Queen Bess demands queenly accomodations

Photo:  A Royal Pose Well, the persnickety Bessie has upped her high maintenance even further.  The vet was out yesterday to vaccinate both Ruby the calf and Bessie (being from an organic farm, Bessie didn't ever get vaccinations, so we thought it best to give her the same shots that Ruby would get).  The 4 month old Ruby and her 8 year old mama both got the same treatment--shots in the back of the thigh to protect from various sicknesses that could literally take down a healthy calf of Ruby's age and leave it dead within 12 hours.  Scary! We've been waiting for Bess to go into heat, so that we can start keeping track of her cycles and get her bred (artificial insemination).  I was supposed to be watching the interplay between Bess and Lucy to see which one was in heat and which one was ever-so-femininely sniffing the air (or other actions) to indicate that one or the other was in heat.  With Lucy gone to live in Ohio, my heat-indicator for Bessie is out of the picture.  She has --maybe-- come into heat once since she gave birth back in July, and now even that seems in question. At my request, to give me a starting point for counting down the days until her next heat cycle, I asked the vet to give her a fertility check (plastic sleeve on, and shoulder deep in cow to "feel" what stage she is in).  Certainly it's not his favorite part of visiting a farm with cows..... The results?  She won't be coming into heat on her own.  At all.  She has a cyst.  Not good news.  Even a bull couldn't get this cow pregnant. Vet said that there are two kinds of cysts that cows get:  One type has them in heat every day, and one will keep them from ever coming into heat.  Bessie has the last kind. So the artificial insemination process will become even more artificial.  The vet is coming again today to start her on a series of shots.  He will administer the first one this morning.  I will administer the next shot next week Friday.  He will have a 4 hour window of "opportunity" to place the purchased bull's "stuff" inside of her on Monday (the insemination, artificially done), the 19th of November.  Without the extra queenly attention which will hopefully result in a royal offspring next September, she would not come into heat, could not be bred, and (in a normal dairy situation) she would be packed off to the sale barn because she would no longer be valuable to the dairyman. So in a way, Queen Bessie has been spared a very un-queenly fate because she landed on our farm, where I had no choice but to become fond of her and her bossy ways and high sense of cow-dom.  Here, she has a chance for an excellent "bovine practitioner" to work his magic.  (It seems that the challenge of the situation serves to thrill the vet about practicing all aspects of his veterinary expertise, which is a good thing.  He is "syncing" two beef cows' fertility cycles at another place at the same time, so it fits in with what he's doing on other farms, which might save us a little bit of money, too. He goes there first, comes here second, keeps track of breeding all 3 cows on the same date, it works, I hope......). We'll pray that this procedure works, and that she conceives a little prince or princess on the first try.  Even with the money from the sale of Lucy to help pay for Bessie's fertility expenses, vet costs could easily skyrocket if we don't approach this with common-sense! The adventure continues.....along with all sorts of knowledge about the reproduction of cows, which I certainly didn't expect to find fascinating.....but here we are! Laura http://dykstrasfarm.blogspot.com/

1920's farmhouse for sale, 4 acres

In my on-going wish for more suburban-to-country-minded neighbors, here's a farmhouse for sale about 5 miles from here: 1920's farmhouse, 4 acres with barn, riding arena, pond, chicken coop.... The house looks very nice from the photos.  The property itself is described as "in need of TLC" and "overgrown", but then....that's what we had to plow through here, too, and it's been worth it. Price drop from $275,000 to $260,000, and the "history" part of the listing leaves out the fact that it was up for sale for quite a while and taken off the market at $300,000 just over a year ago.... 1215 N Ridge Rd MCHENRY, IL 60050 Something to keep in mind:  McHenry county is voting on limiting the amount of poultry and other livestock on any unincorporated lots under 5 acres, depending on zoning (AG zoning would be a plus, but the tax amount suggests that it's probably estate zoning, same as ours).  Besides that, this is a very cute farmhouse in a fairly nice location.  If you don't want over a hundred chickens like we have, then this would be a really nice property to at least look at..... Laura http://dykstrasfarm.blogspot.com/ --- On Tue, 11/6/12, Laura Dykstra <dykstrazoo1@gmail.com> wrote: From: Laura Dykstra <dykstrazoo1@gmail.com> Subject: a picture for you To: dykstrazoo@sbcglobal.net Date: Tuesday, November 6, 2012, 9:18 AM You have been sent 1 picture. 08112350.jpg These pictures were sent with Picasa, from Google. Try it out here: http://picasa.google.com/

Barnevelders: Moving day(s)

Photo:  The garden shed that has served well as a chicken coop The Barnevelder coop is standing empty tonight for the first time since we brought the birds here after closing on the property.  I've enjoyed looking out the kitchen window, watching the birds pecking and scratching and doing their chicken-y-thing out there. There were 2 roosters to start with, and a small flock of hens. Those 2 hatched in Cheryl Rathe's Pre-K class, must have been in the spring of 2010(?).  That puts them at 2 1/2 years old, but their spurs are so long now that you'd think they were older!  Their babies all showed signs of Welsummer breeding (sometimes the 2 breeds are mixed in the hopes that Barnevelders will pick up the darker brown egg-laying genes from the Welsummers).  So, those 2 roos were given a different flock in the barn, and they are BOTH still protectively guarding their ladies.  The next rooster was Earl, a beautiful Barnevelder roo with black and mahogany feathers and a strutting "air" about him.  He lived in the barn for a while before becoming king of the coop.  While in the barn with the rest of the mixed flock, went through the respiratory sickness and nearly died before pulling through.  He quite happily became king of the roost when we replaced the two brother-roos with Earl.  When Earl died suddenly last winter, then the replacement Barnevelder rooster stepped in, and has been very watchful of the hawks that roost in the big willow tree, very vocal when there is danger to his hens, very vigilant in showing them the tastiest morsel of food or wriggling worm, and then very proud as his ladies all rush over to fill their beaks with the bounty that he has clucked about. Now, despite his loud protests, he and his ladies are in the barn, being assimilated into the larger flock.  His place might be in question, because the pecking order of the roosters in the barn already has been toppling as the birds all stay inside because of the colder weather.  One of the older roosters, one with 3 inch spurs, was already trying to pick a fight through the netting around the pen.  This morning, the BV roo was out of the PVC pen and running scared as the other roos try to keep him in line and steal his hens..... Before getting to the moving the rooster, I've been gradually been moving hens from there into the barn.  The PVC and netting pens were set up, and a few hens at a time we--re scooped up by the ankles off their perches and then brought flapping and squawking into the barn to adjust in the relative safety of the PVC pen (as opposed to just being plunked in the middle of a hostile flock of old biddies who want nothing more than to pound the new hens into submission--sometimes the picking done by the hens seems worse than the actual fighting by the roosters). First I moved the less than perfect hens--the ones that aren't true to the breed.  Some were from the mixed flock to begin with, and were moved into the Barnevelder pen back in May when the barn was WAY too crowded with classroom chicks.  They grew up as a flock in the separate coop and never knew that they weren't purebred.  What a cruel awakening it must have been for them to realize that the quality hens were left behind in comfort while the half-breed pullets were being hoisted upside down to be transported into crude PVC pens! Anyway, the move wasn't without incident.  The PVC pens aren't poultry-proof if 5+ pound hens are flapping around and throwing their bodies at the garden netting that makes up the sides of the pens.  Almost all of the displaced pullets and hens found a way to escape at one time or another, as I repaired places where the cable-zip-ties had come loose.  Those hens also found ways to slip out of the barn and end up right back in the Barnevelder coop with the old flock.  (Chickens do whatever they can to return to their familiar roost every night, so at the first sign of a path to freedom, the homesick ladies made a dash for their old pen, and walked forlornly around and around the outside of the fence until they became brave enough to fly up and over to familiar territory).  I've been tired of seeing the same hens back in the old coop every night, and there HAVE been a few tufts of feathers on the ground which could either mean that an interested rooster was overly enthusiastic to come across an unfamiliar hen out in "his" territory, or that a hen was lost in the dark between barn and coop (and was swept away by an owl or coyote during the night). The move has been progressing over the course of a week or so, and tonight I was finally sick of it, so rooster and remaining pure-bred Barnevelder hens were hoisted unceremoniously by their ankles and brought to live in the barn.  Several times, a chipmunk or maybe even a rat has been rustling around in the empty feed bags of that coop (I'm ashamed to admit that I've screamed even as I'm trying in vain to get my foot moving to stomp on it).  Sigh....the chicken dust and old litter in that coop is disgusting.  I don't know why even a rat or a mouse would WANT to live in there, but I can smell them and have seen them.  It's time to clean, sanitize, leave empty for the winter, and then we'll see if it becomes a chicken coop for a healthy flock or the "Bunny Barn" for Jeremy's new bunny (yes, he quickly changed his mind about whether this new one was going to be "his"). So....the coop is sitting empty, ready for a full-scale cleaning which I don't have time to do, AND I'm still cooking and canning buckets and buckets of pears which were a true gift from the Harvard feed folks. Lots to do, and here I sit, typing......at least there are pears quartered and cooking into juice on the stove, and all the animals have been let out/fed/milked/watered, whatever they needed before I got sidetracked by the lure of the computer screen.  Before I let all of the time get away from me, I need to get back out to the cow-pen and shovel out the remaining manure that big Bess and little Ruby have deposited in their barn and feeding area..... Laura http://dykstrasfarm.blogspot.com/

A pie in exchange for hundreds of barn shingles

Photos:  Our barn, built around 1920 (check out the second photo of the old roof--these rather brittle shingles are on top of the original cedar-shake shingles), and the hay delivery that started the pie-for-shingles conversation I've been buying feed and other supplies from a number of sources:  The all-too-familiar one being Farm and Fleet.  Next potentially familiar one would be Tractor Supply.  The chicken feed comes in 500 pound batches from Union Feed Mill, where I sometimes buy water-conditioner salt or other feeds, too.  Sometimes I stop at Lake Barrington Feed, where Jim is especially helpful, even more so than usual when you ask him about poultry (he judges poultry at many of the county and state fairs around here). There's a feed and garden store in Woodstock, but it's kind of pricey.  I only go there for one-bag purchases when nothing else is open.  They specialize in riding gear, so the chicken feed isn't the main draw for their customers. My favorite stop is becoming a community resource for us as well:  Harvard eggs and Feed.  It's run by a very friendly couple--the husband grew up on the farm.  His parents built a smaller house on a slight hill, while Bruce and his wife Sue have lived in the big old farmhouse.  I stop in for things that I want better quality from, like ground corn, alfalfa pellets, beet pulp shreds, or dog food.  (The corn, alfalfa and beets go into the dairy-cow grain mix that Bessie gets).  Sue and I chat for the whole time I'm there and then some.  Bruce has taken to fondly calling me Sarah, because I remind him of another customer and it took him a long time and a lot of teasing from Sue before he remembered that I'm "Laura".  Now he does it on purpose, and I threaten to call him "Bob" or "Bub" or some such thing in return. Bruce was an answer to prayer this past summer in the hay crisis.  Remember how panicky I was feeling when the prices were soaring, the supply was practically non-existent, and I asked for all of you to pray along with me for our winter hay supply?  It was the very next day that God answered that prayer with a full load of clover/grass hay, sitting in the turn-a-round drive of Harvard Feed, freshly harvested, and not spoken for.  At a decent price--still $7.25 a bale, but less than most.  Not only that, but Bruce also had a wagon of grass hay out in his field, meant for his daughter to come and pick up, but now it had been rained on lightly (not much rain this past summer to ruin anything!) and it looked like she wouldn't be coming after all.  $2.25 a bale.  Average that out, give the cows sections of both types of hay daily through the winter, and it worked.  The clover hay is the cows' FAVORITE. Another friend, Jonathan, had volunteered his truck if I found hay, and he willingly worked in a hay-pick-up after work that next day. Bruce had another load of alfalfa later in the season that he delivered right to our barn, because my Trailblazer MIGHT not have been tough enough to pull the loaded hay wagon (whether my car would have done it or not, my driving would have been the bigger problem!) So, many times in the course of the last year, Bruce and Sue have either offered solutions, or just chatted, or made suggestions.   When Bruce delivered that last load of hay, we were talking about our barn and outbuildings, and I mentioned being a little worried about the leaky barn roof (the hay was being stored on the 2nd floor, where small leaks were becoming bigger leaks.)  Bruce suggested metal roofing, and, when I had to tell him that we can't afford that right now, he squinted up at the shingles on our barn roof and declared "Well, I have stacks of those up in my old barn.  And we put the metal roof on ours, so we'll never need those shingles.  You're welcome to them!" A few weeks later, he called to make sure I wanted them.  I said that I didn't want to take them for free, and asked what he wanted for them.  He said nothing, and then, at the end of the conversation, he rather shyly suggested "Well, if you want to make a PIE in exchange for the shingles, I'd be OK with that."  ;)  My response might have been hard for him to understand, because I started laughing and choked out "Bruce, I can DEFINITELY make a pie for you". Found out later that Sue was listening in and chuckling in the background. We established at a later visit to the store that he likes apple pies, and then (non-assumingly, again) he added "Oh, if it's apple, I like LOTS of cinnamon with my apples".  Another chuckle from Sue. Fast forward to yesterday.  I cleared off the kitchen counter and made the pie.  It was really sweet--probably too much sugar.  It was cinnamon-y, but maybe not enough.  The apples cooked down so much that the top was no longer nicely rounded.  The crust was kind of pathetic, but that's how most of my pies turn out. Jeremy and I brought it over, and Jeremy hid behind me as we walked up to where Bruce was working outside the store.  I said "We brought something for you."  Jeremy peeked out and held up the tin-foil-wrapped pie.  Bruce's eyes lit up, and he commented on how the bottom of the pan was still warm. Inside the store, he and Sue carefully peeled back the tin foil and oohed and aahed and declared that the pie would be dinner (it wasn't really that great, but hopefully I acted gracious!).  Then I said "It might be too sweet, and I don't know if there's enough cinnamon for you, Bruce.  If you don't like it, I'll make you another one." At which Sue and Bruce IMMEDIATELY switched gears from appreciation to laughing "I don't think we like this one at all.  You'll have to bring another one".  I walked right into that one. Anyway, after setting up Friday afternoon as the time to get the shingles, rain or shine, Sue told me about all the pears they had canned that week.  Their Bartlett pear tree is over 100 years old, and Bruce's mom used to make pear juice.  They offered that we could come back with buckets and take as many pears as we wanted, because they'd started just throwing them out into the field. I know I don't have time to skin, process, prepare and can pears UNLESS I make them into fruit butter or juice.  That's where the food mill comes in handy.  No time to do all the meticulous peeling of pears right now. So there's another bonus of getting to know folks out in the country.  I bring them one pie, not even a great one, they give us several hundred shingles (the old kind that I'd be hard-pressed to EVER locate for roof-repair), and on top of that, the pears left are free for the taking. And I'll return the favor--whatever I make, I'll bring some back to them, especially if it's pear juice.  It might not be exactly like his Mom used to make, but it would be a fitting thank-you for not just the pears but for everything else. Laura http://dykstrasfarm.blogspot.com/

Bessie fashion choice

Photos:  Lying among the piles of straw-manure in the cow pen, and Bessie protesting my criticism of her new "style" With the rain last week and the week before, the cow-pen is still drying out, slowly.  During the summer, I would clean the cow-section of the barn every day, wheel it out to dump in the cow-pen area, the chickens/ducks/geese would scratch through the piles of straw and manure to scatter it and the sun would dry the bits.  When the manure was dry to the point of looking and feeling like peat-moss, I would rake it up and shovel it into the wheelbarrow, to either put into the garden beds or spread out on the pasture.  That worked really well, and I kept up with it on a fairly regular basis.  Now I'm looking at the slop out there and realizing that, even though I THOUGHT I had a good manure-management idea, when the ground is wet it will NOT work that well.  Since the rain started (post-drought, after all the crops were stunted), the manure piles have just been scattered but not dried.  In the cow-pen, the depth of manure is rather asounding. Out in the pasture, it's a perfect scenario.  The ducks gleefully swish wet cow-pies through their beaks and (in no time) a sizable plopper is distributed for several feet in each direction.  The concentration of cow-pie to pasture-area is good--not too many manure piles so the manure that IS deposited out there can be spread out reasonably by the eager poultry. In the cow-pen it's another matter.  It's now a matter of excavation.  Bessie walks through the wet portions and sinks in as far as her ankles.  Her hooves are caked with manure, and that cloven hoof thing harbors a lot of mushy stuff that squishes out as she stands for milking.  That can't be too comfortable!  But now I see why the cows were in what seemed like such cess-pools of manure at the farm we bought them from.  It's quite inevitable, it seems. The rain has washed manure OUT of the manure-straw piles that have been hauled out of the barn, and now the low areas of the cow-pen desperately need to be dug out.  The rain-water pooled there first, and then the wet manure slowly crept downhill to form a bit of a lagoon. I have been working on it, but the words of my brother-in-law are running through my head:  "You'll need to come up with a different system for taking care of this manure, or you'll need to get a tractor and scrape it out of here".  That was said back in May or July, so someone with more experience could see what I wasn't able to see as the future scenario.  Sadly, we're almost to the point of needing a small bull-dozer, and we have the whole winter to go..... So I've been digging, and raking, and using the manure fork to lift soggy or dripping sections, and trundling barrows-full of cold, wet gunk out into the pasture to deposit randomly in the areas with the worst bare spots or holes.  Still, there is ankle-deep muck in the cow-pen, the kind that wants to suck your boots right off your feet. Bessie, fashion-conscious cow that she is, decided that she couldn't resist the enticing mud-bath and beauty treatment waiting just outside the clean barn-bedding, so she's been lying in the wet stuff almost every night.  Not in the dry areas, that would be too easy.  She is resting and sleeping where her rump and udder and tail can be literally coated (and re-coated!) with manure. Her back legs and thighs are clumped with dried liquid manure, and her udder needs to be meticulously cleaned every morning to keep small clumps of feces from leaping into the milk that we are supposed to drink.  All of this is gross, but my more morbid fascination was with her tail. I noticed yesterday as I milked her that, if her tail switched towards my face, it would really hurt!  Because, even though she has an old-cow tail tipped with coarse, stringy hair (Lucy's was youthfully full and silky and even the tuft-hairs were curled just right), now it could be classified as a lethal weapon.  The coarse hairs at the end of her tail are about 8 inches long, but are no longer hanging individually.  There are distinctly 5 or 6 "clumps" of dread-locked tail-hair waiting to whap me in the eye!  Bess is now sporting dread-locks.....on her tail.  It's a good thing that fly-season is nearly over, or I'd be getting hit repeatedly with rock-solid manure as she switched her incredibly fashionable tail-do through the air. This brought to mind the fascinating National Geographic magazines that I would pore over as a kid--the article(s) about African women who braid their hair with manure.  Not sure why, not sure if it would be healthy for your scalp, not even sure if that's outdated information.  Our dear cow Bessie seems to think that the fashion statement is current, and has adopted this stunning new look for the coming winter months.....let's just hope that her daughter Ruby is more up-to-date and more concerned with cleanliness than her mama is!  Maybe (as is the case with my daughter and my own "fashion-sense"--or lack of it), Ruby will have a quiet little talk with her mama and tactfully tell her that her choice of style is NOT a style at all.  If Bessie's lucky, Ruby will go through her closet with her and make a pile of all the fashion do's and dont's, along with the advice to NEVER dreadlock your tail-hair with manure!!!!  It's barnyard-fashion suicide.  ;) Laura http://dykstrasfarm.blogspot.com/

Rocky's new playmate

Photo:  Rocky the husky Rocky met a hot little vixen yesterday morning.  Shadow didn't want to go out in the morning (not surprising.  When she willingly goes to the pasture with Rocky, he dashes to and fro and body-slams her repeatedly).  Rocky was practically prancing around with his need to be let out AND his excitement to patrol "his" acre after a night of who-knows-what had prowled around out there. I brought him out like usual, left him there and got things ready for milking Bessie, checked on Shadow (who STILL was sulking in her crate and refusing to come out).... Rocky was sniffing a pile of cow-pie when I came back out to the barn, so I left him in the pasture and went in to get the milking done.  At some point, I heard Rocky yipping and whimpering, which usually means one of two things:  "I'm all alone out here!  Won't somebody PLEASE come out and get me" or "Hey Shadow, stop minding your own business, I WANT you to be annoyed with me!" I yelled out to him to be quiet and kept milking.  I let Ruby the calf out of her stall after I got the family's share of milk from Bess, and she stopped to peer out the door and perk her ears forward at whatever commotion was going on out in the pasture.  The waiting milk from her mama was a stronger pull, and her curiosity was pushed aside as she nearly dove underneath Bessie to reach her udder.  For a calf who is already 2/3 as tall as her Mom, she does a good job of getting down low enough to drink from Bessie. Continuing with my schedule, the barn cats got their saucer of warm milk, the chickens got their feed and fresh water, and the milk buckets were brought in and filtered and stashed in the back of the frig. That's when Jeff appeared at the patio door with the rifle in his hand, looking quite excited.  I think my mouth must have fallen wide open..... This is what I could piece together:  Rocky had been "meeting" a coyote which was on the other side of the fence.  Rocky's usual dash-away puppy run and whimpering was apparently his invitation for her to play.  (My first thought--coyote packs will send a coy female to lure a big male dog away from safety, and then the whole pack will take him down). Jeff got the gun and bullets and went out, but by then the coyote was halfway across the empty soybean field.  By the time Jeff got out into the field, the coyote was at the edge of the still-standing corn on the other side of the soybean field, quite a distance from our back fence.  Jeff reported "It looked back at me as if to say "Yeah, good luck finding me NOW" and disappeared into the field.  Jeff shot into the field, and a dog at another farm was barking by then, but the coyote was gone. Michael rounded out the story a bit later by saying that he heard the pack of coyotes out by the Barnevelder coop at about midnight.  I realized that Spartan (one of the barn kitties) was outside last night and not in the barn, and breathed a sigh of relief as I remembered that he had come in for morning milk and was safe.  Mental tally:  All the birds were closed in for the night, one barn cat was inside the barn and the other made it through the night in safety, Sly the house cat was inside like he was supposed to be, cows were safe..... Rocky, on the other hand, should have known better than to pal around with a strange canine, and luckily she (or he) was on the OTHER side of the fence, so that Rocky couldn't clue-lessly follow.  Big husky male that he is, he should pose a threat to a lone coyote, but....he could easily be overpowered by a pack of them, possibly concealed just inside the corn-field. Things made a bit more sense, then, as I thought a few things through from the past week or two. *The cows had been tolerant of both dogs until about the time that the soybean fields were harvested.  At that point, both big cows started to charge the dogs if they happened to be in the pasture at the same time.  At one point, I hid behind a tree as Lucy came thundering and bucking up to Rocky, who was taunting her from the end of the leash that I was holding!!!  I made a quick get-a-way and left Rocky to tire himself out or be trampled. *Lucy had started sleeping out in the open, where she would have a good vantage point of the pasture and all around it.  She usually slept near Bessie before then, usually inside the barn. *Bessie had been uncharacteristically standing inside the barn room every morning, looking out towards the field, but staying close to her baby.  This wasn't good for a number of reasons, one being that her milk seems to start flowing when she's up off the ground in the morning, and the longer she stays lying down, the more milk there is when I come out to milk her (up to an eighth of a gallon is wasted when she stands and lets it stream out, by my estimate!) *With Lucy gone, Bessie took up the spot where Lucy was sleeping every night--the good vantage point under the spruce tree.  And Bessie had started moo-ing a warning to Ruby every time the dogs were running in the pasture. *Ruby started to NOT want to go into the stall at night, since about the time that Lucy left last week. *Ruby had begun to trot forward to the barn entry with ears perked forward, every morning BEFORE happily trotting over for her nursing time.  So, maybe.....the coyotes have been hanging around for a few weeks.  There WAS a chicken which spent the night out in the pasture, where it was potentially safe but still detected by hungry predators.  That night Jeff heard the coyotes outside in the empty field, maybe trying to get at the chicken? Maybe the cows are agitated with the dogs because of the coyote-threat.  Maybe the coyotes will be bolder now that there is only one older cow out there, and Lucy is no longer there to be the spunky watchman. I'll have to do some checking into coyote habits, and whether they would go after a full-grown older cow inside a pasture with an electric fence.  Or whether Ruby is more at risk being left free in the cow-pen with Bessie or being confined in a stall inside the barn (but with the cow-entrance wide open).  Maybe coyotes won't bother with cows at all, which would be the ideal thing to discover. Whatever I find out, there will be extra-care taken to close in all the birds every night, to call the barn cats into the barn and keep them there, to call our house-cat into the house and not let him slip outside again until morning.....any of those could be an easy snack for a pack of coyotes. Rocky, clueless young male that he is, will NOT be allowed to run the pasture unless Shadow has been out there first.  Somehow, the idea of Shadow trying to PLAY with a coyote is ludicrous.  Everyone will be much safer with Shadow pitching a violent doggie fit at an intruder, IF it happens again.  A smart coyote would turn tail and run if coming face to face with a snarling/barking/angry Shadow. Poor Rocky, just when he thought he'd found a friend......  Good thing he can't comprehend how things could have turned out for him if the fence hadn't been in the way. Laura http://dykstrasfarm.blogspot.com/

Thanksgiving turkey

Friday: This always happens when it's the first time to take a type of animal to the butcher.  The chickens are ready to go.  No problem there--they've been in the PVC/netting cages for a week now.  The 2 Cayuga ducks are in a different cage.  I've taken chickens away many times, and ducks once before. The problem is the turkey.  I put him in a dog crate last night.  He hasn't been on my list of favorites for quite a while, since he was caught in the act of killing something smaller and defenseless several times.  He struts around and "courts" the full-grown geese, following them out into the pasture, regally turning his fanned-out tail to and fro, elongating the dangly-thing on top of his nose that usually looks like a bulgy lump, making his face and neck colors change from dreary bluish-gray to sky-blue mottled with bright red.  They go about their business and totally ignore him.  It's sad, in a way, because a turkey hen would have completed his life and given him purpose besides gracing our Thanksgiving table. Anyway, he's in the crate, ready to go to the butcher tonight with the 2 ducks and 21 young roosters.  The difficult part is hearing this bird that I've grown to HATE call out to the geese in the pasture.  He's inside the barn, either gobbling to make himself heard by what he considers to be his flock, or making little peeping noises like when he was a poult (turkey chick).  I had lots of chicken litter to shovel out, so turkey-boy's sad little noises were getting to me. He WILL go tonight, no doubt about that.  The question was:  Do I let him out of the crate for one more day of freedom?  Not a good idea.   I wish I'd gotten a good photo of him.  If you don't know his personality, he is really a stunning bird--a heritage breed called a Blue Slate.  You'd never know that he was a chick from Farm and Fleet that was mixed in with the chicken-chicks that I intended to buy.  He looked a little odd, and there were 2 others like him, but the girl insisted that she was giving me the right ones.  The poults were right next to the chicks, in a different section of the heated cage at the store.  My guess is that someone put them back on the wrong side---but the girl didn't want to hear that I thought these 3 looked JUST LIKE the turkey poults next door! Well, the turkey poults were supposed to cost $16 each, and the chicks were only $5 or less, so Farm and Fleet lost out.  Then WE lost out as first one and then the second one died, leaving us with a love-sick and very confused half-grown tom-turkey.  He identified with the only other birds close to his size--the 4 American Buff geese! If we get turkeys next year, I want to get at least half-a-dozen, maybe more, but only if we have a separate move-able coop for them.  Watching him mercilessly chase a broody hen around and around in the barn for seemingly no reason was NOT something that endeared him to me at all.  Seeing a large turkey viciously killing a young pigeon or a sick chick has taken the intrigue right out of having a mixed flock of birds that are housed together!  Makes me curious to know if all turkeys are territorial or mean to smaller poultry. Thanksgiving dinner, here he comes....  And I have to admit, I AM curious to know just how much he weighs.  He will be our first home-grown, heritage breed turkey, ever.  Stay tuned for the November report and maybe some photos of a fabulous Thanksgiving array of fine dining.  Laura http://dykstrasfarm.blogspot.com/