Little Buck and Chewing Cubes

Little Buck finally has a respectable beard!  He also has a yellow cast to his white face and beard hair because he has some unsavory habits (but excellent aim and bladder control!).  He is still his usual sweet self, despite those pesky hormones. 

He had a distinct odor during the fall rut when I kept the boys separate from the girls, but now that all the does have calmed down and the herd is reunited for warmth, I don't notice an offensive smell.  I was hesitant to own a buck because so many people on the interweb cautioned about the stink and the weird male behavior.   Maybe it's because he is still a young buck, but so far he isn't mean or even very loud.  When the girls where having their cycles and bawling like idiots, Little Buck only made little goat grunts that sounded like a baby goat in distress.  This seemed to irritate Peaches, but wasn't a bother to the rest of us.  

Tractor Supply sells these big bags of alfalfa and oat cubes in the horse supply section.  I bought a bag to see if the animals would like them as a treat.  

The cubes look like compressed blocks of green vegetation.  

They are very dense and the goats have a bit of trouble chewing them unless I break them into little flakes.  

Can you see the new sliding door that Brandon built for the goat stall?  It's the new yellow plywood.  This door slides closed so I can block the wind and lock the goats in their stall.  On these cold days I've been leaving just enough of a gap in the door so they can squeeze through.  I know fresh air is important, but I think my little barn is a bit drafty and the openings face the wind.   

The donkeys love the cubes, and will take a big hunk and chew, and chew, and chew.  They chew so much they get green slobber on their lips.  

How to illustrate the wind with photography?  We have a strong wind, and photos just don't communicate the presence of the wind.  I made the short movie below of the donkeys chewing their green cubes in the wind.  You can see their fur blowing and hear the rattle of the wind in the microphone.  Enjoy a few minutes of donkey chewing in the wind zen!  

More About My Beautiful Birds

I'm exercising my blog muscles, and making a point to take photos every day of something interesting that I can tell us about.  I see my beautiful flock of birds and tell myself that I've exhausted chickens as a subject matter.  But I can't resist!  I write about what tickles my mind, I guess, and after all these years I've still got chickens for brains.    

This is my entire flock - my old birds in the laying flock, two guinea fowl, plus the young meat and layer birds.  It's a lot of birds!  Beautiful birds.  I've never had so many at one time before, and I happily admire them every day. 

All of my old birds molted last fall, and now they have fresh fluffy feathers and no bald spots from the rough handling of roosters.  Its fun to have so many different colors, and I especially like having pretty white birds mixed in the flock.  I worry that the white birds will be targeted by the hawk because they stand out from a distance.  We've been lucky not to lose any birds lately, despite the predators.  We spied a raccoon in our little forest recently.  We regularly see a fox on the road not far from home.  The coyotes sing to us nearly every night and Wendigo responds with a monotonous barking song of her own.   

I have two young spare roosters that were hatched here, in addition to gentle Cogburn the head rooster.  This one, with his red color and fluffy beard, looks like an Easter egger, like his father.  I bet he hatched from a green egg.

But this little rooster looks like an Easter egger on the top, and a barred rock on the bottom.  He must have come from a brown barred rock egg.  If all my roosters are descendants from an Easter egger father, does that mean it's likely that their offspring will lay blue or green eggs?  

This is how many eggs I found in the nest.  I have more than forty birds, and I only get two eggs!

Light River

This is Light River, one of the twin Nigerian wethers that were gifted to me from my goat mentor.  She gave me Light River and Dark River so they could keep Peaches, my big Nubian doe, company.  Peaches was much happier, and less noisy, once she had the River brothers to snuggle with at night.  

Can you see the bloody red spot on the top of Light Rivers head in the photo above?  Also notice that he and his brother have flattened hair on the top of their heads.  This is because they spend so much time knocking their heads together or butting heads with Little Buck.  They rear up on their back legs, aim their heads, and then fall forward and bang their stupid heads together.  Over and over again until their hair is flat and their heads are raw.  

They find it entertaining I guess, since they spend so much time doing it.  Now that Little Buck is growing up, he sometimes wins the contest and pushes Light River out the stall door.  The girl goats and I just try to ignore their antics.  Sometimes they get carried away and disturb Peaches from her food.  Uh oh.  She is quick to lay down the law and pushes the offender away.  She reigns over the herd and none of us question her authority.  Do not interrupt her dinner!

The goats appear so content when they have their hay.  If we would like a few minutes of goat induced zen, we can watch them happily chewing in this video.  

Flood, Flock, and Fur

The floodwater isn't over the road, but it's getting close.  I know I'm not supposed to drive through water, especially in a low riding car, but once I did it anyway.  It only looked like a few inches of muddy water on the pavement, but by the time I hit the deep spot I was already committed and had to keep going.  I made it through just fine, but I promised myself not to do that anymore.  It was too much excitement for me.  Once, both roads to our house were flooded and I couldn't get home after work.  After spending more than an hour trying all the alternative routes only to find them flooded too, I drove back to town for dinner and waited for the water to recede.  

This picture is through the glass of the front door.  The whole flock of "baby" birds are anxiously awaiting their meal.  These bossy birds sometimes fly into the glass trying to get to me.  They think food magically falls from my fingers and they don't give me a chance to get to the food bin in the barn.  If only they had brains! 

I have to run the gauntlet of hungry birds on the way to my barn, where the food lives.  

I feel like the pied piper of chickens with all these birds running at my feet.  I feed them chicken pellets for breakfast and dinner, which I spread on the ground, but I don't let them have unlimited access to food.  I want them to find lunch on their own by foraging for a salad of grass and tasty bits they find on their own.  It's healthier for them to eat their salad, and if they are full of tasty grain pellets I don't think they eat as much greens.  Since I plan on eating the birds or their eggs, I want them to be as healthy as possible.  The eggs I get have dark orange yolks, and I think it's because they eat so much grass.  They graze like cows, traveling all over our property plucking at the vegetation.

It' really very annoying the way they crowd my feet and hamper my progress.  I try not to step on them, but sometimes they get their toes smashed by my big boots.  They also peck at my feet.  I start to feel claustrophobic from too many birds in my way.   

Remember the free bonus chick from the hatchery?  It's the black and white bird in the photo above.  I still can't decide if it's a rooster or a hen. 

I've been admiring Wendigo's fur coat.

She gets tangles around her elbows, tail, and ears, but the rest of her winter fur is long and soft. 

And so thick!  I think her hair could be spun and turned into a sweater.  How weird would it be to wear a dog hair sweater?  

Blog Mojo

Somehow, I lost my blog mojo.  I miss the habit, and I want to catch myself up!

Who would have thought I would prefer freezing temperatures, but, oh my - the mud has been remarkable.  Especially where the animals walk.  We had record breaking amounts of rain here, but finally cold enough temperatures for some of that precipitation to be a real snow and for the ground to freeze solid.  The donkeys were frisky and wanted to play.  We  can watch them frolic in this video: 

In anticipation of the coming cold spell, Brandon made Wendigo a new dog box for her sleeping place in the barn.  She is warm and comfortable inside her new box, even at night when the temperature drops.  

Look!  A winter rainbow!

I've been hibernating, but Brandon has been busy building dog boxes and erecting the frame of a hoop house.  Last summer, we found a good deal on a used hoop house and spent a sweltering day dismantling it from someone's back yard.   I think this person bought it used from someone else, with big garden dreams in mind, which didn't work out when they never got it fully assembled.  Taking a hoop house apart is much easier than putting it back up!  We've done it twice now, so we are practically professionals, right? 

Now it stands in our back field waiting for a solid cover so it can be our future hay storage.   It's big - even bigger than we thought since we counted wrong when laying it out and ended up with an extra hoop... how does that happen?  Not quite professionals after all. 

The greenhouse is mostly empty right now, but I have a few garden experiments in place that are working well. 

The onion bulbs, gifted to me from a friend, were planted on December 3, and now have green leaves that are several inches long and could be harvested for chives. 

The lettuce greens that were planted near the end of September grew wonderfully under the plastic dome, and were harvest-able all the way until this week, when the freeze got them despite the plastic.  If I weren't used to hibernating during the winter months, I could have been harvesting fresh greens for nearly four months.  Next fall, I want to plant even more greens, and then encourage myself to actually harvest and eat them instead of just admiring them.  I have a mental block I think - I'm not used to food harvest chores once the leaves are off the trees, but I'm going to overcome it.  Remind me, would ya? 

It's a double rainbow!  

Wendigo is napping with the chickens.  If you remember, I've been raising some Red Ranger chickens to harvest for meat, and some Pearl Leghorns to be our youngest egg layers.  

These chickens are three months old now, and are voracious eaters.  They follow me in a giant flock and peck at my boots hoping I will drop some food.  With thirty young birds, plus a dozen or so old birds, sometimes I can't make any progress walking because the flock swarms around my feet honking for food.   

The red meat birds are growing fast and should be ready to harvest any day now.  I'll be glad to thin the flock.  I prefer raising these birds to those white cornish cross birds.  These grow fast too, but they are mobile and good at foraging. 

The young birds sleep in the mobile coop. 

The old birds sleep in the coop attached to my barn. 

We made some upgrades to the barn coop this winter.  We added some steps to the perch, a wall from the roof to the ground on the north side, and built a new nest box. 

Rooster Cogburn was the first to try out the nest box and let me know that it needs a curtain for more privacy. 

The stork should visit Peaches in March and Noobi in May.  More baby goats! 

Why do I want more goats?  Good question. 

The beautiful snow and nice solid ground is gone again, and the rain and the mud is back.  I overhead farmer Joe say that if you have the right clothes, it doesn't matter what the weather is.  It's a good thing I have muck boots!