Fowl Food and more

Food

These are some new additions to the farmstead. Basically they are food. This is what you get when you buy those pre-cooked bbq chickens at your local food store. They sit around all day, and I mean sit, waiting for their next meal. The gusto with which they dive into the food bowl is truly impressive. I will add a growth chart one of these days.



Guinea Juvie

These are the most recent hatch of twenty-nine guineas roosting in the juvenile detention center. Ten were handed over to a local friend in exchange for a handful of peafowl. This area was originally intended to be quarters shared with the peafowl; but the guineas had a turf war, defeating the pacifist peafowl quite handily, in fact killing a couple for good measure. !@#$ guineas.



Peafowl

These are the remaining peafowl that survived the guinea assault. They are getting along famously with the cornish crosses. These will remain here for 6 weeks or longer for "home" training, and moved into the aforementioned juvie detention center once the !@#$ guineas are released with the adults (where they will experience payback in the form of the same merciless pecking they handed out to the peafowl).



Goose Eggs

Goose egg laying ended in July. There was an apparent peak in early March, but due to the loss of a layer at that time there is a false drop in egg laying for the remainder of the season. It looks like these geese have a fairly broad laying season extending from March through May, tapering off from then until early-mid July.

More Ducks

I collected an additional ten ducks from a farmer in Salinas who was parting out his flock. They don't appear to be great layers given the lack in increase in egg output. They were bought sight unseen. My mistake, never again.

latest guinea hatch

I packed the incubator full of eggs (42 total) 6 weeks ago. Two of those were not viable (candled at 10 days). Of the 40 remaining, 29 hatched. Most are lavender, but some are purple-lavender crosses. It should be interesting to see their adult colors.

strange eggs

Sometimes eggs are not "normal". There are many ways to define what constitutes abnormal, such as the following called a "softshell egg". (Even an egg that is not within a prescribed range of size can be considered "abnormal" even though it is perfect in every other respect. Mass production requires consistency for packaging purposes.) It's an egg not just with a soft shell, but without any shell at all. The contents are held in place by the membrane found just inside the shell.

The egg shown here is like a lump of jello -- easy to pierce, but held together easily by the membrane. Notice the interesting twist on the end holding it together.

Softshell eggs can occur for a variety of reasons, most often by lack of calcium in the diet. Young birds tend to have a higher incidence of abnormal eggs until they are more mature.

Forgot to knock on wood

It has been a bad month for the birds. Shortly after the no-news-is-good-news comment, a bobcat killed a goose named Madonna. I scared kitteh away, but the goose was a goner. Then a guinea got nabbed out of the brush. Then a duck flat out disappeared, no signs or anything. And yesterday another guinea is gone, no idea when or how.

There is one very well fed bobcat around here.

Here's a survivor:

No news is good news

There have been no updates lately because there is little to say.

The Dirty Dozen are full grown and still considered young; but they are starting to flirt with the drakes so they are nearly adults. Any month now they will start laying eggs. I've created a chart to track the egg lay count. There will be an obvious spike when they start.

There are worms coming out of our ears, much to the ducks' delight. They are in rapt attention when I'm doling them out.

feeding frenzy

The ducklings are a bit over two weeks old now. They have a voracious appetite at this age, as shown in the video here.

From about this age to 4 weeks, they are put the more restrictive diet of 3 feedings a day (as much as they can eat in 5 minutes) rather than "free choice" their first two weeks. They can actually grow a bit too fast for their frames, making them wobbly as they age. If these were meat birds, it wouldn't matter (and they would be fed free choice); but they are layers, so feeding time is restricted.

quack * 12, meow * 3

The guinea chicks were transferred to the outdoor coop after less than three weeks. That is a bit earlier than normal, but past experience has taught me that once they are able to fly up to the edge of the 3' fence, they are within a day of flying around the living room. Out they went.

Today I took delivery of twelve ducklings. These are Golden 300 Hybrid from Metzer Farms. Here is a video of their unboxing:



In unrelated news, this evening I saw my first ever Mountain Lion in the wild... actually, there where *three* of them -- two youngsters (about 40 lbs each) and their mother sauntering across Alpine Road a few miles from my place. Yay!

chirp * 8

Eight keets are out of their shells and exploring their new surroundings. Two eggs never pipped, and the third is trying to break out but it does not look like it will make it. It's unfortunate but it's not a good idea to help a bird out of the shell -- they are usually the runts that will always have a hard life and will likely have an early death anyway. Additionally, shells tend to stick to the skin of the bird, so attempting to break them out almost always causes bleeding, and so they die immediately.

Picture below is the new brood. There are also three short movies on youtube: first drink, first food, and spider chow. I don't know exactly what color they will be -- the mother is a Lavender, and the father is either a Royal Purple or Lavender.

first keet at 8:32pm

Right on schedule! It's typically 24 hours between first break to complete hatch. There are three more pipping, so tomorrow there will be four.

hatch ahead of schedule

Came home and heard a chirp every few minutes... and found one egg with the first signs of hatching -- a single hole where the keet's egg tooth breaks through.

So, that means there will be keets as early as Thursday evening. By Friday they will be in full swing.

Pictures will be posted as the action picks up.