Sorry I have been a little quiet lately.......
The garden is looking so lovely atm. This picture was taken just after Mr Duck Herder's 40th. Sorry about the fold up chair - sort of spoils it a bit, but you get the idea. It is hard to tell that there are nashis and mulberries and all sorts of food trees hidden in this mess with glass house, duck ponds and chook runs up the back!
I miss represented the nashi trees - there are close to 40 baby nashis coming along, and the KIWIS! well, at least 200.
In other news, poor old Nefley the original fluffy chicken passed away (the plague again - regular readers will remember Maurice the Trojan horse rooster who bought beauty, babies and death to the backyard) So that just leaves Quentin. Quentin went clucky, so I popped a little day old egg layer under her (ok, lets just pretend you have been sitting for three weeks, and these plastic eggs were real, and that this is your baby and she looks just like you)
The little one just shot strait in under Quentins wing, and Quentin started cooing and keening and it was the sweetest thing ever and they have been inseparable ever since.
Here they are, a few weeks later, still inseparable.
4 comments:
Very cute.
At what age to you let them out to free range?
I am scared kookaburras etc will carry ny babies away.
Hi there Lucy C - We don't have kookaburras here - but we do have crows and currawongs and the odd eagle. The garden has heaps of cover, with just a little big of lawn so the chooks are pretty good at hiding when anything big and hungry flies by. Funnily enough, the ducks are really good at warning everyone when something big comes along, same as the chooks -they all keep an eye out and run under the lamandras at the slightest warning. So far I havnt lost anyone to big birds - I have seen some crows hassling some young silkie pullets - mainly becasue they were too old to be looked after by their mum and too young to understand the danger! The mums are pretty careful for the first few days, - they don't tend to bring the chicks out of the nest for at least a day or out of the pen for another couple of days after that - they tend to hang around the nest for 3 or 4 days.
I think it would be different if we had a big open yard though.
xxx
It all sounds delightful in your garden! Poor Nefley, it's sad that she went - but what a wonderful, porridge-filled life she had!
x
Now my ducklings are leaving the safety & warmth of the heat lamp & shed & are hiding in the hay barn, the geese are looking after them, the Embden Goosey in particular. It's quite funny watching these huge duck-shaped balls of fluff being watched over by a goose. The other ducks ignore them totally. Ducklings eat snow ~ there was snow obn tghe ground when I let them out this day & the first thing the babies did was to eat it!
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