This morning a whole flock of male red-winged blackbirds spent a long time at the feeder in the oak tree. This is the first time I have recognized a group of them on the property, even though they’re one of the most abundant birds in North America. I took some photos with a long lens through the kitchen window and screen, thus their impressionistic quality.

of the season. Up before sunrise yesterday for a very cold walk. It was six degrees here at 6:30 a.m. the previous morning. Winter has finally arrived, and I am straying from the wood stove only to fill the bird feeders and defrost the chicken water.

The neatest thing was seeing all the fox tracks in the snow. I haven’t seen a fox in ages and thought they’d ceded the yard to Tucker in their canine turf war. However, they left tons of evidence that they are very much still in residence. Here’s where they went under the chicken coop.

And poked around the clean out door, no doubt sniffing the delicious dinner sleepily roosting just out of reach.

And failing to gain entry, they hopped into the little run behind the coop to try their luck with that side!

But I have the nicest, tightest coop in the East, thanks to my dad and a heatwave construction blitz, so the fox had to look elsewhere for its meal.

It’s eighteen degrees and snowing again now, and looking downright wintery outside. It’s hard to believe that just a few days ago Tucker and I were enjoying 72-degree days and the sunrise at the beach!

For weeks now there’s been a mystery among the chickens. They’ve been losing feathers across their lower backs, sometimes so much so that they would bleed, attracting the other chickens to peck at their wounds. They’re too young to molt, and I didn’t find any symptoms of mites or lice, so I suspected the newly “active” young cockerel, Calabrese, of clumsy technique.

But the other day I noticed that even he was starting to get a ratty back. I picked him up by the feet and dug around in his tail feathers. I found a group of blood feathers (growing feathers with active blood supply still in their sheaths) that had been ripped off close to the skin and were bleeding.

Hmmm…the plot thickens.

I looked at the hens again and saw that only one had pristine feathering on her back: Iris, my broody hen. This surprised me, as Lilac has historically been the feistier hen and I’ve never seen Iris attack any of her coopmates. I was loathe to separate her from the flock because of the upset to their social dynamic, so I looked for other solutions. A quick internet search turned up a lack of protein as a possible reason for feather eating.

As a quick supplement I whizzed eight eggs, shells and all, in my food processor and cooked up a giant omelet.

I fed this to the birds as I caught them, one by one, for ministrations. I started with Calabrese, whose broken blood feathers were continuing to ooze and no-doubt attract more pecking from the flock. I pulled each out with my pliers.

Then I rubbed all the birds with blue food coloring, which tints their red skin and makes it less attractive to picking.

By the time that fiasco was over I had food coloring on my jacket, on the coop, my dog’s nose, and of course on my Smurf hands:

But triage is complete and now I must turn my attention to my flock husbandry, which is obviously lacking. I spent the better part of Saturday reading halfway through Harvey Ussery’s wonderful book, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock. I picked this up at the Mother Earth News Fair and just now have gotten in to it. That I can read it straight through like a novel is testament to Ussery’s writing. I think he gives the best advice on chickens that I have read anywhere—really practical stuff presented in a humorous, engaging tone. I appreciate Ussery’s wholistic outlook on keeping birds and his emotional sensitivity to creatures that are often regarded with the opposite of respect.

My reading confirmed what I already knew, that my birds were too closely confined, and bored. I let them out to range the yard and gardens about twice a week, but that’s obviously not enough to keep them happy. So now, in addition to feeding supplemental protein, I need to figure out a way to get the birds outside more often while still keeping them safe from hawks, foxes, dogs, etc. And, I need to take more advantage of the chickens’ manure and their pest-eating skills. And it wouldn’t hurt, what with the cost of feed, to have them hunt some of their own food.

I’ve got a nice compost pile just sitting in the woods, far enough from the coop that the birds don’t venture there.

And I’ve got a deer-fenced garden enclosure, reinforced with dug-in wire at the bottom, that’s now got nothing but a thick straw mulch on it to keep the soil organisms happy through the winter.

I wonder what would happen if I started composting directly in the garden, turning the chickens out in there each day to pick through the pile? The worm life would definitely benefit. The birds would be reasonably protected from ground predators, and if Tucker is outside he helps chase off any threats from the air. I just need to rig a semipermanent passageway from the coop to the garden so that the birds can travel back and forth, both for safety and egg laying, which happens throughout the day.

I’ll still let the chickens out to roam the pasture if I am around to supervise, but this might be a good way to solve the confinement problem I am having while putting the birds to work in the garden. It’s worth a shot.

And then when I do some more research and get some cash flow I will invest in an ElectroNet fence. With that I could have the birds work different sections of the yard without always worrying that they’ll be carried off by a fox. I think it would be good to erect the fence around the garden and run the birds in this “moat” after the garden has been planted and they can no longer be free in it. Perhaps they would help with the insect population if they were serving as ravenous alligators to any bug trying to crawl toward my vegetables!

Have been a whirlwind of productivity and enjoyment best relayed in photographs.

Pervy Tuck

First raid of the compost pile several years in the making.

I know I am an unusual girl to take such pleasure in this handful of homemade worm-happy, vital compost. It is beautiful, and I am proud.

Well house renovation begins with an insulation/drywall blitzkrieg.

And a right-under-the-4:00 p.m.-closing-wire Saturday dump run. Good riddance to this stink bug, ladybug, mouse poo pile!

Lots of wonderful meals prepared, including salmon and sweet potato stew, goat cheese and caramelized onion focaccia, and a roasted beet salad with balsamic dressing. The eating’s been good around here lately!

Vintage gas pumps resurrected from my woods and hauled away to be transformed in to art.

Thanksgiving mushroom walk!

Chicken sculpture

Discovered under my OSB front sidewalk: a whole clutch of snake eggs!

I am still cringing that Mama Snake (probably Mama Black Snake) managed to sneak her brood so close to the house. And yet I saw not a single black snake last year, when they were incubating right on my doorstep! That’s irony for you.

Thrifty new front walk under construction, using stones dug from the property. It’s rustic, but it’s better than rotting, snake-incubating  OSB and sure beats the $9,000-$18,000 quotes I got from the pros for hardscaping this area…

And finally, lots of woodstove sitting, reading, and spending time with this handsome lad, who is relishing his increased responsibility on the farm and every day grows more accomplished. Official presented kill tally: two wood rats and one mole. Way to go, Farmdog!

A few weeks ago, as my giant burning bush was dropping its leaves, the resident bluebirds feasted on its seeds. I shot them through the window as I lay on the couch.

There seem to be many more bluebirds out this fall than I’ve seen in prior years. They really seem to be enjoying the new forest. It would be wonderful if they are some of my nestlings.

I spent five hours outside today cleaning out the garden for winter. I chopped down freeze-blackened plants, dug dahlia tubers for storage, pulled out tomato stakes, transplanted tender plants into pots for winter storage, and rewound chicken wire pea supports. I had all nine chickens penned in with me, and I believe they all thought they’d died and gone to heaven as they enjoyed a veritable banquet of bruised greens, displaced worms, slugs and the occasional black widow spider.

All day long Tucker had been worrying a pile of brush in the woods. It’s a spot that’s always fascinated him for some reason. It’s not large enough to shelter a fox, so I figured it must be home to some smaller critter. Whatever it was captured Tucker’s complete attention, and he spent three hours snuffling and digging in that pile with almost unbroken concentration.

I left the garden to grab something out of the garage and as I did, Tucker trotted out of the woods, head high, holding something in his mouth. Without me saying a word, he came right up to me, flung a creature at my feet, and collapsed into a happily panting pile next to it.

A rat! Tucker got a rat! And boy was he proud.

Turns out the rat wasn’t dead, just partially paralyzed. I tried to get Tucker to finish it off, but he just wanted to play.

He was surprisingly gentle with this creature, just batting it and lightly mouthing it. I am a little surprised he didn’t try to kill it immediately. Maybe he is inexperienced or just wanted a toy, or perhaps he saw the rat as a creature to be protected, as English Shepherds are wont to do? Maybe the countless hours we spent learning that baby chickens are to be guarded and not eaten translated to this rat? Who knows? Perhaps with this and his love of water, he really is a retriever in a sheepdog’s clothing?

Regardless, I forgot the first lesson of rodent handling, which I learned as a child keeping mice: don’t try to pick them up by the end of their tails! I tried to pull this little guy out of the grass and his tail skin came away in my hand with a rip. Gross, I know. Sorry. Just reporting the facts. It gets worse so if you are squeamish stop reading now.

I had heard of chickens eating mice, so I picked up the rat and threw it into the garden thinking my birds could use the protein. It got quite a lot of interest from the gang before Lilac commandeered it. She spent about ten minutes tossing it too and fro, nibbling its toes and divesting it of its eyes before she gave up and went on to munch less-challenging bugs. I think it was too big for her to find an easy way in.

At this point the poor rat was still alive and had been tortured enough, so I dealt it a quick blow to the neck with a garden hoe and took it into the woods for the foxes to find. I did feel sad for it—a rat!—but this is pretty close to the way nature works. Proud Tuck, meanwhile, took up his post right outside of the garden door with a keen ear and eye on the woods.

In fact, not a second after I took this photo he was off like a shot to investigate some scurrying action in the leaves. What a good farmdog—in my book he earned his hunting merit badge today!

One of my lavender orpington pullets came online today and laid her first egg. That extra light in the morning must be working. Here’s her egg on the right, next to Iris’s daily contribution. Not bad for a pullet egg—and she even managed to get it in the nest box! I am excited to see the other young hens start to contribute to the daily egg count.

In other news, I ran out to the garage this evening—in my slippers—to retrieve something from the car. On my way out I looked down and saw this:

Looks like I’d smashed this black widow on the floor! That’s pretty close for comfort…weird too as last Friday night I dreamed I was bitten by something on my foot, I saw two marks and dream-assumed it was a snake bite but maybe it was a spider warning!

If you had any doubt, I flipped this lady over to show her identifying red hourglass. She was pretty good-sized!

Tonight’s our first taste of the coming winter. It’s in the low 40s and grey and rainy. My house is about 63 degrees without the central heat yet on and I am eying the woodstove with longing. Too many other things to do tonight to get involved with the first fire of the season, so that will have to wait and in the meantime I am in triple layers of wool and sheepskin. Plus, it’s supposed to return to the 70s later this week!

Found this little girl dead in front of the garage door when I got home tonight. I think she’s a female downy woodpecker, and I suspect she flew into the glass window in the garage door. So sad to lose this pretty lady.

Far away in the field, during a downpour last Sunday. The rain and distance and window screen between us made for very lovely images. They were perfectly posed.

This guy in the middle is shaking off the rain. I’ve never seen a wet deer shake before. First time for everything. Reminded me of this Scientific American video that was making the online rounds last week. Totally worth watching if just to see a sheep dance.