RIP Buff the Chicken

Posted by louisa on Friday 10 June 2011 in chickens | 10 comments

Buff, our buff Leghorn chicken, died overnight last night.

It wasn’t unexpected – every day for the last week I’ve gone down to the run and been surprised that she was still alive.

On Wednesday, after a good few days in isolation with her own protected food supply, she did look a bit brighter but yesterday seemed to fade again. When I checked on her yesterday evening, she looked like she’d gone but when I touched her, her still bright eyes bounced open and she bwarked a bit to let me know she still didn’t like me, no matter how much time I’ve spent looking after her and giving her treats over the last few days.

Buff wasn’t the friendliest chicken, in fact she was a bit of a pain in the bum – not laying for ages and being noisy – but it’s still sad that’s she’s died. She was a pretty pure breed leghorn, with a fabulous floppy comb and her eggs, when she deigned to lay, were pure white.

She’s buried in the wooded bit of the garden.

Ten things

Posted by louisa on Monday 6 June 2011 in chickens, cooking, DIY, frugal, growing, soap | 2 comments

1. Buff the chicken has been in isolation since last Wednesday since the others started really *viciously* bullying her (as I said on Twitter, it’s disturbing how vicious chickens can be). I think there have been pecking order issues over the last few weeks and it’s stopped her being able to eat properly. She feels very bony (even for a pure breed) and is weak as a result – looking back at old photos of her, the difference is stark. I’m hoping some time by herself and some special food will turn her around but I wouldn’t be surprised to go down one morning to find she’d died overnight. Sigh.
2. We painted the bathroom on Sunday – not the woodwork yet but the second coat of the walls, ahead of the cupboards being fitted tomorrow. One June mini goal down (nearly)!
3. In other housey news, last year we found a hidden coal hole at the front of our house and over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been having it damp-proofed and turned into a utility room. It’s not been cheap but now has a proper full height doorway and is a proper extra room for the house – it’ll free up room in the kitchen too. It should be finished this week, hurrah!
4. While that’s going on at great expense inside, John’s DIY-mad dad is fitting a fence for us outside — to help contain the dog and the chickens a bit more. The fence is going to be rather frugal for a new fence as the lumberyard John’s dad goes to was throwing away about 20 horizontal fencing beams and some posts, because they’d got slightly bleached in the sun so couldn’t be sold “as new” any more. Madness! But useful timing for us!
5. And speaking of freebies, someone was taking a seemingly brand new electric staple gun in its case at the tip last time John’s dad was visiting – they told him it was “broken” but he took it home and found they’d just inserted the staplers in the wrong place. We now have a brand new working electric staple gun for free ;)
6. I never used to use bar soap to wash anywhere other than my hands – it left a film and dried my skin, causing my face in particular to get greasier in compensation. But my olive oil soap leaves my skin clean and soft – and it stays feeling that way for 12+ hours unlike just about every other cleaning method I’ve tried. I very much like it.
7. I made the ugliest soda bread I’ve ever made today – I don’t know what went wrong but it grew really unevenly. Still tasted lovely with soup for lunch though :)
8. Some of my rapini has gone to seed – the heads weren’t big enough to warrant harvesting. Damn the hot spring!
9. Do you make your own quiches? I’m looking for (frugal) store-cupboard recipe quiche ingredient ideas for when we’ve not got much else in — Viksterbean on Twitter suggested antipasti such as olives and artichokes, and that made me think about adding a swirl of pesto too. Any other ideas?
10. Boron would like it to be known that I did not write this post alone. Apologies for the poor quality of my webcam – I only ever use it for these type of pics ;)



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Pain in the bum chickens

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 20 April 2011 in chickens | 8 comments

One of our hens, Ginger, is broody.

She’s the first one of ours to give in to her hormones and is being a grumpy lady at the moment.

By and large, I’m letting her get on with it – I tried to talk her out of it on the first day but she wasn’t interested in my efforts to cool down her undercarriage. Since then, I’ve just been randomly turfing/encouraging her out of the nest box a couple of times a day to make sure she’s amply fed and watered.

She’s not really the problem at the moment though. The good lady Buff is.

Yes, you Buff.

As I noted when I was worried she might think she was a boy, she’s considerably louder than all the others. The others buck-buck a lot and sometimes announce they’ve laid but Buff randomly makes a sustained noise that is a cross between a quack and a honk. It’s *annoying* and loud. At first, I thought she only did it when she was annoyed with me – if I’d got too close or tried to douse her with red mite powder – but yesterday lunchtime, there wasn’t anyone near the coop and she was quack/honking (quonking?) away for ages. It’s not constant but it’s sustained for a good 30seconds/minute at a time.

While we’ve all been shut inside behind double glazing, it’s not really been a problem but now the weather is glorious and we’re all out on the patio at every opportunity, I’m worried it’ll annoy the neighbours. They’re pretty easy going generally and we get along, so I doubt it’ll annoy them so much that they’ll say anything – but it’s the lower level of annoyance I’m worried about. The niggling annoyance trickle which ends up considerable bigger than the sum of its parts. I’m worried that noisy girl Buff is going to ruin it for the rest of them (and us) so I’m considering proactively giving her away – to someone with a coop further from their house/neighbours, on an allotment or, frankly, someone who doesn’t care what their neighbours think ;)

She’s a pretty girl, a pure bred Leghorn and now that she’s laying, she does an alright trade in pure white eggs – never the largest but a decent size, and about two every three days or so. Even though she’s not the friendliest bird in the world, she doesn’t bully the others by any means so she would be an asset rather than just another mouth to feed. She’s just a bit noisy.

I do worry that I’m not dealing with a problem, just getting rid of it, which isn’t great behaviour on my part. And I also worry that this situation could have been avoided with greater forethought – I should have thought about the noise factor before getting chicken (although, to be fair, it is only Buff making the problem. When we first got the ISA Browns, our immediate next door neighbour actually commented about how quiet they were and how he hadn’t heard them make any noise at all – unlike the couple of chickens who had previously lived next door on the other side). But on the other hand, it seems better to be proactive about it to save problems in the future.

What would you do? Any chicken people been in a similar position before?

Buff’s first egg!

Posted by louisa on Friday 4 March 2011 in chickens | 1 comment

You know the other day when I was huffing and puffing about whether I thought Buff, our Leghorn chicken, was possibly a boy? Turns out all the worry was for nought. Look what I found in the nest box this morning:

(For those pedantic funny funny people: no, she didn’t lay the egg cup as well ;) )

As you can see from the diameter of the egg cup, it’s a thin one but about normal length – and very very white compared to the other brown ones. There was no mistaking it. (For the record, her big floppy comb was really quite red yesterday and paler today. I’ve noticed it fluctuating in the past as well so she’s possibly had a few false starts/shell-less ones that have gone unnoticed, although I have been looking closely.)

I think she might have had a bit of a hissy fit while it was coming out though – one of the other eggs in the nest box was broken completely and another had a hole in it — possibly an errant claw or possibly a peck. I’ll have to keep an eye on the situation but for now I’m just rejoicing – first white egg, weeee!

Buff the Leghorn – what a difference in two months!

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 2 March 2011 in chickens | 0 comments

This was Buff, our Leghorn chicken, at the end of December:

This is her now:

I hadn’t noticed how much her combs & wattles had grown until I saw the first picture in Google Image search while looking for leghorn pics so see if they all get such a floppy ‘do. They were tiny back then!

As I’ve muttered/complained about a number of times now, Buff hasn’t started laying yet. She was supposed to be around POL when we got her in November, which puts her at about seven months now so she should be kicking them out. She’s supposed to lay white eggs and since the rest lay brown ones, I think we’ll notice when she does start laying. We do get some paler eggs (for example, we got one today which made the producer bwark so loudly that I heard it up here!) which could be hers if she’s not a pure leghorn, but if that’s the case, it’s strange that in all the days of getting six eggs (from a total of seven girls), we’ve not had a single day of seven.

Her floppy wattle (which would be a good name for a band) and comb are redder on some days than others, but she’s not displaying any other signs of even thinking about squeezing one out – she runs away when I go near her rather than dropping, and the only time I see her in the nest box is when I’ve grabbed her (for a health check/powdering) and she goes in there to hide & complain. She’s really flighty compared to the others and I accidentally, literally, scared the poop out of her the other day by appearing on the path behind the run behind where she was perched. Squawk! Poop! Ran to the other side of the run.

From pictures I’ve seen, her comb & wattle aren’t that abnormally large for a girl leghorn – but possibly not one as young as her. And it’s apparently not uncommon for some leghorns to hold it in until they’re nine months old or so – especially over winter. But I have this fear – which I’ve alluded to before – that she’s a girl-who-thinks-she’s-a-boy or actually a boy, but aside from paranoia and her slightly louder voice, I’ve not seen anything to suggest that. At a guess, she’s very near the bottom of the pecking order and I’ve not seen her try anything on with any of the girls — until recently, she’s been on the other side of the run from them at all time.

Perhaps her low status in the team is inhibiting her. Perhaps her flightiness means she’s too anxious to get down to it. Perhaps she’s decided that egg laying isn’t for her. I’ll keep an eye on her but any advice/suggestions would be gratefully received!