My chickens ate a pumpkin down to the stem. I’m most impressed that the stem was still tied to the branch. They have eaten other pumpkin stems enough to drop the pumpkin off the cord. This pumpkin had a soft spot on the side of the bottom that I cut out, and thus provided access to the pumpkin flesh. This method was so successful, I cut the next pumpkin in a similar manner.
Slice of pumpkin taken out near the bottom to allow chicken access
The chickens don’t consume pumpkin as fast as red cabbage, so I do check for mold growth. After about a week I usually remove the remains.
I have never seen an edge contrail before, or at least not one that looks like a beam of dark piercing the sky. I saw this one and had to pull over to take a picture because… what the?!? The line of shadow actually is more pronounced in the picture than what my eyes saw, so I’m glad I took it. And I’m glad for this article, from which I learned about contrail shadows. Although I’m still wrapping my head around how it works. The article goes through some complicated math. Regardless, a shadow line in a clear blue sky is rather striking. You can see a bit of the fluffy end of the contrail causing the shadow in the upper right of the photo.
My folks gave me an early present: a new coop camera! Now I can pan the camera from my phone and see the roost and the isolation ward. Here is a slightly longer video at night.
Panning across the coop
I mounted the old camera outside the coop so I can see the chickens in the runs. That’s entertainment.
I sigh because I spent almost four hours blowing all the leaves around the house into a big pile out past the fence, and although the pile is really big, pictures do it no justice. I’m pretty sure at least five children (maybe even adults) could hide in that pile, but in the picture it just looks like the lay of the land. Oh well. I know the work that went into shifting all those leaves. As an aside, I blew all of last years leaves into the same area, and this is one of the ways the water runs when it rains. Almost all the leaves were washed down by the spring rains. Neat. Natural recycling.
We were a little late on our monthly chicken health checks, but we got them done! The most surprising event is Navi’s recovery. She no longer has a pendulous crop, her comb is now red and getting larger, she is back in the flock weight wise, and she has started laying. Wha? I’m just going to take it and be glad we didn’t lose her. I don’t think Cockatrice is laying yet, which is interesting. Her vent still looks like a pullet vent. And it is easy to tell. I need to reweigh Cloud. Her weight is down over 200 grams. She has never been the biggest chicken, but that seems drastic. Or I could have written the number down wrong. However, the scale broke during weighing (the glass top popped off, probably because of the recent freeze). I have an idea how to not just fix it but make it better, but I actually have to implement my plan. Magic’s weight is back on track (it was down last check), which makes me hopeful for Cloud. I also need to keep an eye on Seashell’s foot. She has what looks like a healing wound and it is a little swollen, but it doesn’t effect her gait. We rinsed her foot well and put wound spray on it. We recently visited an alpaca farm and had some extra alpaca feed, so the chicken’s treat after checks was alpaca food. They loved it. (Apparently chickens can eat alpaca food, but alpacas shouldn’t eat chicken food. So there we go.)
Critters and Craft 