What do you do with a recidivist and a sociopath?

I finally caught my first crow -

Good news for me and the local fledglings, but the crow seems less than impressed -

It's his turn to go in a trap and catch another.

It went quiet on the crow and magpie trapping front for the past couple of weeks. Whether it's the cold snap we had, or whether there's been enough territory freed up by our trapping efforts to prevent fighting, we're not sure. This crow was number 25 caught this spring.

Underkeeper Pete has had great success trapping grey squirrels, a foreign invader here in the UK that threatens the native red squirrel population. Pete had 6 squirrels in one trap today. I'm pretty far behind Mike's and Pete's trapping skills, but I'm learning.

Looking out the kitchen window this morning while making coffee, I saw Mike walking across the garden carrying Myfanwy, the spectacled chicken. This could only mean that the specs weren't working to prevent egg eating. Mike caught her in the act and sent her to Eggsile again while we decide her fate.

She had a friend join her mid-morning. Our last lone game hen. She's an unspecified breed of a fighting-type chicken (don't ask - it doesn't bear thinking about and thankfully it's illegal). Seven game pullets were just dumped here one day. She's the last of her group.

The game hens go broody but with a vengeance. Their natural maternal instincts combined with their tendency towards aggression turned them into sociopaths. They would fight each other, kill the other game hens' broods and trample their own in the process. Nothing survived their mothering. As soon as a game hen went down on a clutch of eggs, all the other hens in the garden gave her a wide birth.

We felt sorry for the game hens, a victim of their breeding and unwanted by their breeders. We kept them, but never let them hatch another clutch of eggs ever again. Frustrated, some game hens would find quiet spots in the hedgerow to lay a sneaky clutch. Although we could never find them, the fox always did and one by one a game hen would disappear in summer.

Mike has a soft spot for this one hardened survivor. I did too, until I found she's been turfing other chickens off their nests and sitting on their eggs as her own. Not content with just one hen, she's madly defending at least two clutches that aren't hers and preventing them from hatching because she can't sit on both at the same time. She had to be stopped. I risked a good kicking to catch her, take her off the nest and put her in Eggsile. 

Both wayward chickens await a verdict now. Until then, at least they have each other. Unless one of them lays an egg, and then it will be war.

Boundary Issues

My intensive fencing apprenticeship is complete as of 8.30am this morning. Ted and Terry tolerated my help which came mostly in the form of a constant stream of questions. And I was the "left a bit, no, right a bit" person in charge of determining whether the post was straight before the big post rammer knocked it in. A trainee position granted, but a girl has to start somewhere.

I did learn enough to feel semi-confident about putting the next leg of fencing up by myself, which is necessary due to cash flow. Or lack of it in our case. I will have to knock the posts in by hand with a post banger, but I can do a few at a time in the evenings and even if it takes a couple of months to get the posts in, so be it. I can't put any stock on it until the hay crop has been cut and baled, which is at least another month. Getting the posts up is the hard part. Putting the stock netting on, and the top wire takes a bit of time and care, but not so many back muscles to achieve.

The biggest fencing lesson I learned yesterday was acceptance. When I first envisioned putting up the boundary fence by the road, I saw the pristine post and rail fences of a Virginia stud farm:

image courtesy planetware.com

I never pictured the mundane, workaday livestock fence that I was actually erecting:

Where's the elegance? Where's the mathematical regularity of man overcoming nature? I don't know why I was suffering from delusions of fencing grandeur as I personally picked out all the component parts and knew how they fit together. I could have easily, with very little creative thought, worked out exactly what my fence was going to look like before I put it up. How come I was so overwhelmed with disappointment? It just looked so pedestrian.

Ted and Terry knew what the fence was supposed to be, what it was going to be. They were very neat and professional assembling the fence. The posts were straight - at least as straight as one can get a rustic bendy post. But why weren't they measuring the exact distance between posts? Why weren't they putting a spirit level between posts to make sure they were the exact height relative to each other? Why didn't they pull a straight line from corner to corner to keep the posts in line?

Because they knew what they were doing and I didn't.

They were building a neat, stockproof fence to fit in with the natural curves and gradations of the landscape. They could see the overall picture of how the fence fit the field. I could only only see the stud farm in Virginia. I fretted during the whole process because I couldn't see what was actually happening in front of me, at my hands, with these tools.

Once it was up, my visions of stud farms faded and I could appreciate what I was left with - not only the right kind of fence for my needs, but also a basic understanding of how to repeat the process. This in spite of all my fretting.

Their other gift to me was two great oak "posts" to hang the gate. I saw what I thought were four tree trunks in the back of Ted's truck. But once Ted selected a trunk, carved a point on it with his chainsaw, and we lifted it into place, I realised what a post it. It's just a tree, or at least part of a tree, that once cut, takes on the properties of whatever its intended use, in this case a gate post. Sometimes it's firewood (heat), sometimes it's planks (building material). And so on.  As a post its tight grain will support the 15'gate better than softwood, and its natural tannins will prevent it rotting.

They look right there, don't you think? Once in place, Ted offered to cut them level to neaten them up. I asked him to leave them as they are, not quite even, maybe a little bit rough. Now when I look at them they will remind me of the lessons I learned as an apprentice fencer: sometimes the right thing is a stock fence, the fence has to fit the field, and a lot of the time your materials are all around you if you'd just open your eyes and see their potential.

From egg season to chick season

We had our first hatch of the season today. We've officially moved from Egg Season to Chick Season.

The process is pretty simple. The eggs are placed in the incubator (this is one of four machines):

A week before hatching we transfer them to the aptly named hatching machines (no moving parts, water to soften the membrane to make it easier for the chick to get out of the shell):

They hatch in here, and when you open the door on a Tuesday morning at 11am you find this:

Each tray has between 100-200 day old pheasants:

Here's a tray with the lid off, with pheasant chicks ready to be counted:

And helpers counting:

And here they are in their transport boxes, waiting to be taken up to the rearing field and cared for under a light in a warm shed:

There are variations in color sometimes too, but they're all equally cute:

We always give the latecomers a hand if they need it. The foot gives us the first clue they're "stuck":

So we peel off the top of the shell for them:

and let them kick it free and dry off, and rest.

It's very tiring being born.

It's also tiring on us. We just finished chores including dog and horses, checking traps (still no crows) and repairing broody coops ready for chickens to hatch next week. It's past 9pm. I'm going to have some dinner (that is if drinking a glass of wine in the shower counts as dinner) and get to bed. I'm due to meet Ted the woodsman tomorrow morning at 7am to get the fencing done at Milkweed Farm. I will be rubbing sleep out of my eyes and Ted will have already done 3 hours work by then.

I'm apprenticing myself to Ted so I can learn a bit more about fencing. I'll post the least embarassing photos, the ones where I'm not falling over or accidentally stapling my shirt between the netting and fence stake. I managed to burn all the brush that Nigel left from laying the hedge in one hard day, and my shoulder is still angry at me for it. We're using a tractor-mounted post rammer tomorrow. Thank god for machinery.

Hatching is every Tuesday for the next few months. Next week we're hatching partridge chicks. Same process, smaller chick. And in between there will be more chicken chicks hatching out of the incubators at home. I hope there's enough wine and hot showers to keep me going.

As much use as spectacles on a chicken

Myfanwy the hen, daughter of Charles the cockerel, has become a chronic egg eater. I tried breaking her of this unforgiveable vice by shutting her in the aviary (which we've nicknamed Egg-xsile) for a fortnight. Time served, I let her out, and she proceeded to eat the 6 Silkie eggs I put under a broody hen. As a malefactor and repeat offender she was facing two options: a trip to the log pile or specs.

Yes, chicken spectacles.

They are little plastic blinders that clip into the nostrils (they don't pierce the septum). The specs block the bird's forward vision which prevents egg eating, feather pecking and cannibalism (ewww...) They're commonly used for pheasants although we don't use them here, preferring smaller stocking rates and access to outdoor pens to alleviate boredom - the main cause for such vices.

She has peripheral vision, so she's able to free range about. Spec'd birds forage less but can feed from feeders without a problem. And she can dustbathe, wander, visit with her friends. No more Eggs-xile, no logpiles.

If she mends her ways, or after peak egg laying season (whichever comes first), I'll remove her specs and we will see if she's a rehabilited bird. It's Raising Arizona, but with chickens:

Me: They've got a name for people like you Myfanwy That name is called "recidivism."

Mike: Repeat offender!

Me: Not a pretty name, is it Myfanwy?

Myfanwy: No, sir. That's one bonehead name, but that ain't me any more.

Me: You're not just telling us what we want to hear?

Myfanwy: No, sir, no way.

Mike: 'Cause we just want to hear the truth.

Myfanwy: Well, then I guess I am telling you what you want to hear.

Me: Boy, didn't we just tell you not to do that?

Myfanwy: Yes, sir.

Me: Okay, then.

Country Life

I'm just about through the sack of bread flour I bought from our village co-op. By lucky chance, we took delivery of 10 tons of wheat yesterday from a neighboring farm for pheasant food. And the previous evening I finished reading the chapter on breadmaking in John Seymour's book I'm a Stranger Here Myself . The forces of nature were aligning to tell me to get on and grind my own damn wheat for bread.

Here's the wheat in its "berry" form, which I took straight from our storage bin. It's as we feed it to the pheasants and chickens -

Get off chicken! This bowl's mine

It's already been separated from the chaff, so it's ready to be ground into flour. I haven't got a special machine for that, but I do have a coffee grinder and I figure it's the same principle.

 I set it on the coarsest grind and pressed the button, just like the farm wives of yore did -

wheat berries before grinding (L) and after grinding (R)

It looks like flour to me. I stuck it in the breadmaker on a basic wholemeal programme (again, like the farm wives of yore) and -

Ta Daa!!

Bread! And a very tasty loaf too. Next time I might add a bit of vitamin C powder to help with the rise, and maybe a few seeds for texture, but all in all a success. The wheat is grown within 3 miles of here, and it gets delivered by the ton. I don't think I'll need to re-order any flour from the co-op this month.

This also works on dried corn (maize) and produces a nice fine cornmeal. I assume it also works on coffee beans.

I also bought some more sheep yesterday - 3 Polled Dorset ewes to double my small flock. Buying sheep is starting to feel natural now, where it used to feel like a part of a farming dream that was out of my reach (I mean hey - what did I know about farming?!?). I stood in a field of lambs and ewes with the farmer. He was leaning on his crook and his sheepdog lay down at heel, waiting for instruction.

What a marvellous invention the sheepdog. We stood by the gate and with one whistle the dog was gone, out, behind the sheep, and bringing them back to us for inspection. None of this walking out to look at your flock nonsense.

I tried to picture some of our dogs in this sheepdog role: Jazz and Pip would be clinging to my leg in mortal fear of the sheep. Podge would try an initiate a doggie play game with them. Nellie would ignore the sheep as being obviously inferior. Dakota would look at the flock as a culling mission. Nope, the sheep may be a reality but the sheepdog is still very theoretical. You need a larger flock than mine to give a sheepdog enough to do. Looks like I'll be fetching my own sheep then, at least for now.

I chose three ewes of short, stocky confirmation with a decent wool length for spinning. I left them with the farmer to be shorn and serviced by the ram. I will pick the girls up in a few months time, hopefully in lamb and ready to deliver in the autumn. This gives me another year without the need for feeding and looking after my own ram, and a chance to get the fencing on Milkweed farm finished in the next couple of weeks.

I'm off to the agricultural merchants this morning for the posts and wire to fence the field, and for some timber to build broody coops for all the chicks that are about to hatch. They can only live in a bucket under a light for so long. I'm also picking up another batch of day-old meat chickens this Saturday, which will be ready for the freezer towards the end of July. Underkeeper Pete and I are sharing the batch. He's having them til they're off heat as I'm already inundated with chicks. I'll finish them outside on grass. All of us will be needed to process them.

Speaking of eggs and chicks (and the preservation of) - I have started setting my own Larson trap and learning the art of trapping crows. Here's how it works in principle: Once you've trapped a crow/magpie in a trap baited with an egg, you can use this bird to lure others into the trap. Crows and magpies are territorial and dislike interlopers on their patch. They will defend their territory by challenging the interloper which we've secured in a little cage with a drop box either side (this is the Larson trap)-

There's a spring-loaded door which I hold down with a wooden perch. But the perch is split -

Dakota is working out how to get in the trap and get the bird for herself

When the challenger lands on the perch, his weight causes the split perch to giveway. The crow falls to the bottom, and the trap door snaps shut. We can then use that trapped bird to bait another cage. A live bird used this way is called a Judas bird, for obvious reasons. The Judas bird is always given food, water and shelter while in the trap (you can see one of the rabbit carcases from our other night's bunny harvest in with this bird).

If you don't catch your bird within a day of putting out your trap, move it to a different location even within a small area (like our garden). As a Judas bird, magpies will lure both crows and magpies in. A crow Judas bird will only lure other crows, as crows have a pretty fearsome rep, even among other corvids. A magpie will rarely confront a crow.

Trapping is a touchy subject. My trap is in the garden, and I'd put it on top of my sheep trailer under a tree where it would be noticed by other crows, but have a bit of shade too. Unfortunately it was visible from the road. Two walkers yesterday stopped and said how lovely my "pet" crow was. I should have said "Thanks" and been done with it. Stupidly I said "Oh it's not a pet. This is a crow trap." That got a frosty reception. No reply, they just gave me a sour look and walked on.

What can I do? At least they enjoyed their "country experience" visiting my little lambs grazing in their verdant paddock amongst the daffodils. That view of country life is more broadly palatable. In my head I see the too many times I've found crows pecking out the eyes of a still-living sheep that's gone down in a field and can't get back up, can't fight off its attacker. I don't like those images, but that happens in the country too.

We need a bigger couch

Or smaller dogs...

After a drizzly Sunday

We're rewarded with a sublime sunset over the back field

The chickens have come back from foraging in the field and have put themselves to bed with full crops and the last of the day's warmth trapped in their feathers.