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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

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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mccnmatt

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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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mccnmatt

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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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mccnmatt

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October 25, 2014

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Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, Damage caused by chickens, Exclusion pest control, Recycling, Vegetables, Weeds

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Eat sheet and die

Today’s garden project: half-baked sheet mulching. It sounds like a filo pastry recipe but it’s actually permaculture as practiced by the exceedingly impatient.

Proper sheet mulching is a variant of no-dig gardening that can turn your couch grass infested lawn into a fairly weed-free veggie garden, at the same time recycling all those packing boxes you used when you moved in. Done properly it involves ingredients as rich, fastidiously prepared and generously layered as a fabulous lasagne.

However with an epic quantity of washing still to get off the line and some holy card weather on the horizon, speed, rather than accuracy, was my watchword today.

Ingredients

– Garden soil. Very very recently limed and ready to off-gas ammonia when hit by the inevitable cow manure. Because you can’t beat a vegetable patch that smells of a recently cleaned bathroom. Soil includes plenty of trad (left over treats for the chickens) just waiting to reroot in the moist and nutrient rich environment of the new zucchini mounds.

– Partly cooked compost, still replete with visible kitchen scraps. Nothing says “urban food forest” like a seed growing mixture that looks like a bin. In defense of my shonky methods, zucchini will apparently grow happily on a compost heap. Lucky, that.

– A bale of sugar cane hay, three bags of cow manure and a handful of golden zucchini seeds

– Two large cardboard boxes, recently used to deliver plants. There’s poetic symmetry here, since these very same boxes may now very possibly be used to kill them.

Procedure

– Amend soil with cow manure and compost. Best advice is to check soil chemistry first, but life is too short. Possibly zucchini plants lives may also be quite short.

– Shape into a mound. Turn your back for a moment. Reshape into a mound. Repeat. Once again, we see the way chickens (and, it seems, brush turkeys) flourish on a diet of ordure.

– Water thoroughly. Flatten and soak the cardboard boxes/give the chooks a drink.

– Lay the boxes over your mounds and cover with remaining rotten food scraps. Mulch with a thick layer of straw, or alternatively, whatever meagre quantity of straw you have left after interring the potato plants.

– Plant three zucchini seeds in each mound. Say a tiny prayer for each of them.

– Attempt to protect your seedlings from resident poultry by either mechanical or psychological means. You may want to try one of the one of the following: (a) a long arch of of chickenwire secured with rocks and tiles (b) a broken child-sized camping chair draped with a vegetable net (c) a scary painting of the Cyclops’ eye.

Only time will tell whether the exclusion approaches traditionally used by permaculturalists will be more or less successful than the innovative deployment of one-eyed monsters from Greek myth. Since I’ve now used up every scrap of chicken wire, trellis and veggie net on the premises, I may be heading in the direction of threatening ancient gods for economical bird protection in future.

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mccnmatt

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October 19, 2014

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Backyard chickens, Fruit, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Waste

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The year of the dragon?

I know, I know, it’s the year of the horse. But could 2014 be the year that our dragonfruit plant finally does the business? Half a decade we’ve had it in a pot in the sunniest part of the garden, and while it did produce this gorgeous flower for my 40th birthday, that’s been it. Not a single piece of fruit.

Happy birthday!

I figured Sydney was just not hot enough, but gardening pro Juke reckons if I treat them right, I should be in business. I’ve been guilty of botanical stereotyping: pitaya looks like a cactus but apparently it should be treated like a moisture loving tropical epiphyte.

So, with a tremendous amount of cursing and significant perforations in the gardening gloves, it’s out of the constraining plastic pot and into the ground by the sunny back fence. I’m not psychologically ready to build a heavy duty trellis (and given that various tipsy bits of paling on the yard’s perimeter are held in place by running bamboo and optimism, if I was quick on the draw with the cement I would have to have other priorities). So I’m hoping the dragonfruit can cope at least for the moment with jerry rigged temporary supports and the odd bit of string.

In position behind the mandarin tree

There’s not many problems in life that can’t be fixed by chicken manure, spoiled hay and weekly deep watering. The chooks’ bedding seems to be working well for the stupendously fast growing Eureka lemon and the small but fecund Freemont mandarin, so fingers crossed their new neighbour will respond to the same treatment. I’m also trying to grow Kipfler potatoes at the feet of the citrus using the same basic recipe. It will either be a triumph or a multi-species nitrogen-burn-off.

Juke’s dragonfruit expert thinks that a cutback before the flowering season’s not a bad thing. With the kids’ school fair only three weeks away and the plant stall trestle tables to fill, I’m cloning like the wind. The chunks I had to hack off (literally, with a saw – it was surgeon-barber barbarity) have been unceremoniously dumped in pots, with the price-tag as yet to be determined.

Dragonfruit vines seems to be a bit like tetris pieces. They don’t seem to have obvious “up” or “down” bits. In their natural habitat they apparently grow aerial roots from pretty much anywhere so with luck my primitively executed cuttings will take. I’m hoping the prospect of home-grown dragonfruit will shift units, however implausibly shaped those units might be.

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mccnmatt

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October 12, 2014

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Backyard chickens, chicken coops, Eco renovations, Insect pests, roosting

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Tonight on Chicken TV: Roost Swap

The chooks have abandoned Palm Beach, my upcycled mid-century vernacular modernist masterpiece of a hen house. Its retro roof line and evocative beach-shack colour scheme wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of Vogue Living with Chickens but it seems these days, our girls feel out of place inside it. I feel the overwhelming sadness of an artist doomed to be underappreciated during their own lifetime.

Of course, the veterans never saw the appeal of the coop: Andy Ninja unswervingly committed to her lonely position on top of the chicken dome; Snowball, after enduring wearying attentions during Andy’s “cock of the roost” phase, shifted to an exposed position on the rim of a half-barrel.

Andy on the chook tractor

Snowball in position

At first I blamed Treasure the uppity Light Sussex, throwing her weight around. During our recent holiday, she took up a new role as “Her Indoors”. Friends and neighbours, promised eggs as a quid pro quo for keeping the flock fed and watered, went away empty handed. Treasure kept prying eyes away from her crowd-sourced egg stash with fluffed up feathers and force of personality.

Queen Treasure was enjoying plenty of wing room in the nesting box the first night Luna, Shyla and Abbey decided to perch next to a Snowball by the brown turkey fig. However, by the following evening, she’d followed the crowd, and Palm Beach, with its rakish verandah, striking use of organic forms for perching purposes and innovative aquarium-lid clerestory window, stood empty and unloved.

Treasure hogging the beach shack

The outdoor room

I’d like to console myself that this move is not so much a rejection of my design ideas as an embrace of one of the garden’s many “outdoor rooms”. But before concluding that the chooks’ change of roost simply expresses a seasonally appropriate relish of al-fresco napping, I thought I should eliminate alternative explanations. Like an infestation of red mites: the bed bugs of the chicken world.

I can now report that the henhouse is now cleaner than my kitchen, with the deployment of a bottle of bleach and a rarely sighted scrubbing brush. The organic credentials of my garden may have taken a dent but hopefully the chookhouse has had a detox. The mantra of “form follows function” does come in handy when you need to hose chickenshit out your modernist masterwork – though this is not a feature frequently noted in Australian Architecture magazine. In the process I believe I may have made a breakthrough in the quest for an eco-friendly alternative to concrete: a mixture of sugar cane straw, wood ash and a small quantity of egg yolk, carefully cured under a sequence of chicken bottoms, makes a substance that could not be moved by a jack-hammer.

I hope the chooks were keeping a close eye on my efforts to pest-proof their home, since the tomorrow’s weather forecast, predicted with 95% confidence, is for rain. If there’s anything more humiliating than spending your Sunday on your hands and knees scrubbing a nestbox, it’s standing in a puddle during a downpour trying to persuade a group of saturated chickens of the merits of functionalist architecture.

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mccnmatt

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September 19, 2014

Posted under

Backyard chickens, Diamond python, Gardening, Native animals, poisons, Predators

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Bluetongue’s back

There’s was something in the woodshed when I went down to feed the chooks this morning. A scaly tail sliding out the door. At first I thought Snakey was back, since the woodshed was a favourite haunt of hers (conveniently close to a regular supply of breakfast eggs). But it was someone else warming up in the morning sun.

Something in the woodshed…

This time it’s a bluetongue

I reckon I’ve seen that face before.

After spending a disturbingly long time counting and colour-swatching scales, I’ve come to the conclusion this is the same bluetongue, way back in 2011.

Documentary evidence of a skink psychologically scarred by a standoff with a chicken. As I recall, there was a lot of awkward staring – the bluetongue blinked first.

Apparently blueys can live for 20 years or so. Since our place is rich with “habitat” – that is, great big piles of rotting sticks – the guy (or gal – apparently you have to dissect them or set up a fight to find out, thanks to the male’s insignificant hemipenes… *snigger*) may have been hanging round the whole time. It’s a nice thought.

I had attributed our pleasing lack of slugs to vigilant chickens but maybe lizards have been doing their bit as well. This sort of thing makes being an organic gardener seem less like a sequence of indecisive moments in the “slug bait” aisle of the hardware store and more like a practical pest management strategy.

The chooks seem to have a remarkable diffidence towards reptiles. They were completely uninterested a couple of years back when Snakey took up residence in the chook run. The sight of a snake in this position in my bedroom would freak the hell out of me:

No worries mate

It seems this is much scarier

But the gals toddled off to sleep, completely unfazed. It was a different story on the day a white goshawk drifted into the trees above the chook house. The hens bolted into the undergrowth and were very very very quiet. Gorgeous as this bird is – the only pure-white raptor in the world – even I found it quite menacing as, in Bond villain style, it flexed first one set of claws and then the other, gazing intently around the yard.

Maybe its not a simple matter of scales good-feathers bad. I’ve yet to see the chooks handle serious snake action, despite the occasional sightings of a red-bellied black by the neighbours. The potential for reptile-avian dinosaur show-downs is definitely not exhausted. For more updates, I’ll certainly be tuning in to the upcoming episode of Bluetongue Encounters on tomorrow’s Chicken TV.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

September 14, 2014

Posted under

Animal communication, Animal pests, Anthropomorphism, Backyard chickens, chicken diet, Death, Gardening, Rats, Recycling, Waste, Weeds

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Death, hot compost and chicken addictions

Something weird happened today. With a self-important summons to the other chooks, Treasure sped over the large disgusting vat of compost tea lurking under the tumbler and took a long, luxurious drink. After a good sup, she briskly trotted away with the kind of dirty stain on her snowy chest that speaks of an all-absorbing gastronomic experience. Is this a chicken version of the breakfast long black?

Nom nom nom

Knowing as I do in the contents of the compost tumbler – innocent things like lawn clippings, comfrey cuttings and fallen maple leaves; but also less pleasing items – mouldy citrus peel, rotten pears and fetid greens, barnhouse bedding weighed down with healthy gobbets of chicken manure, and in consequence a fine array of crawling and creeping things, their offspring and their excreta – the idea of the chickens necking great drafts of the liquid that oozes from this brew is really quite disturbing.

In general, I view keeping chickens as bit like teaching adults (my day job). Kindy teachers have to wipe away tears, give cuddles and clean up vomit, but when you teach in higher education you can more or less rely on students to handle the basics on their own. I don’t like to patronise my chooks – I reckon they have a fair idea of where to hang out, how to spend their time and what’s okay to eat.

But perhaps I’m being too laissez faire. Maybe I should treat my hens more like my children and start policing their behaviour a bit more vigilantly. Possibly letting the girls drink compost tea is the equivalent of doling out supersized glasses of Coke (and a Happy Meal?) to under tens.

What are you looking at??

This is the dark side of the compost tumbler. It seems so sleek and neat, holding its dubious contents high above things that squirm and scamper and gnaw in the night. You spin her wheel and steer her like a noble vessel towards the promised land of super-speedy compost, black gold faster than lightning. And I can say, hand on heart, that after fifteen years of steadfast unintentional cold composting, one bucket of kitchen scraps at a time, with this tumbler, I’ve seen my very first batch of the good stuff, cooked within an inch of its life. While most things (except for teaspoons and the plastic tags on bread bags) will rot down eventually regardless of how incompetently you build your heap or how infrequently you turn the pile, there is something glorious about seeing steam rising from your compost and knowing the nasties – weed seeds and plant viruses and pathogens – have been fricasseed.

Death, hot compost and chicken addictions

But the path to hot compost is not pure. Here’s what I found on the innocuous sounding Soil Forum while hunting out the best compost recipes, the perfect balance between browns (carbon rich things that crunch) and greens (nitrogen rich things that squelch):

“when we say that “anything” can go into a tumbler, we do mean “almost anything”. Whole small animals are OK but I would do deer heads in a separate pile! (Make too much noise flopping around in there!) I do have 20 deer lower legs on hand but they’d create quite a tangle sent through in one batch. However, I may simply saw them in half and run them all through the next hot batch.”

No, that wasn’t a post from Sarah Palin, though I’m sure she could cook up a fine tumblerful of deer-heads if she turned her hand to it. In case you were wondering, deer body-parts would count as greens (squelch). Always put them in the very centre of your tumbler, where it’s hottest. (seriously, in contrast to anything Sarah might say, for rat, health and aesthetic reasons I never compost dead animals – there’s not a lot of corpses going round in a vegetarian household, and any tragedies that do occur are accompanied by a tiny funeral and ceremonial interring)

That said, there’s no getting around it: composting is still all about death and decomposition. An interesting bit of that Peter Greenaway film “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” comes to me. The cook says:

“I charge a lot for anything black. Grapes, olives, black currants. People like to remind themselves of death. Eating black food is like consuming death. Like saying: “Death, I’m eating you”. Black truffles are the most expensive. Caviar. Death and birth. The end and the beginning.”

I quite like the idea that the chickens are engaged in some kind of philosophical act drinking up their ordure-enriched powerade. That it’s not just forbidden pleasure, the subtle piquancy of insect exoskeletons or a health-giving blast of liquidised potassium that holds such appeal, but that they’re drinking deep from the existential heart of gardening.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

September 5, 2014

Posted under

Anthropomorphism, Backyard chickens, Chickens as cultivators, Garden trees, Natives for shade, Plants and what I know about them, Possums

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Possum pruning and chicken lawnmowers

I seem to spend a lot of time talking about animals behaving badly. Or at least, animals doing sensible, survival enhancing things I don’t 100% approve of. That means you, Treasure! You can’t hide – I see you eyeballing that rocket!

“No one will see me here…”

Treasure and the lawnmowers

But it’s not only the bowerbirds that do useful nibbling. The chickens also make great lawnmowers. Although, describing our patch of grass as a “lawn” is stretching the definition considerably. I can’t say how delighted I was to read the advice recently from the RSPCA that “a weed lawn rather than a monoculture lawn is recommended for free range hens”. Anyway, thanks to the very dry winter, this year the backyard hasn’t turned into the Somme – we’ve got at least some grass and not just vast stretches of mud – and the chooks are keeping the grass down just fine.

The same happy thoughts about animals as horticultural helpers come to mind when I inspect my NSW Christmas bush. It has gorgeous pinkish red new growth which the possums seem to enjoy as much as I do, though their appreciation is expressed through the medium of chewing. Every now and then they pop down and do some tip pruning for me.

Ceratopetalum gummiferum is mostly famous for its flush of red “flowers” in December (in fact these are sepals – the real flowers are smaller and white and arrive in late spring or early summer). The consensus seems to be that if you lop off branches for festive decoration the tree will “flower” all the more enthusiastically the following year. Vindicating the view that if you give an inch, people will take a mile, some even claim you can cut them way down low and they’ll come back. Eventually. I’m not planning anything as brutal as that, though I don’t really want mine to hit five metres and mess with my view. Regular snipping is the go but since I’m secateur shy, how kind of the possums to do it for me.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

August 27, 2014

Posted under

Anthropomorphism, Backyard birds, Backyard chickens, Eco renovations, Exclusion pest control, Plants that attract wildlife, Seasons

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Bowerbirds: snacking for solar gain

Before the fall: it’s always sunnier on the other side of the fence

The gang’s back. Loads of satin bowerbirds in the garden at the moment. I’ve seen a couple of mature males, with their glossy blue-black feathers and gorgeous indigo eyes, but most of the robotic whistles, clicks, churrs and cracks in the trees seem to be the “greens” – juvenile males and females, hanging out in a pack.

I’ve heard grim stories about the antics of bowerbirds in the veggie garden. Apparently they like to lull the backyard grower into a false sense of security and then swoop in and devastate your greens. But I’m feeling kind of relaxed on that front. After the brush turkeys exhumed my long awaited Hass avocado treelet, and my big girls, the young-bloods, the prodigious egg-layers, started lounging around under the baby banana trees, making eyes at my kale and chomping on every “poisonous” rhubarb leaf the moment it unfurled, I’ve decided to go totally Christo. Every seed, every seedling, every newly planted tuber has its own little blanket of horticultural fleece. Anything growing that’s remotely likely to appeal to the poultry palate is swathed in netting.

The one upside of the chooks’ blithe disregard of the garden fence is the complete and total elimination of trad from the veggie patch. Three months ago our spindly raspberry canes and brave little Nightingale persimmon were drowning in a lush wash of juicy stems and emerald leaves, even as the ground slowly dehydrated around them. But now – nada. A few stems scattered around, waiting to reroot after the rain but not a leaf to be seen. It’s all very satisfying.

So it’s not all bad when your flock take to the greenery. The bowerbirds haven’t got a chance of getting my broadbeans. But with their leaf-picking ways, they are doing sterling work for the environment.

Brush turkey roosting in our poor denuded liquidambar

Their latest hang-out is the neighbour’s liquidambar tree – gorgeous and looming, throwing a great long shadow across our ice-box house all autumn. Basking in the sunshine on the other side of the fence, it steadfastly refuses to shed its leaves, months and months after our poor overhung specimen has shivered and shaken off its own. And then, when the last ruby shreds are about to be blown from its branches, and the winter sun finally promises to warm our August days, the bloody thing starts growing leaves again!

But never fear, Super Satin Bowerbird is here! I can’t prove definitively that their main objective was improving our passive solar gain but after closely studying these photographs for insights into bowerbird psychology and culinary habits, it certainly looks like it.