shot. Given the injuries to the poor creature I would presume he/she was a victim of the lawn mower a couple of days ago. I think it's a good job our mowing man uses a ride on mower!
Poor Joe Blake (Australian slang for snake), he didn't come off too well
in that argument and man, did he pong (stink)! I scooped him
up with a stick and carried him away from the chooks' free range area. I
was sneaky though, and put the corpse somewhere that I don't want the
Hensingtons to be. ;) Maybe they will stay away from there for a while,
at least!
Edited to add: An online friend of mine says it looks a lot like an Eastern Brown snake.
Yesterday while I was drinking my morning coffee, I could hear a faint sound which I couldn't quite decipher coming from the direction of my chicken coops. I couldn't decide, sitting in my study, if it was a hen announcing the arrival of an egg, or some other strange commotion. I decided to get up and go to the back patio to listen more closely.
I didn't actually make it out to the patio, but froze, listening just inside the back door with a big, sloppy stupid grin on my face. Yes one of our young cockerels has come of age, and was letting the world...well, the backyard at least know about it with a soft, rusty sounding "Err-uh-errrrrrr!"
I don't know which one of the boys it was. When I went up to the grower pen to ask who was crowing, I was met with sealed beaks and innocent looks while the young pullet softly suggested a solution to the 'problem.'
"Chop-chop!" she clucked under her breath. "Chop-chop-chop!" She is always suggesting that her brothers should get the chop! She's such a meanie.
All of the other hens, both my own, and the guest hens we are chook-sitting were in a state of high excitement, calling out to let the 'man' know where they are.
So, our 'babies' are all grown up. 12 weeks old, today and I am already starting to plan for next season's hatch. I love the rhythm that these lovely birds have brought to my life. Yes, they're hard work, but they repay my efforts in eggs, and more than repay it with the enrichment they bring me.
Have you ever had one of those days when from the moment you got up in the morning, until the sun went down in the afternoon you just felt like you did nothing but run around doing a whole bunch of things but not accomplishing a whole lot?
That was Friday at Hensington Palace! We've been having some quite warm weather here the past couple of days and this has meant that the chickens were all becoming a little bit heat stressed. Thursday, the mercury climbed to 32c and today, it was about 31c I think. We were caught very much unprepared as the average mean temperature in our area, even in the hight of Summer is around 30c which is still warm, but not the kind of baking heat we had the last two days! The chickens were quite stressed on Thursday and there was not much that I was able to do for them as I was at home alone, and I have disabilities which make it difficult for me to climb or lift things. All I could do was let the chickens out on free range and make sure they found some shade.
For the chicks, I had to make sure they had plenty of water and that they didn't get frightened or upset during the hottest part of the day. Thankfully, they all survived, but I knew that something would need to be done on Friday to keep them a bit cooler.
I posted in the forum asking for some advice on what to do to avoid heat stress and got some wonderful suggestions. Some, I couldn't implement, but others, such as providing the chickens with ice so they would have cool water, I could do, as well as placing shade cloth over their coops to keep the sun off the metal roofing.
Sandra and I got some lengths of shadecloth out of the storage sheds and draped these over the coops and the chick's growing pen. We weighted them with bricks for now, but will need to find a more permanent way to affix them before we get any major summer storms.
I had frozen some water in plastic tubs over night, and we also filled a couple of buckets with water and placed them around near the chooks' favourite shady spots in the yard. The chooks liked the idea of the water buckets, but having never seen ice before, were a little nonplussed about what to do with it! That problem was quickly solved though, when Sandra sprinkled a handful of their feed into the container with the ice. They soon got the idea that pecking the ice would either reward them with food, or with something cold and refreshing and they decided to camp next to the ice bucket for the afternoon!
Chooks introduced to ice for the first time
The next order of business was to deal with the chicks who were feeling the heat again in their aviary. We dug around in the handy dandy storage shed and came up with an old cage that used to house my pet fancy rats in the yea long ago! I had been intending to toss it out when the council had a hard rubbish collection a while back, but fortunately, there it was in the dim, dark recesses of the shed, cobwebbed and forgotten, awaiting just such an emergency as this!
The cage was promptly hauled out into the light of day, dusted off and recieved a couple of small modifications in order to become a shady, if somewhat small enclosure for the chicks who decided that cramped or not, it was wonderfully cool and being on bare ground, was the perfect place to settle in for a luxurious dust bath in the cool, damp earth under the tree!
Dustbathing Chicks
(I needed to refresh their water bowl four times that day due to them kicking dirt into it!)
Well, by this time, with all the mad activity to try and prevent our chooks from getting heat stroke, Sandra and I almost had heat stroke ourselves! It was time to retire indoors for a cool drink, and some study before having our lunch.
The big chooks hung out most of the afternoon under a shady tree, camped next to their ice block and bucket of water, whilst the chicks dust bathed, scratched in the grass and squabbled over bugs in their makeshift enclosure.
While the chooks were all kept busy with their outdoor pursuits, I decided it was time to tackle the tomatoes I had picked on Thursday.
I got to work and transformed this...
Into this...
It's just a basic Italian sauce but very tasty! We had some of it with Fetuccine and mushrooms for dinner and it worked a treat. We have enough leftover for three more dinners so that is in the freezer now and all those beautiful tomatoes will bless us with their wonderful flavour for a few weeks to come!
It was a long, and busy day, and I am exhausted and having seen it all written out, I can see that we did actually accomplish quite a bit, since laundry got done and I also completed a quiz for Uni and scored 90% on it somewhere in amongst all that!
If you managed to read this far, you deserve a reward, so here is some chickie cuteness to send you on your way!
so, today we went to the local council recycling
center and picked up an old dog crate for $15! When we got it home, I
cleaned it thoroughly with water and disinfectant (note: I have since found out it is not advisable to use disinfectant to clean equipment for backyard poultry. Warm soapy water will suffice) and let it dry in the
sun for an hour or so.
The crate has "Pepsi + Diego" written on the top of it. It makes me wonder what animals used to use this before it came to us. We
have set this up in the coop for our broody Sussex, Bertha. She seemed to
tolerate the disturbance okay. We went up and did this just after sunset
and I got her off the nest she had been using and put her near her
water bucket. She was a bit stiff from sitting and kind of fell face
first into the bucket.
Note to self, put her further away from the bucket next time! She then
proceeded to have a big drink of water. The other chooks in the pen next
door were on the roost, but when they heard/saw her drinking, two of
them came down and had a drink in their pen, too. It was rather cute!
We
put fresh straw into the dog crate, and put her fake egg into it, then
when she had eaten some food and had another drink, I tried putting her
inside the crate. She fussed and clucked and then came out, acting
frantic as though her egg was missing. I put her back in. Same deal.
Then
my partner suggested we should get the straw from the old nest she had
been using and put that into the crate. We did that, put her egg in
there, put HER in there and waited.
There was some more clucking
and fussing, and then a little noise that sounded like a cry of joy when
she spotted her fake egg. She immediately settled on the egg, and
that's how we left her.
She seems very determined to set, so I am going to organise some eggs for her early next week.
Oh,
and while she was off the nest, she did a poop right at my feet, which
was huge and omg!! The smell!!! I'd heard about these 'broody poos' but
they seriously have to be smelled to be believed.
I suppose that was my just desserts for dropping her headfirst into her water bucket!
In the springtime, it seems a young hen's fancy turns lightly to raising chicks!
Much as I would adore some little hatchlings trotting around after their mumma hen, I am not set up as yet for raising chicks, or for brooding them myself should the hen go off the set. :( I wish I could let her have some chicks, but I simply don't know enough and it would probably be unfair to her, and the babies.
I have heard that it is possible for eggs to hatch if you put them down your shirt/bra, but I am not keen to find out if that's true! Besides which, I don't even have fertile eggs as I have no rooster. I guess, clucky as Bertha and I may be, it will be the sin bin for her tomorrow if she is still setting.
When
I posted on my blog recently about my chickens going nuts over canned
sardines, my friend DivaJyoti commented that she hadn't known chickens
would eat fish.
Chickens actually prefer to follow an omnivorous
diet. The chickens we know today, that scratch around in barnyards or
(sadly) rot away in battery farms, for shame! tend to be fed on a grain
based diet, more because it is convenient for us. The domestic hen, gallus domesticus is actually descended from the Jungle Fowl:
Jungle
Fowl originate from India, Sri Lanka, South East Asia, and Indonesia.
In their wild state, jungle fowl eat a varying diet consisting of
fruits, grains, vegetation, small rodents, lizards, bugs, slugs and
insects. When allowed to 'free range' our domestic chickens will do much
the same. I've heard of domestic fowl eating mice, lizards, beetles,
worms, caterpillars snails and slugs. In fact, a flock of chickens let
loose in a matured vegetable garden will nibble little bits of the
veges, but will also keep the garden almost completely pest free. They
particularly favour the larvae of coddling moth! Yesterday, I gave my
chooks 100g of kangaroo mince.
Someone
mentioned on a poultry forum I frequent, that feeding kangaroo meat to
chooks is an extreme sport. After trying this myself, I'd have to
concur.
There was none of that hesitant peering at it before taking a small
peck to taste it that you normally see when offering a new type of food. Rosie tried to rip the meat out of my hand before I
even got the wrapper off it!
Then it was on for young and old as my
gentle, 'boking', scratching hens turned into miniature velociraptors,
jumping up, flapping at me, trying to snatch beakfuls of meat out of my
fingers (they rarely eat from my hand) and chasing each other all over
the chook pen trying to snitch pieces out of each other's mouths. All
the while, they were making that special high pitched muuuur-uurrrrrr!
sound that chooks reserve for only the best and tastiest morsels.
My chickens truly never cease to amaze and amuse me and yesterday was no exception.
We have had a change in the weather the last few days with rain settling in for most of yesterday, so when I went to collect the eggs in the morning, I used an umbrella to keep me dry while I went up to the hen house.
Being quite used to the idea of an umbrella myself, it didn't occur to me that the chooks had never seen one in their lives before. I sallied forth through the light rain, carrying a dish of food with me, my mind occupied with feeding the hens, getting the eggs, opening their day run and all the usual things that run through my head on the 30 meter walk to the coops.
Usually when the chooks hear me coming, they run to the door to see what I have brought them, but on this occasion, they seemed a bit reticent. I stood staring at them in consternation. They stood at the opposite end of the coop, staring back with varying shades of alarm on their beaky little faces.
"What on earth is wrong with you lot?" I asked, glancing around for any signs of a snake, hawk or other predator.
Silence. Stares. Frozen postures.
And then it dawned on me.
"Oh! Silly chookies! That's just an ubrella!" I folded it and laid it on the ground and was cautiously rewarded by the hens creeping forward to greet me with dubious clucks of recognition as they each kept one wary eye on the now 'dead thing' lying on the ground by my feet.
We got on with the usual morning routine and then I walked back to the house, chuckling all the way about the incident.
This is probably not bizarre or weird behaviour from the hen's pov, but I thought I would share it anyway because I couldn't believe how much of a duh! moment it gave me when it dawned on me why my chook did what she did, this morning.
I went to get the eggs and then noticed one of the chooks was acting a bit strangely. So...
I set the two eggs I was carrying down on the floor of the coop and went to pick up the chook in question, forgetting about the eggs as I examined her. After satisfying myself that the chook was healthy, I put her down and turned around to notice Rosie standing over the two eggs kind of half crouched, actually, making little cooing noises and trying to tuck one of the eggs underneath herself by pushing it with her beak. I went over to her and reached for the eggs. She stepped aside quickly but made a snippy little Brrrrk! noise at me as I picked up the eggs and carried them outside the coop.
Not my chook. Same breed, though.
It didn't occur to me, until I was almost at the house, that of course! DUH! Those eggs represent a huge investment to the chicken and the egg she had been trying to tuck under herself was actually HER egg! It was her way of trying to protect her 'baby.'
I tend to forget, that eggs are more than just a yummy snack for me. They're the chooks' investment in the future.
but it was not until I went up there myself today that I noticed this! 
Almost had a heart attack until I realized it's dead. Not sure what type of snake it is.
Note to self, put her further away from the bucket next time! She then
proceeded to have a big drink of water. The other chooks in the pen next
door were on the roost, but when they heard/saw her drinking, two of
them came down and had a drink in their pen, too. It was rather cute!
There was none of that hesitant peering at it before taking a small
peck to taste it that you normally see when offering a new type of food. Rosie tried to rip the meat out of my hand before I
even got the wrapper off it! 
