Where has Yowie Yoga Cat BEEN?

I know you all wonder how Yowie Yoga Cat has been doing with his CAREER.  Actually he’s been doing a lot of photo shoots lately.

I Was Here All The Time

Yowie Yoga Cat Parking

I Are Serious Cat

But Sometimes Shy and Un-Imposing . . .

Yowie Yoga Cat with his new fashion hat

Yowie Yoga Cat is a sexy thinking guy

Yowie Yoga Cat ends his day in the bath

HOWEVER . . . Nowdays, when he isn’t posing for a photo shoot, he hangs out with BUBBA his best friend.

 

BUBBA, Yowie’s friend (c) 2017

And he also hangs out with CHICKME, his maybe sometime girlfriend

CHICKME (c) 2017

 

 

One renegade chicken

Renegade chicken. She’s SO idependent

I had recently started letting my chickens out of their pen to roam the yard.  I have a privacy fence, and after blocking the undersides of all the gates, not including hawks,  it was a pretty safe place for them to roam if I didn’t let the dog out of his pen.

So I let them out and watched to see where they hung out.  For the most part they stayed at the back of the property which is where thiere pen and nests are at.  They scratched everywhere, the compost pile was a favorite, as was under the flatbed and trailers in the backyard.  I introduced them to the winter garden which had nothing in it they could destroy.

They had a whole lotta chicken fun.  And I cut down on the feed bill quite a lot.  They got bugs, and grass, and seeds to eat all day long.  They got to roll in the dirt, flap their wings, run a good distance too.  But when I’d come out to take a head count, (I’ve got six hens), there was always one not with the flock that I would have to search for.

Today I went out to check on them and that renegade chicken was at it again, only this time I couldn’t seem to get her to come when I called, even though five of the hens were eating chopped apples and leftover spaghetti as a treat.  I came back out later, I heard what I thought was something from under one of the junk cars in the yard.  Worried that maybe a racoon or possum had started living in a trunk, I checked.

Nope . . . no chicken.   And I’m worried about her because she isn’t staying where I can find her.

I went around and looked under all the vehicles, the trailers, anywhere one might find a chicken hiding.  And low and behold, under the BACK side of a trailer, was this very silent chicken.  She wasn’t unhappy, or hurt.  She wasn’t laying an egg.  What she had done was to scratch out a hole in the dirt under the trailer and hunker her body into it.  She didn’t seem to be nesting.

What she was doing was to just plain take a spa dirt bath. She was happily contented to just wiggle around in the cold dirt and bathe in it.  I mean she was in total chicken heaven too.  Her eyes were glazed with this enjoyment I’ve not seen anywhere so intense.

And she seems to just be that type of personality, a chicken that is a renegade, independent “doesn’t need the flock” kind of gal.  But I think I need to mark her with a scarlet “R”.

Chickens don’t like unfamiliar things

I don’t LIKE new stuff

I had some white breadcrumbs that I put in the blender to take out to them, and went out to the chicken pen to give them to the hens. And I found something out quite by accident about my girls (the chickens).

I bent down to sprinkle some on the ground as I do every day with thiere regular crumbles.

They backed up.

I put some in my hand because they will eat directly from my hand with gusto.

They backed up again, looking upset. “Hey! that’s not food!”. They just did not TRUST those bread crumbs.

I finally got them to eat some by pecking with my finger at it like I always do.  The bread crumbs are lighter color than their crumbles.  But it taught me something about the discerning eye of a chicken.

And possibly the discerning eye of most people.  I know people that act that way about a new idea, a new food, a new thing they didn’t have experience with.  I just had to show them that it was good for them.

For the Moms you knew

Moms Chicken

Mom was always doing art and artsy stuff. When I was very young, one day she started a project that always puzzled me, because she slaved and worried over it so strenuously.  And this is how it started.

She got out some wax paper, Elmers Glue, sawdust, a big bowl, some tools, and started mixing the glue with the sawdust. She drew out this chicken on the wax paper and then with the glue/sawdust mixture she proceeded to make a flat but bas-relief chicken on the wax paper.

She fussed, she cussed, she just couldn’t get it right.  But when it was finished and dried out, it looked like the chicken in the picture above.  Well, it didn’t hold together very well.  It broke in all the small places like the feathers.  But I remember it so vividly because it seemed so important to her.  I didn’t try to figure it out then, but now I know what it all means.

See, when my mother died I inherited all of Grandmas stuff that SHE inherited.  And one of the things that I got was this cast iron chicken.  I had never seen the actual thing, I just experienced my Mom trying to make a chicken.  But now I know that it was her Moms chicken, and it meant a whole lot to her.

So this chicken has a place of great honor in my kitchen now. You just never know the history of things sometimes except by accident. If someone had thrown it out, I might never have known.

It was a very special light bulb moment when I “got it”

Baby chicken poopy feet

I was mistaken when I thought to save money on shavings by using newspaper for baby chick bedding.  And I promise it wasn’t a problem when I only had to change papers once a day.  But as baby chicks grow, so do the poopy spots, so I changed to pine shavings.  But not before I had to remove the cemented on poop galoshes that walking in poop created on the bottoms of the baby chicks feet!

Chicklets snuggling in my coat and learning to be tame.

I should have taken a picture of what it looked like (poop snow-shoes, galoshes, chicks-turned-ducks with poop webs).  It had dried rock hard under that heat lamp and you couldn’t have gotten it off without taking skin along with it.  So I put them, all six, in a cardboard box to the downstairs bathroom and proceeded to soak it loose.

I first thought to soak it off with soapy water, but that didn’t go too good.  It was too dried, thick, and hard, so I ran enough really warm water in the bottom of the bathtub and let them walk around in it for 15 minutes or so.  I’d check each chick and pull off whatever came off easily and put them back to stand in the water for another few minutes.

I had to do all of this on my knees, and they were sore by the time I got finished with all of it. But when I was finished I had baby chicks with clean feet and wet belly feathers.  I put wads of toilet paper into the bottom of the box, layered that with wet chicks, and topped it off with more wads of toilet paper and closed the box.  They were grateful as heck too.

I took them back upstairs to dry under their very own heat lamp and 15 minutes later they were good as new.  Just thought someone might be interested in what it takes to do it.

 

 

Baby Chicklets are so darn cute!

Eggs, eggs, eggs, on my mind . . . (I must have eggs on my mind)

I had chickens, ducks, geese, guinea fowl many years ago. I went through the whole learning process with fowl homesteading. I lost a few, got too many, learned how to fix them when sick. I learned what to do with predators, owls, rats, stray (and not so stray) dogs, possums, etc. I learned the hazards of buying them at swap meets and how to treat the leg mite you get that way. How to treat chicken colds. And how to mercifully put them to rest when they needed to be. I knew what breeds I liked, and which might be problematic. (no nervous Polish chickens or Leghorns for me)

After years of doing many other things I kept looking at chicks in the feed store. They had a chick corral with 5-6 stock tubs full of all kinds, even Banty chicks. Three years passed, each year I looked at chicks.

Baby Chicklet

Although I knew my husband did not relish cleaning a chicken house, I kept asking if it was okay if I made sure I did all the chicken chores. No chicken was going to come between me and my husband. But this year, with grocery costs, and the fact that I knew chickens would eat all the leftovers that the dog wouldn’t eat, like salad trimmings and make eggs out of them, I asked again (while at the feed store).

He said yes this year, and I bought six pullet chicks (female chicks). They happened to be a breed that is easily sexed at birth by color, the Red Comet. When grown they look kind of like a Rhode Island Red chicken, but instead are red or gold and white feathered. The breed I really like are a dual purpose breed called Buff Orpingtons, but they weren’t available at the feed store.

Home made chick brooder from plastic tub

He helped me find a container to keep them in, a Rubbermaid tub. I put it in a room with a closed door to keep the cats out.
I clamped the red heat lamp to it, installed a thermometer close to where it was hottest, put newspapers in the bottom,
filled the feeder, and the waterer, and put the Chicklets in it.

Here they are snuggling in my coat . . .

Chicklets snuggling in my coat and learning to be tame.

It’s been a week, and they are so far doing fine. However I did find that half of them were much younger. You can see by how long the wing feather are on the younger half.  Here are pictures of the difference.

The younger baby chick wing feathers, still pin feathers.

Baby chick older wing feathers same day

The difference in the way they act is that the younger ones sleep more, and want to snuggle more under your hand.  The younger ones are also not as strong.

It’s going to be several months before I have eggs. They do have to grow up and be old enough to lay them, which gives us time to make the chicken house and pen. While looking online for more chicken information, I happened upon my old chick supplier Murray MacMurray Hatchery, (or McMurray) and found out they have a new thing. They now sell older birds, and you can buy almost laying age pullets singly for WOW, $17.95 or so. They are expensive, but you don’t have to wait months for eggs. I may get some few more chickens from them that way.

You can also get fertilized eggs from them, and put them in your own incubator. But I didn’t live in an area that I could have a rooster, and didn’t have an incubator.