Awww…aren’t they cute?

As adorable as these critters are, I’m definitely a duck person. I love how ducks stick together. Ducks never leave a bird behind. Chickens will wander off on their own and not care the least that the rest of the flock is far, far away. Not only is this duck mentality admirable, it’s also handy. A duck isn’t going to fly the coop and head off on its merry way. Oh no. And if one duck should happen to get separated from the group? Send the flock out after her, and they’ll round the straggler up.

Ducks are also not so pointy. I like the round, smooth duck bill. It doesn’t scare me like the pointy and most surely deadly-sharp chicken beak. Duck feet are big and floopy like clown shoes. Chicken feet are giant pokey daggers.

Finally, ducks like water. Ducks sploosh and snorfle in the pool and drill huge mud holes and shovel water on each other and dance under the sprinkler. Chickens play in the dust. Achoo!

Yesterday, Andy finished the d’uccles’ pen, and today he retrofitted the cochins’ pen to give them a little chicken cave. Both pens are pretty much the same. Andy seems to have perfected the bird pen design. It’s sturdy but light enough to move.

Yesterday our homestead’s population increased by 28. Here’s 12 of them.

Friday Andy saw a message on freecycle for two pairs of chickens, mottled cochins and mottled japs. I did a quick search online and found out that the japs are bantams (teeny), and I found that cochins are good meat birds. I asked Andy to ask the person if “pair” meant a breeding pair, and the person who posted said they were breeding pairs and to “Call Elvis” for more info.

I did some more research and found out that while many cochins are indeed full-sized and good meat birds, the mottled ones are bantams. Hrm. I don’t really want bantams because there’s not much meat on ’em and their eggs are tiny. By the time I came to this realization, Andy had talked to Elvis and learned that there were really 5 or 6 breeds of birds looking for new homes and many of them were cute, fluffy babies. We decided to go out and see what Elvis had…and hoped some of them were full-sized birds.

Elvis had a LOT of birds. Half of them were pigeons, which we had zero interest in…though the fan-tailed pigeous were pretty. There were the two pairs mentioned on freecycle plus some d’uccles, some silkies, and some other really tiny bantams that looked just like typical chickens but itty bitty. Elvis also had two bantam ducks and two very pretty quail.

We ended up with the dozen mixed chicks shown above, the pair of cochins, the pair of japs, a young silkie, and about a dozen d’uccles….some mille fleur and some porcelain, two grown up, a couple of teenagers, and a few youngsters. We also got a cage.

We put the d’uccles in the cage we got from Elvis, and the rest went into four cat carriers for the trip home. Elvis had said we’d have no problems tossing all of the (non-chick) birds into one cage, so when we got home we started emptying the cat carriers into the one big cage. Big mistake. The three grown roosters were incredibly unhappy, and we had to rush around trying to get the males separated again. In the process of doing this, the japs and cochins ended up running around free for a bit, and the two roosters got into a discussion.

We got the cochins into the duck tractor, and I rigged another pen with the top panels of the duck cage for the japs. The jap rooster, whom we named Elvis, is a diva.

Andy got to work and built one small chicken pen, which became the cochins’ home. The japs spent the night in a rabbit cage, and the d’uccles are pretty much staying in the cage we got for a while. Today Andy is building a second small pen for the japs.

All the birds are very pretty, but I don’t think we will keep them all. We don’t really have any reason to keep them all, and, well, that’s a lot of birds (especially when the chicks mature and go outside). I definitely want to keep the cochins, because they are very friendly and calm and don’t fly. And the silkie…s/he stays, too, because s/he is very extremely cute. (I don’t have a picture of her/him yet.) I think we may eventually rehome the japs because while they are very pretty they have teeny tiny eggs and are rather high-strung. Now, the d’uccles…I’d like to keep a few, but I don’t think we need all of them…most of the chicks are d’uccles. Here’s a picture of two young mille fleur d’uccles making faces at Priscilla the mottled jap.

Even though Elvis gave us all these birds for free, I’m thinking maybe we can ask a little bit, maybe $5 each, for the birds we rehome. Not only will that help us cover some of the costs for materials to build the new pens but also it will, I hope, help weed out some people who would maybe take free birds and not treat them very well. Sort of like an adoption fee.

We planted some cilantro in our sad little garden plot, but since we didn’t really take care of it, things just went to seed. Fortunately, cilantro seed is also known as coriander, so now that it has dried out from the hot spell (the same one that caused half our tomatoes to split open), i went and harvested the seeds!

Coriander

The downside is I think we still have a spice jar of coriander seeds left from the last time I did this, about five years ago…

The ducks’ wings are getting stronger and stronger, but they aren’t strong enough yet to let the ducks really fly. Everytime the girls flap their wings, little puffy feathers jump off the ducks and make me think of cottonwood trees.

Tomorrow the poor ducks have to stay in their house/run because their pen needs to be rebuilt. The current pen isn’t able to stand up to the stress of being moved so often. Andy and I both dread moving day, which seems to be occuring more frequently lately. The ducks are making mudholes around the waterer much, much quicker than they had been. Once the girls have a good mudhole going, the pen goes to pot pretty quickly. I shoulda taken a shot of the most recent mess, but I didn’t so here’s the last one. It’s not as impressive as the current one.

When Andy heads down the hill each night to put the sheep in the barn, I’ve been letting the ducks out to play and hunt down moths. They (the ducks) make cute little whirring, swirly, chirpy noises while they dig around in the grass. I’ve also been giving them lots of yummy treats like blackberry guts leftover from the wine juicing process and bits of tomato core. In this next photo, the girls are looking at me as if to ask, “More?”

I have transferred the small batch of wine I made into its secondary fermenter to sit for a few months. It’s only about a gallon and a half, but what I tasted after the main fermentation tasted like a yeasty red wine. Which is to be expected since the yeast is still in suspension, but at least it didn’t taste sour or anything like that. It has a nice red color to it, but I’ve read that it will fade over time.

The blackberries, however, do not stop coming. I took the 12 pounds of berries I collected and made a larger batch of (according to the recipe, anyways) what will be a sweeter wine. After mashing and letting them soak overnight, I strained them and added the sugar and yeast, and have ended up with about 4 1/2 gallons this time. Hopefully it will not foam so much that the top blows off the fermenter!

This is what 12 pounds of berries looks like:

Blackberries

Today I picked approximately six quarts of blackberries, mostly off the patch along the road. That many berries would probably cost us $45-50 at the market.

My arms look like I was in a fight with Buddy. It’s a little freaky when you hit a vine and a blob of a dozen or more Japanese Beetles falls on you, buzzing angrily. Or you discover a berry covered with tiny ants. I don’t like ants.

I’d estimate there is still at least another six quarts waiting to ripen on the vines, although I’m not sure if the hot dry weather will cause them to turn black slower or quicker than if it is raining. I hope it’s quicker, because I’d like to make another batch of wine, and I think Cabol wants to make jam…

Cabol told me this morning one of the ducks got three inches (that’s a thousand or so decalitres for you metric folk) off the ground. Is that considered flying?

Feeding grain to the sheep in the morning is even more fun than watching bunnies eat. They both shove their little faces into the bucket and make happy snuffling sounds while scarfing it all down. Then they make sad sounds in the evening when I go in the barn and they realize they won’t be getting more until the next day.