Chickens and Unschooling

Fluffy Butt was dumped into our yard about 4.5 years ago. I thought it was longer than that, but I found the LiveJournal post that dates it for me.

Unfortunately, Fluffy Butt has been slowing down lately. A few months ago he stopped sleeping on the high roost in his house. I wasn't too worried about it at first, as he still found an elevated area to sleep on each night. That was, until a few days ago, when I caught the ducks beating him up.

I hoped it was an isolated incident, but last night, they started it up again. Time to move the ducks in with the other chickens at night, and give the old man some peace.

For some unknown reason, we are overrun with pillbugs this season. As pests go, they rank fairly high in my book, just below crickets really. Much better than any variety of pincer bugs or, especially, what I call flat bugs to keep me from declaring my house invaded by cockroaches. I would still prefer to have a less vigorous population of pillbugs in my yard/house.

The ducklings enjoy outside time, as long as a human joins them, it's in the shade, and there is water.

Shade is easy to come by, since we have several varieties of citrus planted close to the house in our backyard. Water is provided by a hose nearby. Much to my delight, and to that of the ducklings, I discovered a new game the other day.

Put the hose on near the wall (conveniently watering one of our citrus in the process), and watch the pillbugs scatter trying to escape the water.

Food, water, and entertainment all in one.

Documented through Twitter, since I can't get photos to work any other way

And yes, they've gotten huge.

This new set up came from modifying the current box to create an elevated shelf for the ducklings to use as a nest. Then I just cobbled together extra sides. It gives them more overall room and the barest chance that their sleeping area won't become sopping wet whenever they play with their water, which is basically always.

Also worthy of noting, we have only had the ducklings for 1 week and this is their 4th box iteration.

No surprise, Ghost seems as fascinated by the ducklings as he was by the chicks we raised in the house last year.

Cat TV.

Cat sitting for eldest.

It rained a lot last night. Easily an inch of water in the bottom of my garbage can this morning.

It rained yesterday morning, too. For gaming/park day I brought some sand toys to the park, so C could embrace his inner 5 year old. Other people actually showed up, so S got to talk D&D with one of her friends. She is building a Pokémon based D&D adventure to run for us once school starts, so having someone not involved in the game to bounce ideas off of is fabulous.

I'm thinking of ordering ducks, but haven't settled on the timing yet. Our neighbor's ducks managed to hatch a couple of their own. Cute little things, alive and well, following their mama around his yard.

I finished the 4th book in the series I'm reading and the fifth has not been delivered yet. As a precaution to never be left in this dire strait again, I ordered book 6 today.

As S pointed out to me earlier, we did stuff today.

I tried to get S's laptop's voice recognition program to work. Yeah, no, it is shit. It did lead to a fun game for S and C, though. Sing at the computer and see just how badly it gets the lyrics down, then sing back the messed up lyrics.

I found one of our old bikes that wasn't a complete lost cause and set it up for C to ride. In fits and spurts he rode over 10 miles today.

C and I walked Pete, even after all that bike riding.

I made dolma for dinner.

S and I found most of the rest of the music room (a.k.a. H's old bedroom) and set up C's keyboard.

One of H's coworkers found a duckling, so I drove out some Flockraiser and gave him a crash course in duckling care.

S and I puzzled and watched Battlestar Galactica.

I had an oddly satisfying day of social isolation today.

I chatted with H on the phone for 20 minutes.

I called to check on a friend from out of state and even though the conversation had to be brief, she sounded cheerful.

With the use of technology, S and C from our house, H from her apartment, and the 2 other members of their Saturday D&D group from their house, played a reasonably fun installment of their D&D campaign together.

M and I took Pete on a long walk. I've been playing PokémonGO again, since the quarantine started, so we walked down to a pokéstop in our neighborhood. It was a longer walk than I usually take him on, so poor Pete was really worn out by the time we got back.

Since Consonance was supposed to be this weekend, and old filkers tend to be reasonably tech savvy, they managed to live stream several concerts performed on many different livingroom couches. I got to listen from the comfort of my bed full of heatpads.

Interspersed through most of my day, I used the magic of iheartradio to stream an oldies country station out of Houston. Oh yeah, R.I.P. Kenny Rodgers; throughout the day that radio station was playing a tribute to him followed by a different one of his songs each time.

We also ended up having to bury a duck today. The one C started calling Spackle, because while she was supposed to be a brown duck she grew a very large number of white feathers instead. C and S chose rocks to put on her grave. They were trying to make them look like a runner duck.



Earlier in the day, I freshened up the hay in the chicken laying boxes and started on the insurmountable task of cleaning up the horse poop in the yard. Weird thing, someone threw a large bag of trash in our garage can. I wouldn't have minded if it was last garbage cycle, my container was nearly empty then, but I really needed the extra space this time around.

After coming back in from my evening animal stuff, I discovered M in the midst of a virtual filk circle with more than 40 participants. Oh, I didn't mention that Consonance is a filk Convention.

Our oldest duck, Fang, the fawn and white runner, died this morning. It's sad, but did not come as a total shock. She had been slowing down over the past week. She was the last of our ducks born before the great duck slaughter of 2015.

Baby pictures from Fang's first week.

I snapped some pictures of her last week, since I had a feeling I might be writing one of these posts soon.





We buried her by a volunteer tree. S brought Wobbles over, so we showed him the body. He hung around for the ceremony, splitting his time between talking while standing near the edge of the hole, and cuddling with C.



Fang attached herself to Wobbles when she was the only duck left. He accepted her as one of his girls. She used to yell at him if he wasn't where she wanted him to be, then seek him out to get him moving in the right direction. It was thanks to their relationship that Wobbles' geese and the ducks are an integrated flock.

So, after the duck sat on the goose eggs for three and a half weeks, the goose took over. Then, three days ago I found this:



After watching the geese doing nothing besides looking at it then wandering off, I decided to intervene.



It took a few hours to get itself out of it's shell. The poor little thing kept flailing with it's one leg still in the shell just slipping against the smooth surface. I didn't want to help it because it looked like it was still partially attached to the shell by some gooey stuff and I was afraid of causing more harm than good.

Apparently all it needed was time to finish the transition, because eventually it achieved this:



I made a beanbag sock, microwaved it, and gave it to the gosling to snuggle up to. We started calling the beanbag, warm buddy .

We weren't sure the gosling would make it through that first night, and it took a couple of days for it to be strong enough to stand for more than a second, but three days later:



The baby doesn't seem to need warm buddy anymore to stay calm. Instead we play this version of On The Borderline for it on loop.


ETA: Since it was such touch and go for the first couple of days, I wasn't sure I did the right thing bringing the baby into the house. We decided that any more hatched goslings would be left for the geese to deal with. That was until I found a dead gosling in the nesting bucket this morning. Now I'm not sure what I'll do if I find any more live ones. This could get complicated.

From the perspective of our layers, Spring has sprung. One goose has been laying for a few weeks, yesterday I found two duck eggs, and last week the new chickens left me these: