The Red Menace, 6/18/05 - 6/18/11

Red lurking in the rose garden a month ago.

Just yesterday I wished her a happy birthday in this space. I knew she was contrary, but this just takes the cake.

I found her stiffer than Richard Nixon in the hutch this morning. After the others had happily jumped over the carcass on their way to the feeder, a quick inspection showed the probable cause: she almost certainly had been egg-bound. If she had shown any signs before the ultimate one, we probably would have been able to get her through the problem, as we had with others before, but she didn't.

Condolences are not necessary. This was one mean chicken, also given to occasional episodes of gender confusion. Were we serious farmers, not dilettantes, she would have been Sunday dinner long ago.

Her most frequent victim in either mean or gender-confused mode was poor little Sugar, a meek and sweet-natured Araucana. When both of them were a few months old, Red lost a toe during a run-in with a wire fence. We put her in a cage in the potting shed for recuperation, a place where she couldn't get her bandage dirty or lose it. For company, we put Sugar in there with her until it became evident that Red was beating up the smaller bird. After recuperation, Red always had a thing for her former cellmate -- never quite enough for us to put a permanent end to things or even to separate them at night, but frequently causing "oh, jeez, Red, cut it out" moments.

Sugar

Sugar's a beautiful bird when she has all of her feathers. At least now we can count on that being her standard condition.

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I Didn't Plan on This Post

This blog is supposedly written by an astronomer, and is supposedly in part about astronomy, but you wouldn’t know it recently without the verbiage around its Blogger frame.

A historically significant Galaxie.

I really am working on a couple of big posts about science and community colleges’ ways of wrenching it into relevance for our students. Multi-spectral views of the “grand design” spiral galaxy M74 are in the offing here in SherWords, for example, and in the works are guest blogs from electrifying explainers of modern Meteorology and Geology. Let’s hope that the latter guest appearances happen before global warming and/or earthquakes kill us all. (The astronomer is holding a major asteroid impact back as a trump card.)

But, meanwhile, Fort Harrington just insists on continuing to happen. And, particularly, its short, supposedly “dumb” denizens insist on being cute in ways that can’t be ignored, unless you can ignore a baseball bat applied to your nose.

You think being cute is a once-in-a-while thing? HAH. These critters work on it full time, and sometimes perversely. For example, the last post in this blog was a presumably unusually-cute picture of Emma. Yesterday, she just had to trump that with the prettiest picture ever taken of her, seriously:

Emma, January 2nd, 2008

And, the day before that (New Year’s Day), Guinness and the still-acclimating Finn McCool just had to practice their Hallmark audition:

Finn McCool and Guinness celebrate New Year's Day, 2008.

And, yesterday, even the chickens had to get into the “You just TRY to leave this out of your precious blog, pinky!” game, notably the remarkable Specks…

Speckles surveys the deck rail after the solstice.

… and Bratty, the Black Giant.

Bratty perseveres, kicking dirt to uncover worms, a month after the loss of her sister.

Bratty’s picture is both warm and heartbreaking to Diane and me. Pepper was her nearly identical sister, and (if you can believe it), Pepper’s eyes were even more startling in their warmth.

Rac Attack

My first impulse was to blame my neighbor. My second was to blame the freakish weather of the past two years. But, finally, I had to blame myself.

Last week’s Thursday was USA-ian Thanksgiving day. We had friends here at Ft. Harrington to help us celebrate the day and help us eat the traditional poultry. During the evening’s joviality, I forgot to close the chickens’ run door, leaving them vulnerable to predators.

For the past several years, there has been no reason to worry about that. Any encroaching varmint was welcomed by alarm barks, loud and furious, from Kelsey. This year, probably because of a two-year major drought here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, even our usual raccoons vanished, leaving our plums to drop uneaten from their trees. (And on to our deck, making a mess.)

One of our neighbors, though, leaves food for his cats outside his front door, because his cats can’t come inside, because they can’t get along with his dogs. A couple of weeks ago, a juvenile raccoon discovered this free food, and started stopping by on a regular nocturnal basis. Since no other raccoons were around, because – I guess – of the drought, which has dessicated the hollow’s creek to a trickle and wiped out the crawdad population, this youngster became bold.

He found our chicken run and, I’m guessing, waited until a gate was left open. That happened on Thanksgiving night.

We heard nothing that night, nor (evidently) did the dogs. But the next morning, we found pieces of Pepper scattered around the garden and the rest of the flock cowering in various places.

That night, we made sure to secure the chicken run as usual… but the ‘coon now knew that chicken dinner was to be had here. The young ‘coon ripped a large wooden piece from the run’s door and ripped into the run at about 3:30 in the morning. It made the mistake, though, of going after Xena, who resides in the uppermost portion of the run at night. She screamed loud enough to wake me, Mrs. Fort, and all the dogs. In various states of undress (which, for the dogs, was total, of course) we raced out to the chicken run and chased the little ‘coon away.

We also scattered the chickens away, since all the doors to the run were opened in the fray.

For the next hour, she in her nightgown and me in my robe, we scoured the compound for frightened, hidden chickens, finally locating and gathering them all at about 4:30am. We carried them into the potting shed for safekeeping, and did our best to finish our night’s sleep.

The following day, I prepared the potting shed as best as I could to be a temporary home for the 10-chicken flock.

Potting shed as refuge. The chickens at bottom are the two inquisitive ones: Specks and Lacey.

The plan now is to keep the chickens in the potting shed at night for another week, hoping to convince the young ‘coon that the chicken buffet is closed. Meanwhile, I’m “hardening” the chicken run doubly: by installing hutches within the run in which we can enclose the chickens at night and by reinforcing various vulnerable places on the run’s exterior fencing.

Morning after a busy night of pooping on black plastic. (Xena is at bottom-center, the little warrior princess!)

Meanwhile, I can’t walk by the chicken section of our grocery store’s meat section without feeling a little queasy .

'Bye, Pep

Pepper, 2005

Fort Harrington's chicken compound was attacked by a raccoon on Thanksgiving Day, 2007. Of the eleven birds, Pepper was the only fatality. The incident will be recounted in more detail later, but I thought Pepper should have her own post now.

Bless you, Pep. You were a good chicken.

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Buffy & Goldie (or vice versa)

Buffy (or maybe Goldie) on Sunday afternoon, March 25th, 2007.

Our dear friend Carla came to visit Ft. Harrington this weekend. She had just passed a landmark licensing exam in her profession, and needed a place to decompress among friends and animals. She really likes the chickens, so Diane let them have the run of the yard for most of the weekend. She also let Carla have the run of the yard, but that's usually not a problem.

Buffy and Goldie (or maybe the other way around) on a backyard table, vandalizing some ornamental vegetation.

Two of our dozen girls are Buff Orpingtons, and were among the batch we received from a hatchery in Iowa in June of 2005. The "blondes" (as we call them) are named Buffy and Goldie, but perhaps it's the other way around. I have never learned to tell them apart.

Young blonde chicks in August, 2005.

They have always hung out together. The above picture shows them at age two months, perched atop a chunk of redwood, in part of the run they still share with ten other chickens.

Buffy (or Goldie) at age two weeks in July '05.

She's in Diane's hands in the above picture -- and looks like a living Peep, doesn't she? She is in our so-called "Potting Shed," which is really more of an animal-care facility. Only eight by twelve feet and heavily insulated (walls, floor, and ceiling) it is easily kept very warm by a tiny electric space heater. Its rafters and wall-hooks afford easy hangings for various veterinary goodies, and this is where we care for sick or injured animals -- and where we incubated Goldie (and Buffy) and their sisters for a long time after they arrived as two-day-old chicks.

A two-day-old mob, June 20, 2005.

Goldie and Buffy are in there somewhere in the above picture. It shows most of the 25 chicks we received from Iowa by mail two days after they were hatched. After raising them to sturdiness (and we didn't lose a one!) in their incubator in the Potting Shed, we gave all but ten of them away to various members of the Math department in the college where I teach. Together with the two older biddies we still have, that makes a dozen chickens at Ft. Harrington... and they're all still going strong.

The "younger ten" were all hatched on June 18th, 2005 -- the same day in the same year that our youngest dog, Jax, was born, and 35 years to the day after my younger son, Adam, was born. All of that makes it easy to remember when Paul McCartney's birthday is.

A redhead, Sunday, March 25, 2007

Blondes aren't the only birds at Ft. Harrington. The proud guy above is clearly a redhead, as he shows off his ruby topknot for us at the wild-bird-bribery cylinder. (As with all the others, click on the image to see a larger version.)

Ready-made Easter eggs, March 25, 2007.

Now that spring is well and truly here, our girls are popping out eggs at a prodigious rate -- just about one per chicken per day. Above is two days' worth. Goldie and Buffy lay the very pale beige ones, our older girls lay the white ones, our Araucanas lay the (yes) green ones, and the others give us various shades of brown.

Ft. Harrington: Animals Other than Cats

My good friend ronniecat has linked to this nascent blog, saying that it is, among other things, about cats. True enough, but Ft. Harrington has other species, as well.

Chickens, for example.

Another friend, Brian, frequently plunks video clips into his blog. Let's see if I can do the same. What should happen if you click the middle of the image below is this: you'll be taken to a YouTube chicken video equivalent of newage snooze music. You should have the sound turned up for this; it's our chickens settling in for the night, clucking and schmoozing with each other in a very, very relaxing way. If your sound is really turned up, you can hear the ambient background sounds of a typical "Creepy Hollow" (as we call our little valley) evening:



We also have dogs -- including little Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Emma (the ginger "Blenhiem" girl) and her bratty brother, Jax:



And we have the BIG DOG, the watch-meister, the Kelsey, the main man.



Kelsey is a pound-mutt. Seven years ago, when we rescued him from the Santa Clara shelter, he was said to be an "Akita-Lab cross". When we took him to our vet for his first checkup, Dr. Jones laughed and said, "I can see some Akita at the front end and the back end, but there's a whole lot of funny stuff going on in between." Guard dog is his calling, though. Notice him in these pix taken yesterday while Diane was distributing treats (rice chex) to the chickens -- he's the yellow guy in the background, swiveling his head around to make sure no gremlins infiltrate the party. Bless his doggy soul.