Saturday Scout

Here's what Scout is up to this weekend:

Might go for a walk.

Maybe take a nap.

What wild and crazy things will you get up to this weekend?

Sounds and Other Signs of Spring

Here are 3 sounds of spring and one other sign that it is on its way, all found on my morning walk:

Northern Flicker calling and drumming

Pine Grosbeak singing

Black-Capped Chickadee singing

Sunshine by 7:30 am. 

 

Happy Spring!

Chicken Fever Part 2: Finding the Cure

I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want:  I want chickens.  Or at least that’s what I was thinking a year ago when my husband, Mr. Practical, said yes to chickens.  

If you live with other humans, you really should check in with them before adding animals to the dynamic.  I’ll deal with "chicken math" in another post, but just know that when desiring chickens sometimes 25 doesn’t seem like an unreasonable number.  Make sure you clear it with other humans in your home before you go too far down that road.  You don’t want chickens of resentment.

Having my head in the clouds, I wanted the rarest, the most finicky, the most exclusive (read, expensive) chickens I could find.  Other than that, these were my criteria for our future flock:

• Cold hardiness.  Although this past winter has proved me a liar, central BC can get cold, sometimes down to -40 in winter.  These chickens had to be tough.

• Foraging ability.  I wanted my chickens to hunt for grubs in the garden, chase after grasshoppers, be brave and explore the world.

• Beauty.  Yes, I’m that shallow.  I wanted pretty chickens.  Spotty and speckly would be best.

• Able to handle confinement.  They would have to spend winter cooped up when the snow came.

•  Egg colour.  Can’t a girl have nice things?

• Oh yeah, and egg production.  They didn’t have to be rock star egg layers, but they had to lay a respectable amount.

Is that all too much to ask?  After much study I settled on two breeds I thought I must have:  Silver Laced Wyandottes  

http://www.backyardchickens.com/products/wyandotte

and Speckled Sussex.  

http://www.backyardchickens.com/products/speckled-sussex

 Both breeds I fell in love with because of their good looks and gregarious, adaptable natures.  Let the great experiment begin!

After weeks of research in books and online I realized that shipping hatching eggs from the other side of the country was too impractical even for me.  I looked closer to home and found two great local breeders, Ravenwood Acres in Vanderhoof and Snowvale Heritage Chickens near Williams Lake.  Unfortunately, neither bred Speckled Sussex, but I became so distracted by their other breeds that I got carried away and ordered a mishmash.  Both breeders were well informed and able to answer all my questions. 

"Which came first?  The chicken or the egg?"

 Thanks to Shelley at Ravenwood and Danielle at Snowvale for their patience while I peppered them with questions both before and after picking up my biddies.  They know their stuff and are doing great work keeping many beautiful breeds going.

I’ll share more in an upcoming post about preparing for the arrival of these bundles of joy and poop and cheeping.  Cheeping, but not cheap.

Chicken Fever

I had it. Bad.  My brow dripped with sweat as I pored over the pages of poultry guides.  I stopped eating, too busy learning how to integrate chickens into a garden.  I huddled under blankets barely able to focus on anything but speckly, spotty, streaky plumages.  I tossed and turned, dreaming feverishly of the best breeds for northern climates, egg production, foraging ability.  I developed a chicken twitch, spontaneously crying out “CHICKENS!”  and grabbing my husband’s arm while bulging my eyes at him.  Diagnosis: I had chicken fever.

The fever began mid-winter when the best man in the world agreed that it would be fun to try raising chickens.  I rubbed my hands together with glee and not a little Machiavellian joy.   My dad was born in the country and my mom grew up on an orchard.  There must have been some latent Alien-like farmer just waiting to bust out of my gut.  

 

Just for the record: I know I'm not a real farmer.  There's no way I can work that hard.  I like my naps.

I knew chickens were just the first step in my plan to be that crazy lady living off the land with all those animals.  Not quite an animal hoarder, but definitely a collector.  Perhaps even a kick-ass breeder of endangered livestock breeds.  

While Mr. Practical (husband) thought it would be nice to get a few homegrown eggs a day, I planned to have several of each animal I could keep, a veritable ark of disappearing breeds.  And honestly, he knows what I am.  If he wasn’t in the picture I’d already have 17 dogs, each with three legs or one eye.  I have a soft spot for the downtrodden in the natural and domesticated world.

So, Part 1 of my evil plan: start with a few chickens.  Once that’s a roaring success, slip in a few turkeys, “just a few to raise for Thanksgiving”, then on to pigs and goats and cows and maybe alpacas, because they’re just so fun and easy! 

 

Whoa!  Okay, ease up there cowgirl.  Let’s just see how the chickens go.

Stay tuned to find out how I cured my chicken fever.  Mostly with a lot of hard work.  Yuck.

Gratuitous Green

Here's some gratuitous green for your manic Monday:

Clasping twistedstalk, Streptopus amplexifolius. I found it growing in our "back 4" acres (we don't have a "back 40").  I had never noticed them before.  Boy, do I feel dumb.  They are singing out their beauty, if only I would lift a leaf to look underneath.  Hidden treasure.

Have a good week, everyone. 

The Great Backyard Bird Count

The Great Backyard Bird Count goes from February 13 to 16, 2015.  Right now!  Starting today! What better way to ward off the bad luck of Friday the 13th than giving back to nature?  

Keep track of the birds you see in your backyard, when you go for a walks, wherever you are.  Then go to http://gbbc.birdcount.org/ to sign up and sign in, and record the birds you saw.  It’s so easy.  It’s also Reason #8 why I watch birds. 

Your data tells researchers so much about bird behaviour in late winter/early spring, a time when there aren’t as many eyes on birds as there are during major migration.  Your information counts! You get to contribute to science.  Science, my friends!  

So get out there and count those birds.  Be a nature superhero.  

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s Citizen Science!

Why I Watch Birds

I’m not an expert.  I watch birds because they give me joy, not because I want to evaluate primary projection of feathers or debate whether keeping a hummingbird feeder up late into fall causes hummingbirds to stop migrating.  I watch for purely selfish reasons:

1. I’m easily amused.  Birds’ lives are much more interesting than mine.

2. Good clean fun.  I feel better about myself after watching birds for an hour than after watching an episode of “Finding Bigfoot”.

3. Discovery.  Did you know birds can sleep while they fly?  One side of their brain sleeps while the other stays awake.  I can’t do that.  We are learning more about birds every day.  The more I learn the more I realize I don’t know.

4. Availability.  Birds are everywhere.  If you look outside you might just see a bird.  And bird watching is easier than polar bear watching.

5. Be a voyeur without being judged.  Try watching people eat, sleep, have sex, and poop through a pair of binoculars and see how that goes.  Not very well.  Birds don’t care if you watch them as long as you give them space.

6. Connection to a larger community.  Stand at the edge of the first open water you find in March looking at ducks through a pair of binoculars, and sure enough you’re going to get company.  “Whatta ya got?” is a standard greeting in the birding world.  You have an immediate connection.

7. It takes me out of my own head.  Bird watching is better therapy than therapy.  It’s better than a bowl of ice cream with raspberries and chocolate sauce (although I’ve been known to multi-task - the two aren’t mutually exclusive).

8. An inflated sense of self-importance.  There are so many opportunities to contribute to citizen science with birding.  Your information goes a long way to showing the big picture of bird populations, migration patterns, and other bird-nerdy  data.  You can  participate in eBird, Feeder Watch, the Great Backyard Bird Count, the Christmas Bird Count. Your information counts and therefore you count.

9. Umm, have you seen a bird?  They are gorgeous.  If you can’t plant flowers, put up a bird feeder and you’ll have flying flowers year round.  If you can at all afford binoculars ( or beg, steal, or borrow some - maybe just borrow) look at a Common Raven through them.  Those suckers can be iridescent, multifaceted, and drop-dead gorgeous.  

I could go on but I don’t want to lose my last remaining reader.  So you, hey you out there, you one last person!  Shut your computer down.  Look outside.  Find a bird, and watch it.  You may fall in love. 

What Chickens Think of Cameras; or Here are Some Bad Chicken Pictures

I love taking chicken pictures because in my completely unbiased (okay, completely biased) opinion I think chickens are beautiful creatures.  It’s just that they are so terribly curious about new things that they don’t pose well.  They’re too busy walking directly into the lens.

But because they are so delightful I just keep taking their pictures.  So I end up with some blurry ones.

I don’t begrudge my little biddies their curiosity.  I’m happy to have chickens that want to know: what’s going on? What is she doing? What is that thing she’s holding? And mostly, is it for me to eat?

So keep on walking into my lens, my lovelies.  One day I will get that magical shot of a perfectly posed bird.  In the meantime I will settle for fuzzy chicken faces.  Or fuzzy chicken butts.

The end.