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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.

Here 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

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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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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October 28, 2014

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Anthropomorphism, Fruit, Plants and what I know about them, Pollination, Possums, Vines

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An unhappy threesome

The threesome in the bottom of the garden is just not working out well, or not for my lonesome lady kiwiberry anyway.

Most kiwi fruit are dioecious – to produce fruit you need both male and female plants. Commercial producers have maybe one staminate pollinator to eight fruit-bearing pistillate plants. In our garden, there isn’t enough space for such large scale polygamy. All in all, the plant sex around here is playing into the hands of the social conservatives.

The couply-couply Sweetie kiwifruits in the “solar pergola” have done their baby-making (with a little bit of help from me). Inspired by their example, the Mt Tomah Red kiwiberry is now in bloom. But it’s just not happening for Hairy Hayward, her pollinator (or his lovely vigorous and hairy wife). It takes chillier weather to get their blood up, I reckon.

Sweetie baby kiwis

Hairy Mr Hayward. Really not up to much in the reproduction stakes.

I’m not quite sure what should happen next. Mr Sweetie has done his dash fertilisation-wise this year. I have no shame – I am willing to act like a bee and transport the good stuff around the garden but I’ve gotta have something to work with. Perhaps internet dating is the way to go: “Would like to meet: generous pollen-laden male kiwifruit. A love of warm weather essential. Variety and nectar-production unimportant. Must be willing to reproduce immediately. No time-wasters please”

Mt Tomah Red kiwiberry buds

Mt Tomah Red kiwiberry blossom

Mt Tomah Red blossom

She may not have a fully functioning pollinator, but Mt Tomah Red does have a new BFF. A teenaged possum has snuck into the marsupial sunroom – between an old pane of glass above the barely used airconditioner and the boarded up window behind it. I don’t think he realises it’s like the Big Brother house in there: he might feel like he’s having a secluded nap amongst the kiwi vines but in reality anyone hanging out the washing can look in and catch him snoring. And if he’s hoping that Madam Tomah Red is going to provide him with a sequence of midnight snacks, he’s mistaken there as well.

The papparazzi invade the marsupial Big Brother House

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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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October 10, 2014

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anthropocene, Anthropomorphism, Backyard birds, Seasons

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Going cuckoo

You’re suddenly awake. It’s very very early in the morning. There’s an loud, insistent two-note call right outside your bedroom window. It goes on and on and on, each time inching up in pitch, getting more and more desperate until it’s pretty much a hysterical squeak. Just when you think the bird’s going to start outright screaming or explode, abruptly it stops. You settle down in bed. And then it starts again.

Or it’s the middle of the night. Somewhere in the darkness, there seems to be a huge, angry and deeply confused seagull, belligerently squawking in disgruntlement and disgust: “Where the hell’s the beach??! And where are my chips!!!?”

It’s spring and they’re back. Koels with their plaintively annoying round-the-clock cries, and channel billed cuckoos, raging at midnight (and during the day as well).

I heard my first koel, bang on time, the day after the vernal equinox; a raucous channel billed cuckoo interrupted one of my classes a few days before. They’ve flown in from the north in time for the breeding season. Sydney: it’s officially spring.

Whining teenaged koel begging for attention and grub

Despite their loud voices I have only ever eyeballed koels a couple of times. On both occasions it was a whining juvenile that got my attention. Down the bottom of the garden a year or two, I watched a great galumphing teenager begging for takeaway from a motherly if diminutive wattlebird. We’re still working on installing LBB (little brown bird) habitat around here. In the meantime wattlebirds rule the roost, along with magpies, kookaburras, rainbow lorikeets, cockies, brush turkeys – the usual self-confident generalists and anthropophiles (is that even a word?). Which suits the koels fine, since red wattlebirds seem to make great parents.

Channel billed cuckoos prefer currawongs and occasionally magpies as babysitters, and since a mob of maggies has been hanging out at our place over the winter, I wonder if we might get an in-situ “fig hawks” or two as well. My dad spotted a mega-cuckoo at the top of the drive last weekend, so it just might happen. Surprisingly, considering its deafening cries and outlandish hornbird-esque appearance, no-one knows much about what the channel billed cuckoos get up to in their spare time. So, go, backyard birdwatchers, go! Do that citizen science thing!

My one and only picture of a channel billed cuckoo

For all the mystery, it seems these guys, like the brown cuckoo doves, cooing outside the kitchen window in a more decorous and paradigmatically cuckooish way, are some of the winners of the anthropocene. They like us and our tasty fruit-bearing trees. And they favour the parenting style of the other birds that enjoy the buffet. Currawongs have come down from the mountains in the last forty years to snack on Sydney’s privet and lantana, and the visiting cuckoos are pretty happy about it.

Brown cuckoo dove

Brown cuckoo dove wondering “What’s the annoying clicking noise?”

Reflecting on how much these birds seem to enjoy our company, I’m tempted by a “humans-as-brood-parasites” line of thinking. Begging for food from our animal compatriots, all the while chucking their babies out of the nest. Terminating the blood lines of the things that came before us in a flash and replacing them with more and more of our own offspring. Bigger, noisier and more devious than the critters that feed us and house us.

But let’s not go there. It’s a nasty thought, and whatever we might say about humans, cuckoos just aren’t that bad.

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October 3, 2014

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Bees, Fruit, Plants and what I know about them, Pollination

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Sweets from my Sweetie

Kiwiflower see through shaded and nice bud with light crop

Big news from the solar pergola: Sweetie-boy, our blokey kiwifruit, is in bloom. Still nada from the Hayward pair and Mt Tomah kiwiberry down at the bottom of the garden, but there are buds all over the low-chill Sweetie vines, lad and lass, after only two years in the ground. Well done, boyo!

I’m really really really hoping we get fruit, but I’m not wildly optimistic, given how tricksy pollination can be for kiwis. According to the ever-authoritative North West Berry and Grape Information Network “kiwifruit flowers do not produce nectar and are relatively unattractive to bees”. Potential pollinators won’t look twice at your unappealing chinese gooseberry flower if there’s anything else going. I’m mystified – they look lovely to me. But I’m starting to regret that lavender hedge.

New Zealand’s boffins are developing a RoboBee to help solve this problem (seriously!). In the meantime, if your fella really isn’t up to the job, there’s always PollenPlus (TM), “from the world’s largest male kiwifruit pollen producer and supplier”. Surely that’s a niche market. And to get your big jar of pollen where it needs to go, why not purchase a PollenPlus motorised air blower with an electronic pollen dispenser? Live the life of a giant mechanical insect! You know, I really fancy that, though I think a bee costume would be mandatory to get the full effect.

Let’s be sensible. Robotic pollinators are a bit rich for our blood. I reckon I can stretch to assisting with a bit of flower-on-flower frottage, though. So come on, Sweetie-pie, show us those girlish blossoms and let’s get twirling!

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September 24, 2014

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Animal communication, Anthropomorphism, Backyard birds, Native animals

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Sulphurous romance

While hanging out the washing today, I witnessed a moment of cockatoo romance: a touching break-up-and-make-up scene.

A gang of sulphur crested cockies was chilling in our neighbour’s backyard jungle, napping, preening and crunching the odd stick. I watched for some minutes (rather pruriently, I admit, but I had the excuse of avoiding housework) as a couple engaged in some heavy-duty necking. Chewing the feathers around each others’ eyes: it doesn’t get more intimate than that. Then it all went wrong – there was a sudden squawk, a bout of wrestling and irritable pecking, and one took off to sulk in a nearby tree.

The remaining bird released a bit of tension by ripping off some chunks of bark and partially eviscerating a few palm fronds. Then after about quarter of an hour (there was more than one load of washing), the huffy one came back. He (I’ll say he, for no reason in particular) initially flapped over to the far end of the branch. With an air of studied nonchalance, by turns looking diffidently about and intently examining his perch, he inched slowly towards his flame. It all ended up in some rather sultry ear whispering and gnawing. Most satisfactory.

Noooo na no na no na noo

Lovebirds

Nuzzling sulphur crested cockatoo

What are you looking at?

I know sulphur crested cockatoos are so common that many people view them as pests. Particularly people whose balustrades or window frames or grain crops they’ve ripped apart.

But there is something magical about the sight of the big mob at dusk, floating across the valley, screeching and wheeling as they prepare to roost for the night. They alight in one tree for a moment and then, all together, lift their wings and move on. Drifting over the steep wooded slopes, passing across the creek and turning back again, they stitch together the sunlit and the shady side of the gully. In their map of this place, I’m guessing, the switchback road and the marina, firetrails and bridges and cliff faces, the river a thousand steps below, fall away.

Watching the domestic scenes today: parents, siblings and lovers dangling and swinging in the branches, inspecting and deconstructing the palm tree, muttering, exclaiming, fondling and fighting, it’s easy to see how people want to keep these clever, beautiful creatures as pets. And apparently while they can survive for forty or maybe even eighty years in the wild, they can live to be over a hundred in captivity. So there’s something to be said for it, I suppose. I’m reminded of those enthusiasts for longevity who have discovered you can live longer by eating less. A lot less. An extended life in which to contemplate the absence of pleasure. For instance, here’s Cocky Bennett, a Sydney legend who apparently lived to 120, the last 20 years nude, mumbling “one feather more and I’ll fly”.

Cocky Bennett, who allegedly lived to the age of 120

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September 21, 2014

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Animal pests, Diamond python, Fruits for shade, Garden trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Satin bowerbirds, Weeds

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Blood on the mulberries

This means war! Or at least a humanitarian mission with military elements.

Just when you’ve been lulled into a false sense of security by their generous assistance with your passive solar, suddenly the bowerbirds turn against you. One minute they’re giving the liquidambar a light trim, the next they’ve descended on your mulberry tree and stripped it bare.

Growing

Gone

Mulberries are perfect backyard trees. They’re easy to grow, fruit without chilly weather, and produce berries in spring before the fruitfly really get into gear. Kids love to eat them: the Halloween themed blood-stained hands afterwards are a bonus. You can feed them to silkworms which sorts out any number of school projects (and if you’re that kind of person you can weave your own scarves or caftans). Chooks happily clean up the spoil. And you never ever see mulberries in the shops – when they’re ripe they’re so soft and juicy they’re unshippable. You have to eat them warm, straight off the tree.

And if that’s not enough, they also make a great spot for a diamond python’s mid-morning nap.

There’s not much you can do wrong with mulberries, or so they say. You’ve gotta love trees about which it can honestly be said: “you cannot kill them”. You have to prune them for new growth and berries, but hacking randomly does seem to more or less work, though the outcome might be described less as “a classic open-centred vase shape” and more as “an ugly mess”.

The only bit of advice that people regularly give about mulberry trees is to avoid planting them near paths “to avoid stains”. Given the chaotic state of our garden, I smiled smugly at this. And then planted mine right next to the washing line. Oops.

Mulberry and Hills Hoist. Not a good combination.

I know, I know, my Hick’s Fancy should have been netted against the birds (given that they can be weedy, this is probably a good idea for ecological as well as harvest-maximising reasons). But the bowerbirds haven’t stopped at the mulberry. They’ve also had a good go at the grapes up the granny flat wall and the kiwifruit vines on the “solar pergola”. Exclusion netting is all very well but short of getting a great big net dropped from a helicopter to drape over the whole house and yard, there’s only so much you can do. Thinking about it, that actually sounds like a lot of fun. All I need is some air support.

Nibbled kiwifruit

Nibbled grapes

Sad looking proto-grape bunch severed from the vine

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September 19, 2014

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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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Posted on

September 5, 2014

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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.