Still attempting to be patient (and failing miserably!)

Can't be much longer..... My Uncle Duane said that she looked like she'd deliver in July, rather than June, and I'm resigning myself to the fact that he's probably right.  We have a Bible study group meeting here on Saturday night--the last night in June.  Maybe she'll provide the learning experience?  Or maybe we'll have a little Independence Day calf a few days later....or maybe we'll still be waiting in September when Labor Day rolls around..... Bessie has developed a gentle fondness for grooming Lucy, and Lu is so happy to just stand there and enjoy it.  It is very cute to watch the motherly attitude from such an opinionated cow.  When the inevitable body-slam or full-force head-butting comes, poor Lucy is taken by surprise, but rallies quickly or pushes right back.  Good for her! On the manure front:  The chickens are such a good match for the problem of too much cow manure, especially if the cows have had grain the day before.  Geese are even better, I think, because they can go through the fresh....um...droppings and make quick work of spreading a plopper all over trying to find any goodness to gobble up.  Bleah!  I've been harvesting dry manure and straw from the cow pen.  The chickens have scratched through all the manure from the winter, and it's dry, fluffy, the texture is almost light enough to blow away.  They've scratched down to the dirt, and all that manure is lying in hills, just waiting to be moved to the garden beds.  Russ suggested filling a few of the empty (and still unplanted) raised beds, and I decided to do just that.  Two wheelbarrows of the fluffy stuff, and the 4x4 beds are full.  After it composts a while, I'll add a third wheelbarrow of it before winter.  If it's nice black soil by spring, I'll plant veggies in it.  If not, it will get a cover crop of buckwheat or rye or even vetch or alfalfa, something that will grow quickly and can also be cut for the cows and poultry to eat. Other news:  We lost one young duckling to some sort of predator injury.  Three days ago, her group was the last party to call it a night, lounging under the spruce tree where the chickens love taking their dust baths.  I noticed that one duck was having a bit of trouble walking, but she kept up with the others pretty well.  I didn't think more of it until the next morning, when she had to flap her wings wildly to even be able to move forward as she tried to march out of the barn with the morning's mass-exodus of squawking geese, ducks, chickens, and the one lone turkey.  We set her up in one of the PVC pens, and I watched her all day.  She looked like something had tried to grab her by the back and carry her off.  No talon marks, so that rules out birds of prey.  The missing feathers under her wings and the scrapes on her back reminded me of how the hen looked after Rocky had bitten her back and pulled out feathers.  Rocky was not at large at ANY part of the previous day (we meticulously compared notes to account for his whereabouts for that entire day), and Shadow had been in the back acre, but the ducks were on the other side of the electric poultry net fencing when she was allowed to run free.  Maybe the suspected fox struck again, and wasn't able to drag her through the livestock fence?  Or a coon may have tried to take her at dusk just before I came out to round up the stragglers?  At any rate, she died by that second night.  The sickly young female turkey died last night.  That day, I had set her up in a PVC pen outside, because she never would go out of the barn.  (Yes, one day it was the sick duckling, the next it was the sickly turkey.....the PVC pens are turning into the sick-ward!)  The young tom who was so protective of her was outside in the pen with her all day, and they seemed to be enjoying the sunshine and fresh air.  They were both making turkey-noises that I had never heard from them when they were inside the barn, almost like a sandhill crane's call, and funny little chirps to each other.....  On taking her back to the barn, though, she seemed traumatized and immediately sank down into the straw bedding on the floor.  She died a few hours later in a sad little huddle..... I think we are seeing more than the usual share of death on a farm.  Other chicken keepers are surprised when I describe the mortality rate that we're seeing out here.  It just seems a little extreme. So.....(our pastor did a sermon on that word in the context of "For God SO loved the world", and now I'm overly conscious of it every time I type it!).....so.....I think the situation to aim for is getting the poultry out of the barn and into the large south entrance to the barn, which is set up as a chicken-coop already.  We clean and sanitize the floor and walls inside the barn.  We spend the winter either taking out drywall and insulation or sealing it somehow.  Mold is visible in spots on the walls and the ceiling.  Drywall was never meant to be the absorbing material for all the moisture that chickens give off or that ducks spread all over with their drinking and bathing habits.  We also should build stalls, for lack of a better word, divisions of the first floor area where groups of chickens can live in separate quarters when we move them back inside the barn (eventually).  I need to be able to change chicken-litter gradually, and not an all-at-once barn cleaning when one group of chickens is sick.  Plus, it would be nice to have something a little more sturdy than PVC and plastic netting to keep different growing groups of chicks separated by age. The waterfowl will either be banned from living in the barn, or will need living quarters above the dirt-pit in the corner.  That way all the watery mess from them will drain away instead of making the chicken bedding soggy.  Any water poured into the dirt in that corner immediately disappears into the ground.  We might fill that pit with concrete to shore up the walls and make a floor level with the barn floor, and make sure to leave a good drain down through the floor to the dirt underneath. I'm also thinking that I will experiment:  The Barnevelder coop could be cleaned out and sanitized, sit vacant all winter, and then we incubate Barnevelder eggs from that flock in the spring.  Only incubated chicks which have never been in contact with the suspected sickness of the existing flock would go into that coop next year.  Maybe I can get a healthy flock going which wouldn't go through the respiratory sickness that we have gone through for two seasons now....they would never come in contact with the chickens that we have now.  If they WERE healthy with that approach, then we would faze out the older chickens and gradually replace the current flock with healthy birds over the next few years.  Only healthy new chicks would be raised in the main part of the barn, and only after it was totally sanitized, cleaned, and made more workable..... Duck and goose chicks raised the same way would possibly result in a waterfowl flock which would not have been exposed to any chicken sickness (supposedly, ducks and geese wouldn't get the same sickness that a chicken might, but could be carriers of that sickness!) Well, enough of that.  It can get my mind spinning sometimes. Time to do the obsessive-compulsive peeking in at Bess to see if there's a cute little calf-face looking back at me...... Laura.