Spring chickens. And quail.

Spring is nearly here, the signs are everywhere. The blossom is falling off the blackthorn trees, and the bluebells are flowering. Vixens have gone to ground to have their cubs. I saw my first swallow this morning, picking insects out of the air. I picked my own insects: the first tick of the season off of Quincy.

Well, technically a tick is an arachnid, but why split hairs.

The weather has been so favorable, from a gardener's perspective, that for the first time ever I'm caught up with my sowing and planting. That's my slapdash comprehensive garden plan for this year, scrawled on the back of an envelope -

And you can put your seed packets and notes inside the envelope so you don't lose them. Genius.

I'm using a four-plot rotation system, and companion planting. The garden is dug, manured, fed, and sown with everything but the late-season and tender plants. I've even remembered to put down enviromesh to prevent a repeat of last year's carrot root fly problem -

I was so on top of things, that I broke out the lawn chairs and cooked dinner in the chiminea - grilled mackerel and pheasant burgers, the gamekeeper version of surf & turf.

You'll have to allow me this moment of almost-smug success. It didn't last long, as you'll see.

Spring sap's not just rising in the plants. The cockerels - pheasant, chicken, and quail - have colored up and are beginning to vie for female attention. And fight. Cockerels love to fight. Even our heavyweight Buff Orpington cockerel was sporting a bruised eye, closed and puffy from a fight with featherweight Lloyd the pekin cockerel, a third the Buff's size. I'm not even sure how Lloyd reached that high.

But the quail seem to be the pugilists of the poultry world. The aviary has turned into Madison Square Garden. The weaker males have bloodied heads, and the females are missing the feathers from the back of their necks from frequent male attention. I knew it was time to put some quail in the freezer.

The sad truth of farm life is fewer males are needed than females. One ram can serve fifty ewes, a pheasant cockerel can easily hold ten hens. If a male isn't good enough for breeding stock, then he's only good enough for the freezer. If you're a male born on a farm, it's either the stud or the abbatoir for you: heaven or hell, so to speak.

When I sexed the quail, I had three hens and eight cocks, which explains all the fighting. I kept one cock for breeding and the rest I've started to process.

In case any reader is interesting in vent sexing quail - and who wouldn't be? - it's very easy to do. Start by turning your quail on its back, and gently push the tail up to expose the vent. If a small ball of foam comes out, it's a boy -

Once plucked, you can see that, just above the vent, the male has a swollen bottom -

It only swells during breeding season, and the foam is only produced at this time too. However, I find that vent sexing is a more definitive method for sexing quail than colour.

I processed three quail this morning, saving the feathers for a local fly fisherman. Apparently they make good fly-tying material. Spud and Lily kept me company through the laborious task of plucking. The skin on quail is very thin and tears easily when plucking. The finished birds couldn't have looked worse if I'd let the dogs chew the feathers off.

Well, I processed two birds and all was going well. I hung them on the back of the truck where they would be out of reach of dogs playing in the garden. I had just dispatched the third when my spidey senses started tingling. Where was Quincy?

Behind the shed eating a bag of rat poison she excavated from a hole, that's where.

She came out with the empty bag on her head.

I didn't waste any time. I removed the bag from her head, bundled her into the truck, and drove straight to the vets, which is thankfully only ten minutes away.

I forgot the dead, plucked quail were still hanging from the rear of the truck until I was halfway through the centre of town and looked in my rearview mirror. There they were - swinging left, then right as I navigated the turns to the vets - completely naked except for their feathered heads.

(I'd put the just-dispatched bird I was holding when I caught Quincy into the nearest recepticle, which happened to be the metal bin we use as a mail box. I came home and found the mail left on top of the dead bird. Thank goodness for country post men, nothing phases them.)

Quincy got the same treatment that Spud got when she ate the poisoned rat. All signs for recovery look good as we got the poison out quickly. With some gentle persuasion from his wife (i.e. I showed him the vet's bill), Mike has agreed to go back to trapping the rats, at least until Quincy gets older.

Quincy found the bag because of her exceptional gun dog nose. I know her scenting ability is already well-developed, even if her judgement isn't.

  Finished quail

Quincy - on the couch and on the mend

Tuesday

The good weather has broken. Mist has come in as thick as a fisherman's sock. The weather pine cone is closed tight which tells me that the rain is in, at least for a few days. Barbara the weather chicken is starting to look damp and threadbare, as she takes her brood out to explore the garden. I'm inside catching up on paperwork and knitting today. And of course there are more pheasant chicks to bit.

Not much of a view over the hedge this morning

Mist and rain doesn't stop morning chores; it just means that you're soggy and your glasses are steamed up by the time you've finished. All the animals need feeding, walking, and letting in or out as required. I've been getting up by 6am so I can finish the basics by 8.30. It makes me feel more productive.

Grandma Brown and Susan are still sat tight on their respective clutches. Grandma Brown went broody in an old wine case in the tool shed -

Grandma B

A few days ago I swapped the two dummy eggs she sat on with two fertile ones from the incubator. Both her eggs and the others in the incubator are due tomorrow. Grandma Brown's ass is the size of a dinner plate so she's going to foster them all. Susan is incubating her second clutch of the year, though she's only ever managed to rear one chick per hatch. She's not due for a fortnight yet.

Susan

One of the brown laying hens is limping, and has adopted the 'tail down' position of an ailing bird. Perhaps she had a run-in with a dog or a car, I don't know. But she's foraging and generally soldiering on with being a chicken. I'll just observe her for now.

A second brown hen has split her beak down the middle. I think I'll have to catch her and trim it up, to keep the split from getting any worse. We have a special tool that trims and cauterises beaks, though I've never had reason to use it before. That can be my new skill for next week.

And my new skill for this week? Sexing quail. I was given four little Coturnix quail and shown how to sex them. It's surprisingly straightforward. At 6 weeks of age (or sexual maturity), the males produce what look like little balls of foam. Pick up a quail, turn it over and expose the vent. If you can see one of these foam balls, it's a boy.

Boy quail (L) and girl quail (R)

It turns out we have two boys and two girls, though the dark hen has a joint deformity that causes her to walk on her elbows. I don't think it will correct itself as her joints are noticeably large, probably damaged. I will watch and make sure that she doesn't develop any sores or wounds on her elbows where they touch the ground. As long as she stays healthy, there's no harm in keeping her. We're only eating the eggs, not hatching them.

This "give everything a chance" attitude means that, between us, Mike and I have had our fair share of gimpy pets.

This same attitude was present last night, on our ride back from Milkweed field. Mike was driving when he swerved the truck, hit the brakes and opened his door.

"What the hell are you doing?" I said.

"There's a moth in the truck" Mike said.

"And?!?"..

"And I wanted to let it out so it didn't die in here. Lepidoptera are suffering this year after such a hard winter. It needs to get out and breed."

It's true, I thought. I haven't seen many moths or butterflies this summer.

" Oh honey, that's really sweet of you!" I said.

"Well, there's not a lot to eat on a moth so it wasn't worth keeping anyway." Mike said

A gamekeeper with a heart, but still a gamekeeper. I just hope he doesn't realise how much meat is on a lame quail.

Thumbs, lambs, AWOL quail, and chicken tales

Poor Peggy.

Peggy is our local butcher, and my sometimes butchery mentor. She raises all the sheep and pigs that she butchers and sells them from her small farm shop. Peggy was preparing half a pig for us and she fell foul of her cleaver. Well, the top of her thumb did anyway. She should be laid up but she's soldiering on in spite of the pain and doctor's orders. In her opinion, her customers' orders are more important.

I heard the story from her husband Steve when I arrived to pick up our pig. As I'm always looking for an excuse to avoid the pheasant pens in this heat, I offered to give Peggy a hand (!) as unskilled laborer in the butchery room. I was surprised, but glad, that Peggy called and accepted the help.

On Wednesday I spent 4 hours helping her process lamb carcases to fill orders, and we were just finishing each one as the customers came to collect them, one after the other. My work earned us huge beef joint for Sunday lunch, though I was happy to do it just to help. It certainly gave me more experience, and I know how much we appreciated help when Mike was first out of hospital.

It feels nice just to be nice sometimes.

We've had some unexpected house guests -

Unexpected but quite welcome.

It's a pair of swallows. I never even noticed them building a mud nest over the front door. (I know, my powers of observation are astounding.) We're only using the back door now, so we won't disturb them. She appears to be sitting on eggs. I hope we'll see three or four frowning fledglings peering over the top soon.

I noticed we were one quail short this morning when I fed their pen. I disturbed a small rat which darted out from a hole it had dug, probably to get to the quail's food. This hole was not only rat-sized but quail-sized too, at least for the smallest of the three birds. In the afternoon, I heard the lost quail calling and Pip helped me to find him. He had crossed the road and was hanging out with the sheep. He's back with his own kind now.

Barbara is still being a great mom -

She has five chicks now. The two that went to our neighbor's to placate their broody hen were rejected. Simon brought them back a couple of days later and I just stuffed them under Barbara. She didn't bat an eye. Silkies are the most dependable and adaptable broody I've ever known. I suspect if you crammed a newborn puppy under her ass, she'd give it a go.

'Stuffed' and 'crammed' are technical terms by the way.

I can see Barbara from my kitchen window and I watched her while I was baking a cake. She's been pulling the feathers out from her chest and between her legs. You can see the result in her run, which I only moved this morning. We're having a heat wave and I wondered if it was to regulate temperature for the chicks - i.e. less feathers equals less heat equals cooler chicks. Does anyone else know what this behavior is about? She certainly doesn't seem stressed.

As if we didn't already have enough chickens, I'm off to a poultry auction tomorrow morning, There is a pair of Barbu D'Uccles listed in the catalogue which I'd like to bring home.  I'm using the money I've earned selling eggs to bid on the breeding pair, which gives me a limit. And seems apropos. Eggs for chickens. The Barbu D'Uccle eggs in the incubator are infertile so it's auction or bust, at least for this year.