nesting geese in January!

It's winter, so time for some blog house keeping! And geese are on my mind, as I found out yesterday the reason why my gander Kristopher has been so paranoid in the run recently... the darn things started a nest! In January! While the temps are below single digits and worse! I ended up removing six frozen and cracked eggs and hope they'll either stop laying, or keep on laying in the same spot so I can keep an eye on it. I like them making the nest in the side run, as we can lock that up at night, but worry repeated egg harvesting might scare them off somewhere else...

Let's see, last time I posted we had received five goslings from my son's incubating program at school. The brooding goose managed to hatch another eight (!) which is our record. If I remember correctly there were only one or two unhatched eggs left in the nest. From talking to other goose and duck enthusiasts we deduced that the hatching rate last Spring was high because the average humidity was high; we had a lot of rain and drizzle (and mud).
Goose eggs need moisture to develop correctly which is why a lot of waterfowl need access to a pond for successful hatching; the brooders swim occasionally and thus bring back moisture to the nest by their damp breast feathers. We do have a large rubbermaid container for them to poodle in but don't really see brooding mommy make all that much use of it, she hangs around closer to home. But she is not on the nest at all times, so next season I plan to mist the eggs occasionally and see if that makes a difference. The previous year we had three goslings from 7+ eggs. That was an above average dry spring, so it would be great if we can increase their hatching rate with just a little spritzing!

All five school goslings ended up being adopted by the larger brood and within a month or so the whole group was walking around together. We sold three of the school goslings; since I kept a close eye on them as they lived in the sunroom I was able to see sex differences and tagged them accordingly. We kept a boy / girl couple ourselves and sold the others as breeders.
Two of the eight brooded goslings quickly got separated at night and died from exposure (they squeezed thru the run/side run wire partition but did not have the thinking to walk around to the door and loop back - I put a strip of smaller diameter fencing around the side run to prevent this from happening again), the other six made it to adulthood fine. We butchered those, for our and our friends' freezers. Feedback was that it tasted the best when deep fried, but then, what doesn't!

It was nice having a large group of geese strolling the yard and garden. It looked so homely (and apparently scared the wacky neighbors, another plus!). Even tho we had a bumper crop of fruit and apples this year we had hardly any problem of rotting fruit on the ground! I had already put a wood snow fence around the chicken yard for our fox problem, which in early season kept the fox out and in later season the ever hungry geese. We'd kick the geese out in morning, feed the chickens, and then let the geese back in at night - otherwise there'd be no feed left! We ended up not feeding the geese commercial feed for about 4 months, stimulating them to graze and gather for themselves as they grew to a respectable weight of about 6-8 pounds dressed - and apple & leftover marinated :)

goslings

One of the five goslings hatched by my son's preschool last week. We donated 6 eggs from our breeding couple and offered to take any results back. All six hatched but one did not make it, and another was having a hard time (pictured). I brought that one home right in the morning to blow dry, keep warm and feed sugar water and by the afternoon she was fine. That afternoon I brought the remaining four home and the five of them are having a good time hanging out in a plastic half drum (no leaking) in our sunroom.

Baby geese are much sturdier than chicks and our five year old is enjoying handling and petting them (for now, until they grow up and "bite his bum", hihi).

The mother goose Emily is brooding her own nest with seven eggs last time I could count, which should hatch sometime the end of next week... we'll see who'll have the better hatching rate, the goose or the preschoolers!

incubating eggs

We started our incubator!
We have a selection of blue wyandotte, hamburg / wyandotte and I think brahma's that look like columbian wyandottes - thank you, friends for donating fertile eggs!

I've been watching the temperature like a hawk...

Simultaneously, school is hatching a dozen of Khaki Campbell duck eggs and a half dozen of American Buff goose eggs from our flock. Emily the goose mom started her own nest, with seven eggs last I could count, we'll see who'll has the best hatching rate - the goose or the preschoolers :)

 

For more info on incubating - it either goes completely fine, or completely wrong is my experience - check out the Hova-Bator manual at (if this link does not work, use a google search):

 

http://www.pdfdownload.org/pdf2html/view_online.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gqfmfg.com%2Fpdf%2FThermal%2520Hova-Bator%2520%2520instructions.pdf

double yolker

One chicken egg, two yolks... you should have seen Simon's face :)
Most of the time I recognize the double yolkers, they do look like two egg butts stuck together with a small 'glue' ridge around the middle. And they always make me smile too.

We finally had a winter with chicken eggs thru-out, tho we do not have much fridge space left now either as we only sell/barter with a handful of neighbors and friends (and some of them escaped to Florida!) but I plan to start up the egg stand drive thru again this year - and add my soaps as well! A milk soap drive thru...

The geese and ducks also started laying and the first six goose eggs I donated to Simon's school. They'll incubate and raise the little ones for a while, and then I get them back - how useful! I'm also collecting the khaki campbell eggs for incubation in their primary class, I'd like a few more girls as I lost two of my three last year (foxes - and hence the saying "sitting ducks" I realized).

Not that we won't be incubating ourselves, except we'll be trading our eggs for fertile eggs with friends. They have blue laced wyandottes, absolutely gorgeous birds, but not laying thru winter as they don't have a coop light. I am partial to wyandottes anyway, pretty and a good dial purpose breed, but have only had silver and gold laced versions. I look forward to new subjects to photograph this coming year!

ducks everywhere!

It's been fun having all those duckies around, but man, do they make a mess! I already evicted their water bucket to the outdoors and just wish they would do their multitude of poopies there too...

But, they are fun to watch, tromping down the snowy pasture all in a row, scooting like a penguin under the stall doors to check out the barn isle (and scooting back fast when they see me...), coming to the fence real curious to look at the tiny human, who in turn loves to watch the funny looking and chirping mass of ducks!

They're about 8 weeks old now and some of the boys are already larger than their mom...

animal medley

 This picture is just too funny, it's "three in a row"! Yes, we've been playing "Four in a Row" quite often recently with the four and a half year old... Here you see loaner buck Jamie on the left, herd queen Thirteen in the middle and cart goat trainee Spot at the end.

Two weeks after hatching and the ducklings are already half mommy's size! Just a little while and the box stall will be too small for all of them, I need to add litter several times a week to create a semi dry floor. When I clean out that stall whatever part of the garden gets it will be sooo happy...

ducklings! in fall!

I don't know, maybe she thought is was spring or something, she is an African duck breed :)
About the end of September I realized I only saw Olivia, the female Muscovy duck, at dinner time but not grazing in pasture with Moe, her hubbie. So I looked and found a large nest under the half dog crate I use for small goat kids to sleep under. I hadn't removed it yet cause even tho they don't fit anymore they do like to sleep on top of it now. There is no sense in messing with a duck's nest, and these are big ducks, so I figured, with the temperatures dropping below zero regularly the nest would be a dud anyway, so just let her be. I did wonder why she kept at it, as Muscovies are known to remove bad eggs and abandon a bad nest...

Low and behold, mid October I walk down the barn for breakfast and there is a semi circle of quiet animals standing next to the fenceline... and there they are! A gaggle, or flock, or school, or whatever you call it, of 10 baby ducklings! TEN! They'd dropped thru the fence off a slightly raised concrete slap and stayed there as mommy couldn't get thru the fence and they couldn't get back up the concrete. It was so weird, all those quiet animals (goats? quiet?!), watching the tiny ducklings. So I got the mom, put her in the spare stall, herded the little flock in there with her and they've been growing like weeds. I did give them a heat lamp as within a day or two they outgrew mommy's cover surface :)

You know what I still can't believe? That these little ducklings navigated all those goat feet thru the side stall and Greni's cake plate hooves in the main stall without getting squashed, and that Casper the killer cat had not killed a single one of them! He did do a fake charge when I had just seen them, immediately yelled him off, he pretended he was not interested anyway, and has complete ignored them since. Almost as if he was asking "are these food? or family?" He's a good cat.

Our fall sure was beautiful!

Picture perfect breeding pair American Buff geese Emily (back) and Kristopher.

Something came up out of the lawn... cause it had finally rained!

A summer evening

Pretty much speaks for itself :)

goslings

Last week we sold our three goslings... which made me so happy! I really was not looking forward to move them onwards to the freezer - tho we love goose meat, of course, who doesn't - these three were our first home bred and home raised gosling fuzzies!

I bought three goslings from McMurray's three years ago, both for meat but also for parasite management (they eat slugs etc that host goat parasites). Unfortunately for the goats, the geese grew up to be a toddler menace, so for sake of keeping the toddler interested in interacting with the goats the geese moved in with the chicken instead. Which turned into a great move as the geese became the flocks bodyguards and have since kicked butt quite a few verifiable times (geese feathers all over yard, a strutting goose male, but no missing chicken). It's only too bad the chicken have not learned to stick close to the geese at all times yet :)

Pretty soon it was clear we had two girls and a boy and named them Josephine, Emily and Kristopher. Kris and Jo became a pair but it was Emily who made nice nests and turned broody. Fortunately for us, and Emily, Josephine committed suicide by drowning in a 5 gallon bucket (really, and they fit like a cork) which is why all our water buckets now have a diagonal piece of wood in the top. After a couple days moping Kristopher moved in with Emily and about three weeks later I let them brood. Maybe that was a little too soon as none of the eggs hatched (but did explode spectacularly). Plus I had moved them to the fenced in goat bachelor's pad, it seemed a nice secluded safe place to brood, except the foxes knew pretty fast the chicken diner had reopened...

The next year I kept the geese with the main flock and after one failed nest - right next to the coop's only entrance - Emily built one in our semi open lean to which I use for meat chickens in summer but is open to the main coop and run the rest of the year. She had a humongous amount of eggs (nine-ish) and ended up hatching three healthy goslings. I did check the nest after she left and found one egg completely developed but it had not hatched, another egg was partially developed, with the rest with no development at all.

We had experienced normal geese behavior, like Kris protecting his wife, which we adults pretty much ignore, we had experienced brooding female and protective male behavior, just don't get close - but two adult geese with goslings is a whole 'nother ball of beeswax!!! I think I still might have a bruise on the back of my leg... from June...

When the goslings had all feathered out and it was clearly time to find them new homes I listed them on craigslist without follow thru results. Luckily for them, I also mentioned I had them available to anyone who might have any interest and one of my milk soap customers at the Farmers Market turned out to be very interested for the same reason we got them in the first place: goat parasite management. So no freezer for them, they'll be pasture mates to four dairy and fiber goats - a prefect ending for my first flock. Thanks!

in memoriam

In all the five plus years we've had chickens we've had aerial hawk attacks, sneaky opposum visits, dog chases, raccoon break ins and fox drive by's - we sometimes lost just a few, sometimes many, but we always had some of our girls left... Up until last week when I picked up apple pumace for the goats and compost (bruised apples & winter squash) for the chickens. I had noticed the cracked corn on the pile but dismissed it as spoiled animal feed... except it wasn't, it was spoiled mouse bait dumped by an unthinking farm employee. By the next evening all my chickens we're either dead or dying and we ended up loosing 15 hens and 2 ducks, including Moe's girl Olivia. I am just grateful my two geese are OK, they're nesting right now, and we have at least a few khaki campbells left over for eggs. Of course, the hens had just started laying that week with us waiting all winter for fresh eggs!

I really miss the girls who helped me dig in Spring... the three Araucana hens we'd had for four years and knew what me kneeling in dirt meant: worm time! I would toss them any of the big worms that would inadvertently come up... The two bantham Buff Orpingtons I got last year thinking they were normal sized ones and wondering why they didn't grow, but they were the first to start laying. The assorted bunch of Columbian, Barred Rock and Buff Orpingtons we were given last year as replacement for the ones killed by the fox... They were raised by indoors and really friendly, so friendly I would trip over them if I did not look out when carrying buckets! They'd caught on to my compost buckets real fast and loved eradicating all the nearly, almost and pretty much spoiled foodstuffs I could haul home! I have so much left over now we actually dumped a bucket of mushy apples on our manure pile which is a first - I've never had enough foodstuff leftovers to compost, ever!

I'm glad we had already ordered replacement chicks and now have a sunroom full of squeaky peeps - not quite the real thing but getting there, haha. We also were lucky to receive nine four month old mixed breed pullets so should only have to wait for a month or two before eggs start showing up again... But I must say, this was the single most heart breaking experience I've had in my animal husbandry years... it was good having a really big bonfire a few days ago to clean up, say thanks and remember.

some pics I found...

The school our toddler goes to hatches eggs each year and this year they had too many ducklings to handle - and yes, they do make a mess! I had just built the rabbit hutch and borrowed the white fencing to make a rabbit / toddler play area so I moved the ducks in there. I knew it was temporary anyway, either they would be part of the main flock or be in the freezer two months later.

Having the ducks right up at the house worked great predator wise - nothing bothered them - but not so great having them right next to the picnic table... especially with damp or rainy weather their yard had a distinct ducky smell! On the other hand, Simon loved feeding them and this way he did not get harassed either (by the geese).

On a side note, while we spent Christmas down in the City we walked from the subway back up to the apartment and I found two more panels to the foldable fencing! They are the exact same kind and fitted perfectly... no idea why they were stacked out with the trash. My hubbie was not real happy with my 'dumpster diving' - even tho I see it as the ultimate recycling, cutting out the middle man, haha - but he did rearrange packing the car to fit it.

He's always so embarrassed when I "shop" along the road, it's almost cute, and I feel weird. And then we visited my Dutch friend Karleen in CT and she also 'recycles' whenever she can. We had a lively conversation about the availability of public dump sites (which Ithaca does not seem to have) lounging on a nearly new 'rescued' couch, drinking tea from a 'rescued' kettle while enjoying the view of a beautiful 'rescued' horse painting. She's cool :)

we've got chicks - and 40 of them!

Just like the past three years or so we ordered meat birds and I picked them up April 15th. It is unbelievable, the growth difference between these and my hen chicks! And they behave differently too, much more food oriented -less interested in foraging, but way interested in their human 'mommy' bringing them food! I feed them twice a day a set amount otherwise they'd overeat.

The first year we grew Cornish X meat birds from Agway, great birds but man, they grow fast. And every time they moved around their joints tend to click... it just did not seem natural, a harvest ready bird in 8 weeks! So after that experience we chose Color Rangers, which grow a little less fast (12 weeks) but with hardly any of the health issues.

This year I ordered even more chicks than usual - we only need about 20 birds for the year - as we had several friends and acquaintances interested. So we'll barter some with Eileen for sewing & baby sitting, with Christine from school for beef her husband grows and with a hunter for venison. How varied our freezer contents will be!

Only after two weeks or so they moved to the outdoor "lean too". Still with a heat lamp, at least at night or when it's chilly, until they grow their complete feather coats - and it stops raining!

some winter pics...

I thought this looked so funny in the shallow sprinkling of snow last winter! All those ducky footsteps - the chickens don't come out as soon as it snows, but the ducks don't seem to have any issue with that, and they sure love hanging around outside in the rain!


My privy project turned out such a success and then a big wind blew the door right thru the hinges... both black hinges are bend at a 15-20 degree angle (which is why the door doesn't close) and that tongue & groove board of the door is badly cracked. I took the door off recently, took it apart and glued the board back together - next time I'll also add an outside lock (way out of reach of little kids hands) just in case!

Make your own chicken feed

10 pounds mixed grains - Farmer Ground Flour has everything from soup to nuts in the "waste" grain mix Tom's been using--corn, wheat, wheat bran, buckwheat, oats, rye, spelt, etc.; texture varies from flour to meal to whole grains.
1 pound organic fish meal - from Fertrell via Hilltop Organics in Dundee, NY; made by International Protein Corp., Minneapolis, MN
4.15 oz (1/2 cup) Fertrell Poultry Nutibalancer - from Fertrell via Hilltop Organics in Dundee, NY

recipe from Tom Shelley, Compost Educator and Sustainability Scion
Learn more about the Sustainable Chicken Project at steephollowfarm.wordpress.com
and on facebook www.facebook.com/129295929#/home.php

we're got ducklings!

Even though I had calculated the eggs would hatch just before we went to NC, they actually all hatched right in the middle of our trip! Our petsitter called us, unsure what to do, and it seemed like all but one egg hatched successfully :-)

Guess where we're staying in NC... on the Outer Banks in a little town called DUCK!

duck egg surprise!

Even though we had a surprise 40th birthday party Sunday for my hubbie, it was I who was surprised with a dozen of Cayuga Duck hatching eggs! I felt like early Christmas :-)

I stuck them in with the Muscovy eggs and will transfer them to the other incubator when those hatch. No sense in having two going at the same time! Unfortunately, it looks like our surviving rooster Eddie the buff Silkie is a bit of a dud - NONE of the chicken eggs were fertile when I candled them! Man! We need a better rooster for next year...

oh, you can actually see a difference between the Cayuga duck and Muscovy duck eggs here, the cayuga ones look almost orange and the others sort of white greenish. Which is funny since cayuga ducks are famous for their dark green eggs when they first start laying!

hatching eggs again...

The one time we come home after dark because of work - I was part of our local annual Artist Market - a fox had gotten into the coop and killed about half our flock! I did not even notice when I closed the door Friday night... but the next morning it was quite clear something had happened, apart from the couple dead bodies in the building itself, the rest of the flock was very quiet and demure... I lost a khaki campbell (two more the next night when I put them in our veggie yard on slug patrol, apparently the veggie yard fence was not high enough, poor birds) and about 10 chickens, including my two new home grown roosters!

And how did I know it was a fox? Because the triple next door neighbors saw it trotting past their porch Friday evening with one of my chicken in it's mouth! Their dog immediately ran at it and scared it to drop the boy, it was one of my boy roosters, and it took shelter under their porch. A day or two later he was calm enough I could come over and catch it - but even though I was very relieved and grateful they called about the homeless chick I did not want to get it; it was Them. That was soo strange, even though they had their little two year old toddler grand daughter running around and I wanted to invite them to our bi-weekly playgroups I just could not get the words out of my mouth... all that cause the man of the house decided to become territorial to all his neighbors with his 30 acre property... oh well, at least I had my boy back.

So, to make up for the losses we put about 35 chicken eggs and about 12 duck eggs in my two new incubators. They're the ones I got (for free!) on craigslist so I did not know whether they would even run, or if they would hold their temperature - but low and behold, two of the three work perfectly and one of the automatic egg turners works fine too!

It feels so "lazy" to have a turner - I'm used to turn them all by hand. But I must say, I have not incubated that many eggs at once before! I am so curious to see all the different chick combinations - we have quite the collection now... hatching sure is fun :-)

poultry butcher / processors

Seems like Graps Bros is out of the chicken business - they had an intense check and failed approval for the poultry processing part of the business... they do still do goats etc, but since both brothers are nearing their 70ties they did not feel like investing the time and money to update the poultry part to qualify again - and I don't blame them!

If you are looking for someone else in the area as well, through the poultry forum of the Ithacan website we found a local Amish butcher near Ovid.

Parish Road Meat Processing / Paul
2666 Parish Road in Interlaken, NY 14521.
607.869.9446 but only between 730 and 8am (no machine, but will call back).

waddaya' mean: nobody eats rhubarb?!

my chickens literally eat everything... including rhubarb leaves, as you can see from this pic! I've had to fence the plants in, otherwise they'd have been mowed down to the ground! wow... I just wish they'd eat japanese beetles with the same vigour :-)