Monthly Archives: November 2014

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November 28, 2014

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Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, Damage caused by chickens, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Recycling, Waste

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Plants in protective custody

Reflecting trends in Australia more broadly, the population behind bars in my garden is steadily increasing. The metaphor starts to break down there because my indigenous plants aren’t systematically and grotesquely over-represented in prison.  And it’s not collective punishment, more like protective custody.

Washing line vege netHere are some of the make-shift prisons keeping chooks and brush-turkeys at bay. Eventually I suspect I might just cage the whole veggie garden, as much to deflect the midsummer sun as to prevent raids by flying dinosaurs.  Some of our neighbours are already there, as you can see from this fabulous repurposing of a Hills Hoist.

In the mean time, I’m finding new and creative if not visually attractive ways of leveraging my pathological hoarding… from the tried and true bit of broken trellis…

Yellow zucchini seedlings
“Sugar baby” watermelon seedling

… to recycled heavy rubbish finds.

So far mysterious steel objects from the side of the road 1: brush turkeys 0 (though not for want of trying).

Red okra seedling – safe for the moment
Seedling burgundy okra
Burgundy okra

There’s an array of objects yearning for landfill propping up veggie nets:

Old umbrella frame protecting salad greens

Old umbrella frame protecting salad greens

Once it was a rattan salad bowl. Now it is giving lebanese zucchini head room under a veggie net
Kicking a goal for asparagus, sorrel and watercress with the spine of an old kids’ soccer goal
Methuselah broccoli protected by an old clothes hanger (shallots in the background). This broccoli is six months old (not a joke). Everytime it gets to about 10 cm something eats it. Health-conscious critters around here – I’m not going to bother planting goji berries!

and then there’s the open prison: things surviving against the odds outside the fence that encloses the veggie garden.

Chilli bush protected by pea sticks
Rock samphire – sticks and stones may break your bones but they also discourage visits from possums and chickens

Of course that’s making the assumption that the fence is high security. Somehow, I don’t think so:

“Frenchette”from my lavender hedge, in front of the garden gate
Inside the veggie garden fence there’s a broad bean fence. And inside the broad bean fence is… Andy Ninja. She can break in as well as out.
I thought Shyla was sleep but the minute I moved the veggie net to show off the toning colours of the yellow zucchini leaves and the broken kids camping chair, she was in like a rat up a drainpipe.

Okay, my road-side finds are not quite quirky enough to function as garden ornamentation (I need to yarn bomb my umbrella!).  And I don’t think these pics will appear on Buzzfeed under “2014’s Best Organic Garden P*rn”.

Perhaps I should proudly locate my backyard in the fine tradition of rural homesteads featuring interactive museums of rusting Massey Fergussons and defunct Valiants, and in-situ galleries of op art reinterpreted in the language of car tyres, tarpaulins and giant piles of silage.

I’d like to flatter myself that the selling point of my carceral structures is functionality, rather than kerb appeal.  However, drawing on painful experience, I know there’s a strong possibility that around about the time my plantlets look like producing something edible, there’ll be a conspiracy between a brush turkey and a windy day and I’ll see roots wafting in the breeze.

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November 26, 2014

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Anthropomorphism, Backyard chickens, chicken diet, Damage caused by chickens, egg laying, pecking order

Andy Ninja, cannibal chicken?

Andy mugshot

A good couple of years after apparently going through the “the change” and only a few months since she was regularly crowing at dawn, Andy Ninja’s back on the lay.  They’re not particularly beautiful eggs – sometimes crimped like they’ve been extracted with forceps or she’s stopped for a breather mid-lay; sometimes exceedingly delicate; often broken – but eggs nonetheless.  She seems to favour the long abandoned compost bin: quiet, private and less heavily policed by huffy uber-femmes than the nestbox.  And thanks to my laziness in the composted-cardboard-shredding department, eggs laid there are even honestly labelled.

Honesty in advertising

At the very same time  Andy starts producing her miracle eggs, The Phantom Egg Eater has returned.  It’s a suspicious coincidence. The veteran, yearning for the good old days when she trotted up to the house to lay an egg a day, regular as clockwork.  The aging chicken willing to do anything to return to those glory days….

…anything… even taking other hens’ eggs… younger hens… pretenders to the throne… taking their lesser eggs and transmuting them, creating… yes!…. my very own marvellous eggs…

Okay, so I had fully worked up a vision of a tormented yet triumphant Andy Ninja, guiltily gorging herself, all to restore faded reproductive glory. But natural justice must be done: I needed proof.

Pastel coloured plastic Easter eggs plus one pastel coloured real one

In the quest to catch the egg eater in the act, I hot footed it to the bottom of the garden at the first triumphant cackle yesterday morning.   Andy is just lifting herself off a still-warm mid-life egg.  This one’s intact and I’ve stolen it before she has a chance have any kind of peck.  She retreats, a picture of innocence. Content of the paragraph

Suspicious andy cropped

Andy walks straight past the pre-damaged plastic egg in the least favoured laying spot – the old lawn mower catcher under the granny flat. Only used in moments of desperation.

But here’s a plot twist: as soon as Andy leaves the compost bin, Shyla the Australorp moseys in.  Is she settling down to lay?  No – moments later she reappears, looks around (are any witnesses?), and darts away.  So it’s Shyla!

But wait! A minute or two later, Luna the Barred Rock arrives on the scene, ducks into the compost bin, peers about and then pops out again.  Nothing to see here.

Oh my god!  They’re all at it. It’s like Murder on the Orient Express!

I need a plan.

Someone on a backyard chicken forum recommended a strategy for dealing with egg-eaters:  fill a cracked egg with hot English mustard.  The culprit will gulp down what it thinks is the yolk and learn its lesson rather sharply.

No English mustard in the house, just a rather toothsome wholegrain French. And no broken egg.  So why not cover one of the plastic ones with mustard and do a bit of pre-emptive operant conditioning?  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Implausible deployment of the mustard-on-egg strategy
Luna with Mustard Mouth?

Only I forgot: the chooks like to snuggle up to the fake eggs as they settle down to lay, scooting their little plastic treasures from one side of the nestbox to the other if need be.  With their beaks.  I race down to the henhouse to find Luna and Treasure looking they’ve just eaten their first vindaloo.  I do the only thing an empathetic chicken keeper would: given them a cooling slice of watermelon*.

So, chicken tongues soothed. But I’m still no closer to bringing to justice the Egg Eater.

This morning Andy popped out a broken egg, so it’s back to a more standard use of the mustard technique.  We still don’t have English mustard so it’s a pretty disturbing looking yolk – if chooks are anything like as smart as animal behaviour researchers say they are they wouldn’t touch it with a 40 foot pole.

This time there’s no sign of repeat offenders panting in the evening breeze.  But by nightfall the egg and its condimenticality have disappeared entirely.   No shell fragments.  No spillage.

Now, it is possible that the hens as a group are very very tidy eaters with a surprising love of spicy flavours.   Alternatively, maybe somewhere nearby there’s a diamond python with a serious stomach ache.

Disturbing mustard filled egg – will it fool them?

*Okay, rather suffering from mustard-mouth, Luna and Treasure might have simply been hot, since chickens don’t sweat and it was a steamy old day.  Did I mention that chicken breathe using air sac that extend into their bones?!!? Oh yes, I did.  Well, they also maintain a consistent temperature by dumping heat into those air sacs (and connected pneumatic bones).  Dinosaurs probably did it that way too… according to Mathew J Wedel in “Vertebral pneumaticity, air sacs, and the physiology of sauropod dinosaurs” Paleobiology 29(2) 2003 pp.243-55. 

Literally and figuratively cool….

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November 22, 2014

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anthropocene, Australian natives, Climate change, Ornamental gardens

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Maps in bloom

Angophora costata in bloom seen from Berowra train station

Perhaps I’ve simply been oblivious before, but this year it seems the bush around Berowra is awash with flowers –  white posies crowning the Sydney red gums (Angophora costata) that now appear to be on every street corner, ridgetop and slope.

Gorgeous Sydney red gum in a Berowra street
Sunset from the back deck
Angophora costata in Hornsby Heights
Has Morrisey been performing in Berowra? Angophora blossom hurled away in disgust

There’s something strange about this foam of blossom appearing across our familiar view, as if, while we weren’t looking, a stagehand unrolled a new backdrop to our lives.  I’ve become a tiny bit obsessed by capturing this new scene on camera. Here’s a small sample of my multiples.  Andy Warhol eat your heart out.

Angophora costata in Berowra Valley National Parkbloom in Berowra
Angophora costata at sunset in Berowra Valley National Park
Closer to town, the jacarandas are also out.  I love the way this royal bloom redrafts the map of the suburbs, rerouting your eye from the usual lines of roads and railways and wires, to a new dot-to-dot of superbly laden trees.  The city shifts on its axis.  Or better, the city’s axis, the radial city itself, retreats behind a mist of purple flowers.
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Jacaranda and Sydney red gum dot-to-dot
The rhizomatic city of jacarandas

Of course, this new cartography of living things is still a map of privilege, of the breathing space between people.  They don’t call affluent parts of town “the leafy suburbs” for nothing.

Creating and keeping green space gets more urgent as cities get hotter.  An article in the Harvard Gazette reports research on the way inequality, heat and green space correlate.  “Heat” says Joyce Klein Rosenthal, who teaches in Harvard’s School of Design, “is an environmental stressor, unevenly distributed in places where there are less trees, less green space, and associated with poorer housing quality”.   “At every scale” she noted “income levels are associated with surface temperatures. Poorer neighborhoods are hotter; wealthier neighborhoods are cooler”

Gorgeous street trees on my way to work
A magic carpet

Street trees have magic carpets beneath them, not just lilac flowers, but shade.  And on a stifling day the breath of wind across a city park – old-school evaporative airconditioning – is almost as good as the breeze off the water.  Just now, the City of Sydney is trying to green streets and villages, beating the urban heat island effect by shading concrete, weaving plants into walls and sowing seeds on roofs.

But, that hasn’t stopped the chainsaws round here.  New regulations in NSW, created in the name of fire risk-management, let householders rip, at least on trees ten metres or less from their place (oddly, it seems that trees in the middle of spectacular views present the greatest fire hazard).  What an irony: climate change, worsened by tree-felling, makes the Australian weather hotter and extends the bushfire season.  We fear the urban forests, just as we need them the most.

Jacaranda flowers close up
Prepare to stop and marvel at the suburban glories of jacaranda

After years of cultivating a back yard the size of a large picnic blanket (that’s to say, a picnic blanket made of concrete) every day I bless the growing things I see from my window.  I may feel differently one day when the view from my back deck is Sydney red gums topped with flame rather than flowers.  Let’s hope I don’t find out anytime soon.

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November 16, 2014

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anthropocene, Backyard birds, Backyard chickens, History, natural history

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Dinosaurs in the backyard

I’ve been thinking a lot about chickens’ feet lately. Not as as a convenient snack, like the vacuum-packed ones left on a hotel pillow (alongside a packet of condoms) for my parents to enjoy on a recent trip to China.  But as a little reminder that chickens are actually dinosaurs.

Abbey’s dinosaur feet
Shyla’s dinosaur foot (do you think she needs moisturiser?)
Treasure’s goth inspired ready-pierced dinosaur feet

The whole avian dinosaur thing has crept up on us over the years, hasn’t it?  Children’s encyclopedia facts shifting under middle aged feet, kooky science factoids becoming simple commonsense.  The plastic dinosaurs in the kids’ toy basket, made in the 70s, are discredited heritage items now, with not a feather in sight.

When I was a fledgling, Archeopteryx was the only bird-like dinosaur around.  But now, it’s just one of many, and not even the earliest (a title currently held by Aurornis xui, which was covered with fine proto-feathers most likely used for insulation and probably couldn’t fly. Naturally, Aurornis is described as “chicken sized“)

I’ve been reading John Pickrell’s Flying Dinosaurs (University of New South Wales, 2014), and he notes that “there is now good evidence that many carnivorous theropod dinosaurs, even fearsome and well known species – such as Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus – had feathers” (Pickrell, 2014, 84).

Wow!  You could knock me over with one of those proto-feathers.

Monitor skin
Snowball’s flightless protofeathers

Dinosaurs did all kinds of bird-like things.  Mei Long tucked her head under her elbow to roost for the night (Pickrell, 2014, 48).  Fossils show Citipati osmolskae crouching over its eggs like a broody hen (Pickrell, 2014, 179). T.rex seems to have suffered from trichomonosis, a potentially lethal parasite that which rots away the jawbone.   Contemporary birds of prey catch it from eating pigeons; T.rex might have got it from gnawing at each others’ faces. (Pickrell, 2014, 60)

I discovered some crazy facts about birds reading this book. For instance, birds have smallest genome of the vertebrates – and bats’ genome is pretty small too.  Smaller cells with large relative surface area means better gas exchange and greater efficiency, enabling the high metabolic rate required for flying.  Apparently hummingbirds, with the fastest metabolism amongst birds, also have the smallest genome (Pickrell, 2014, 58).

Hard to believe that such tiny tiny changes could make a macro difference, but I guess if you’ve given up teeth and a jawbone to save weight, economising on your genome seems like a mere bagatelle.  Inferring genome size from the space of lacunae in bones, researchers have proposed that between 230 and 250 million years ago saurischian dinosaurs – ancestors of the birds – also started to have smaller genomes, while the bones of your triceratops or hadrosaur soldiered on unchanged (Pickrell, 2014, 59).

I was amazed to read that birds don’t breathe like mammals: they have a one-way respiratory system with multiple air sacs that, when inflated, help make them light enough to fly.  When birds breathe, the air flows into their their bones!   And some dinosaur skeletons reveal the same spongy, pneumatised bones (Pickrell, 2014, 49-50)

“Dinosaurs and birds unquestionably have very very similar ankles. In fact, nobody has an ankle like a dinosaur or a bird” (Phil Currie cited in Pickrell, 2014, 27)

It’s perhaps ironic that chickens’ scaly feet scream “dinosaur” to me, because one of the earliest feathered dinosaurs was Anchiornis huxleii which actually had feathers on its hind legs as well as its forelimbs.  In fact, there were loads of early feathered dinosaurs that looked like this.  Paleontologists are still trying to work out quite how it could have used these rear legs in flight without dislocating its hips – they were probably for used to enhance aerodynmics or to create drag (Pickrell, 2014, 114).

The startlingly speedy progression of our chicks from tiny bundles of fluff to whopping great layers, made sense of the notion of paedomorphosis, a process in which animals reach sexual maturity at an earlier stage of development

In the brooder
A fledgeling at 2 months old
Four month old Shyla learning new tricks
Shyla fully grown

In comparison to the slow maturing reptiles, birds, like mammals, grow quickly in early on.  Interestingly, as they mature, birds’ heads don’t change much in shape; in comparison most dinosaurs’ skulls morphed dramatically, the comparatively large, spherical noggins of babies elongating into the snouts and jaws of adults (Pickrell, 2014, 54).  US researchers Bhart-Anjan Bullar, Mark Norell and Timothy Rowe noticed Archeopteryx’s adult skull is rounded just like the babies of other dinosaur species, and concluded that the ancestors of birds maintained juvenile characteristics later in life.  This process of paedomorphosis (or neoteny) often goes along with smaller body size.  It seems to allow the emergence of a new and unexpected set of features in an organism.  Harvard’s Bhart Anjan-Buller observes “These unique characters may allow the exploitation of radically different ecological niches from other similarly sized organisms” (Pickrell, 2014, 56).

And birds have surely filled those ecological niches.  There are aroundabout 10,000 living species of birds, far more types of avian dinosaurs than all the non-avian kind that ever lived.  “Dinosaurs are now more successful than they’ve ever been, but they all look the same” says Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum, “With the exception of a few aberrations, they are all bipedal flyers” (Pickrell, 2014, 28).

And let’s not beat around the bush, a really really big percentage of those living dinosaurs are chickens.  There’s a global chicken population explosion: there are now about three times as many chickens as there are humans – in the 1960s we were about eekies. And that’s not even considering the ratio of domesticated to wild animals.  According to the RSPB, there are maybe 30 times as many domestic chickens as there are the most numerous kind of wild bird, the African dwelling red-billed quelea.

In fact, best not to dwell on this to prevent yourself being plunged into depression about the forthcoming Age of Loneliness, when we humans will mostly likely have few non-human companions.  Better get used to the company of rats, cockroaches, and jellyfish.  Maybe we’ll have a few bats – to my surprise, there are more species of bats than any other type of mammal except rodents (Pickrell, 2014, 107).  And, of course, chickens.  Lucky I love my avian dinosaurs.

Andy Ninja the ISA Brown’s knock knees
Treasure the Light Sussex’s dino-feet

(You wouldn’t believe the confused and irritated looks the chickens have given me as I’ve been taking these pictures of their feet.  Sorry guys.)

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November 12, 2014

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Fruit, Gardening, Natives for shade, Plants and what I know about them, Plants that attract wildlife

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The inconspicuous, the insignificant and the underwhelming

Sure, to the swanky author of a well-received volume on gardening it’s a throwaway line: “has insignificant flowers”, “flowers are inconspicuous”.  But how about some consideration for feelings, eh?  What’s wrong with “reserved”, “low profile”, “unpretentious”?

My 7 year old drew me aside the other day and whispered conspiratorially “At school I drew a picture of a plant’s bits!!!” In the light of this insight, which I really hope she didn’t share with her teacher, perhaps we could even go with “modest flowers”?

Shy persimmon flowers
Persimmon flower retreating from the light

To be honest, I find persimmon flowers faintly perturbing when upended and exposed to the rude light of day.  Much better to let them shelter under their curtain of leaves.

Sheltering below the leaves
What they look like when you invade their privacy

I do, however, need to be rather forward with my demure custard apple flowers soon.  They may not look like much but there’s the smell of perfume in the air.  Time to wave my magical pollinating paintbrush and help create some atemoyan fecundity.  Or, given my pruning anxieties and the consequent fact that most of the new flowers are more than two and a half metres off the ground, perhaps it’s time to fall off a poorly located stepstool, crashing through branches, crushing multiple flowers and possibly poking myself in the eye with pollen-dusted painting gear on my way down.

Too insignificant to pollinate yet
What happens if I don’t get to a flower with my magic paintbrush
One to gather pollen from
Custard apple flowers when it’s too dark after work to get out my magic paintbrush

Thankfully there’s no need to hand pollinate the midgen berries to get tasty little purple-and-white fruits.  Otherwise I’d have to get one of those three-haired brushes they use to paint a portraits on a grain of rice.

Australomyrtus dulcis flowers – teeny
Midgen berry flower

And then there’s the flowers that are not so much shy as downright recalcitrant.  On the left, a NSW Christmas bush down the road.  On the right, the unimpressive shade-dwelling specimen in our yard.

And another offender: Kunzea ambigua doing its thing elsewhere on the left and in our garden, not even making the effort to take a decent photograph.  Very poor form.

Kunzea ambigua looking rather nice elsewhere
Kunzea ambigua – can’t really be bothered

Thank goodness for institutional plantings.  Just because councils like to plant it on the median strip doesn’t mean I’m not happy to see the blue flax lily producing its, shall we say, somewhat coy flowers in the shade under the maple tree.  If your camera is close enough, even the teeniest flowers are significant. Could that be a metaphor for this blog? Or is it just a sales pitch for a macro lens?

Dianella caerulea
Dianella caerulea really really closeup
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November 9, 2014

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Anthropomorphism, Backyard chickens, broody chickens, Permaculture

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The Broody and the Bustin’: daytime drama on Chicken TV

I witnessed the Tiff of the Uber Femmes in the henhouse this weekend.

Snowball the silky bantam and Treasure the light Sussex have both gone broody.  Their steadfast commitment to their chicks-to-be is in no way diminished by the fact that they are sitting on two golf balls and a couple of plastic Easter eggs in attractive shades of green and pink.  The fakes aren’t there just to mess with their minds:  they were slipped into the coop to thwart the Phantom Egg Eater (golf balls being both hard to break and to the best of my knowledge flavour free).

The other new girls are still sleeping alfresco, but with a dramatic drop in the egg-count we suspect they’ve also been forced by Them Indoors to find some new and obscure location to lay their eggs.  Now: documentary evidence of desperate chickens turned out of their coop by feathered home-wreckers. Shy Abbey makes a frantic dash for the nestbox but is thwarted, not once, but twice, by Snowball, the Fluffy Ball of Fury.

“Don’t even THINK of laying that egg here!!”
“Over my dead fluffy body”

There’s a picture burnt into my brain: poor Abbey “crowning”, an egg half out of her cloaca, trying to beat off the rageful Snowball for long enough to drop her bundle.  No photo – perhaps a good thing.  Having shoved Snowball out the door, I thought Abbey deserved a moment or two of privacy to finish her business.  But as soon as the deed was done, Abbey was out of there and the indignant bantam was back in the coop, carefully gathering and nurturing her beloved plastic brood.

I don’t think I could psych myself up to lay under these circumstances either. So this week’s job: stalking the homeless chickens until we figure out where they’ve hidden their egg stash.

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November 1, 2014

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Death, Fruit, Garden trees, Gardening, Insect pests

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Day of the Dead Bugs

Victim bugs

It’s a pity the internet isn’t scratch and sniff.  The citrus flowers were splendiferous this year – the place was suffused with perfume for weeks.  And now there are lots of baby fruit on the trees – not only on the lemon, mandarin, oranges and grapefruit down in the veggie garden but even on the limes and the kumquat suffering in pots by the back door.

But there’s a nasty smell taking over the garden these days. The stinkbugs are back.

Tahitian baby limes before the invasion
Tahitian baby limes with stink bug

I’ve spotted bronze orange bugs in the garden before but never quite got around to doing anything about it.  I’ve gone for a bit of a Darwinist approach with insect pests in the past.  Organic Tough Love, we might call it.  “Deal with it!  I’m busy!” has worked okay with the Eureka lemon and the Freemont mandarin (and the ruby grapefruit seems to be doing alright too).  But the poor baby blood orange has only grown about 5 cm since I planted it, thanks to sooty mould and aphids (… okay, thanks to neglect).  The one mature fruit tree that was here when we arrived has been smothered by potato vine, scratched by chooks, starved of water and fertiliser, permanently shaded and, of course, parasitised by the odd citrus bug.  No wonder we’ve only seen 3 rather unpleasant oranges in the last 5 years.

So, bugs, it’s time.

The Bronze Orange Bug: a worthy adversary
Bondish insect villains

There’s something of a 60s Bond film about these pics – I think it’s the Chromakey background.  But maybe it’s also the general Bondishness of stink bugs.  You can imagine a cable car zipping up to their citadel at the top of the lemon tree.  And 007 would need any number of secret weapons from Q’s underground lab to deal with that nefarious blinding spray.  There’s Sean Connery converting a dapper hat into an oxygen mask before fighting off the green and orange horde.

No fancy equipment for Uncle Harry and I when we set out on our mission this morning, just protective glasses, ill fitting rubber gloves and a trug of boiling hot water.  No-one lost an eye, though by the time the bucket was filled with colourful corpses we both smelled atrocious and Harry had a mysterious brown stain on his beetle-pinching fingers.

Uncle Harry, bug killer extraordinaire
Toning nymph bugs
The first victim
An infested branch destined for the drink.

Despite being a vegetarian for a quarter of a century, I’m not sure I’d make much of a Buddhist.  Meat-loving Harry felt guilty about the citrus beetle death toll whereas I wielded the seccateurs gloating “Die, bugs, die!!”.  While I was up a stool lopping the most heavily infested branches off the lemon tree (it needed a haircut anyway), I spotted a Halloween-themed scene which made me feel less unnaturally ghoulish.  I particularly like the bit of fly viscera splattered on the right hand side of the frame: Spidey was obviously scuttling from the scene of the crime.  We killed a lot of bugs today but at least we didn’t paralyse them, regurgitate stomach acid onto them and then suck their corpses dry.

Spider assassin

Although strictly speaking, if you could face a meal of stinkbug entrails, this probably would probably be a more sustainable alternative to death by washing up liquid. On that funereal note, enjoy All Soul’s Day, folks.  Let’s hope we don’t see any stinkbugs returning from the grave.