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July 26, 2014

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Anthropomorphism, Backyard chickens, Diamond python, egg laying, Possums, Predators, Rats

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The egg eaters

Someone’s been eating eggs. I don’t mean us, although obviously we have been eating them, and with great relish too. I tried and failed to take a photograph of this morning’s scramble, that glorious renaissance of the freshly-laid goog. It seems that these eggs are simply too magnificent to be captured by mortal photographic technology. All that remained on film was this ineffable golden glow.

No, I don’t mean us, the authorised Egg Robbers. Some other creature has been eating eggs. It could be a rat or a possum. It could be Snakey the Diamond Python – there was a mysterious predatory smell in the garden over the last couple of days, along with scattered beige feathers. Andy Ninja was looking distinctly rumpled, like an ambitious nocturnal reptile might have tried to make her, perched temptingly amidst the lower branches of the coral tree, a late-night snack . But I fear it may be…. a Cannibal Chicken.

The kids are on the case: “We questioned each of the chickens, by showing them an egg. Shyla and Treasure were interested, but not too interested. But Luna went close to it… too close. I think she tried to peck it.” So, after this exhaustive forensic investigation, Luna is in the frame (in a possible miscarriage of justice, Abbey the elusive Barnevelder escaped questioning by being impossible to catch).

Who is the inner Luna? Who can say, although the disturbing photograph suggests an interior vortex and a single glowing eye. Beware, Luna, we will be watching you…

Luna mugshot 1

Who is the inner Luna?

Luna mugshot 2

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mccnmatt

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July 15, 2014

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Backyard chickens, egg laying, Recycling, Vernacular architecture

First moon party for Abbey the Barnevelder?

Huge day at the home farm. Palm Beach, the mid-century style hen shack, has seen its first eggs. No need for the planned lessons in nest box use. We can give away those scavenged golf balls – these savvy youngsters have no need of ersatz eggs to tell them what to do where. Noble failure is our usual thematic here, but I do love it when a plan comes together.

Palm Beach: christened

Suspicious dark feathers

Is this the work of a bantam?

The question is: who laid those eggs?

When I heard someone down in the chook yard doing the egg song a couple of days ago, I assumed it was our brilliant but erratic – well, just erratic – veteran layer, Snowball the Silky Bantam. But is this egg the work of a bantam? Yes, it is small compared to the ostrich eggs we’ve been buying from the shops lately, but small enough to be Snowball’s? And what of those suspicious dark feathers? Perhaps some eggsperts out there can advise us (sorry!).

Could it be that at seven months old Abbey the Barnevelder is all grown up? Should we be getting out the red bunting and throwing her a full moon party? Only round-the-clock viewing of Chicken TV will tell us for sure.

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mccnmatt

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July 11, 2014

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Animal communication, Backyard chickens, Recycling, Vernacular architecture, Waste

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Today on Chicken TV: the makeover show

Here’s me thinking that Chicken TV involved humans watching avian melodrama unfolding in their own backyard. Little did I realise that Chicken TV is, in reality, chickens relaxing in front of the spectacle of me doing DIY. Forget the twitter feed on Q&A, this is truly interactive television, featuring tea-thievery, butt pecking and repeated attempts to use powertools.

Here come the supervisors

Luna considering the best spot to drill

… and deploying the spirit level

Today on chicken TV: the makeover show

Abbey inspecting the quality of my work

The occasion for this viewing pleasure was a revolution in gate-making – my first not entirely constructed of bamboo, zip ties and chicken wire. This one is constructed from a superannuated IKEA bed frame (ok I cheated. I also used some hinges, paint and one additional length of pine). The original intention was to keep an ancient dog, visiting for the fortnight, away from the poultry. As it turns out, the tiny, arthritic dog and the strapping teenaged chooks settled into a comfortable state of mutual disinterest. The project had gained its own momentum by then, as gate-making activities always seem to do.

The bed-gate

Shyla sizing up the bedgate prior to escape attempt

I was feeling mighty self-satisfied about my bed-gate, despite the “chookhouse tolerances” of my dodgy carpentry and the ominous creaking of overstrained hinges, and started to warm to the prospect of keeping the livestock out of the native shrubbery. As my nine year old said “You’d don’t know our chickens, mum”. And and sure enough, within ten minutes, there was Shyla, marching up briskly and forthrightly up to the back door.

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mccnmatt

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June 23, 2014

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Animal communication, Animal pests, Animal senses, Backyard chickens, Bandicoots, Brush turkeys, chicken diet, Native animals, Plants that attract wildlife, Possums, Rats

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Things that go clang in the night

Tiptoeing down to the bottom of the garden through the midwinter gloom (or, to be precise the astronomical twilight) for some last-minute salad greens, I hear a sudden clang in the chook yard.

It’s grandpa. Well, Grandpa’s patented galvanised iron chicken feeder, slamming shut. Something’s been chowing down on the chooks’ supper, and it isn’t Andy Ninja.

According to the manufacturers, Grandpa’s are vermin proof, requiring the heft of a chook to access the munchies inside. And we carefully checked the skies before training our girls, since apparently cockies, despite being lightweights, comparatively speaking, have be known to figure out to jump mob-handed on the foot-pedal to get to the goodies. And it’s not a brush turkey, for all their proprietorial air. It’s after their bedtime.

In my fantasy life, my garden, as well as being effortlessly fecund with nature’s edible bounty, is an ideal habitat for rare and exciting native creatures. The clang, in this universe, would be a shy and endangered Long-Nosed bandicoot, taking a detour from its usual diet of grubs and tubers to snatch a mouthful of scratch mix, as if to assure me, through this moment of dietary eccentricity, that I am walking lightly on this earth.

In fact, I’m pretty sure we do have bandicoots in the back yard, but I’ve only once had a fleeting glimpse a white bum disappearing into a disorderly pile of prunings (or “habitat” as I like to think of it). If they are attempting to communicate with me through the medium of conical nose-holes disturbingly close to my seedlings, I’m not quite sure what the message might be.

In my nightmares, on the other hand, the visitor at dusk is a Liverpudlian Super Rat, that somehow sneaked into the shipping crate when we left the UK seven years ago and has been loitering in the bottom of the garden ever since, disembowelling cats and swallowing brush turkey eggs whole. Okay, the Super Rat may be not all bad.

There’s a more endearing rodent possibility: perhaps it’s a hard working and cooperative clan of mice, like the very cute singing ones in Bagpuss.

I could hide behind the generous leaves of the custard apple and try to catch the interloper in the act. But since there’s a sharp westerly blowing and further research is bound to disappoint, one way or another, I think I’ll allow the Clanger to remain a mystery.

clangers

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June 19, 2014

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Animal communication, Animal senses, Anthropomorphism, Backyard birds, Backyard chickens, chicken communication, natural history, Predators

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Reflections of a ground predator

What noise does a chicken make?

Some people might go for the classic “cockadoodle dooo!” of an rooster at the crack of dawn.

But many people probably come up with something like this: “Buck buck buck buck” (here’s a video example). That’s what chickens sound like to most of us.

In fact, this is a specific type of chicken alarm call. It means “Ground predator! Watch out!“. In this video, there’s a cat on the prowl. However, this call sounds so familiar to us humans, even those of us who are not chicken obsessives, because we are ground predators. So what we think of as “normal chicken sounds” say less about what chickens normally do, and more about the fact that we’re there, and they’re keeping an eye on us.

Chickens make at more than twenty four different calls (check out some of them on this very interesting video), which are not only referential (“aerial predator” “food” and so on) but are uttered differently depending on who’s listening and what’s going on. In fact, they can be quite machiavellian, deliberately “lying” (for instance, some males make a food call to attract females when there’s no food to be had – though since chickens can recognise and remember up to 100 individuals, this is not a good long term strategy!) They are pretty cunning too. In a recent article in Scientific American K-Lynn Smith and Sarah Zielinski explain how researchers resolved a problem: why do roosters frequently call out a warning about a passing hawk even when this might attract the hawk’s attention and put the rooster himself at risk. They found that roosters are very strategic. For instance, they observe that “a male calls more often if he is safe under a bush and his rival is out in the open, at risk of being picked off by a swooping predator. If the rooster is lucky, he will protect his girl, and another guy will suffer the consequences”.

To sum up, chickens are smarter than humans usually think (if not always nice), and humans… well, humans are ground predators.

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mccnmatt

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June 6, 2014

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Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, chicken diet, Garden trees, Ornamental gardens, Plants and what I know about them, Plants that attract wildlife, Seasons

The liquidambar feast

So much excitement over such tiny seeds (or more accurately, in terms that will never be used in an up-market menu, even after the zombie apocalypse: “abortive seeds resembling sawdust“). Check out the mucky faces of these lorikeets. The yellow tailed black cockatoos love them too. At first, there’s just the occasional thump of the prickly round fruits hitting the deck, as if there’s a poltergeist at work. Then you hear a rustling overhead and a plaintive mewing, like a kitten stuck up the tree.

Don Burke doesn’t like liquidambar: they have thirsty roots that will choke your pipes and lift your pavers. But the 20 metre tree at our place shades us and our epiphytes in summer, lights up the yard in autumn, and by May, let the scraps of winter sun that makes it over the hill slide in through our front windows. The piles of fallen leaves get kicked up by the kids, scratched through by the chooks and dumped under the trees as easy if messy mulch. With my pro-native plant prejudices I wouldn’t have planted it, and if the sewage pipe backs up I’ll come to hate it, but it’s easy to love a deciduous tree.

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June 5, 2014

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Animal senses, Backyard chickens, Gardening, Vernacular architecture

Three reasons to install garden seating

Garden seating: why bother?

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May 15, 2014

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Animal senses, Backyard chickens, natural history, Possums, Recycling

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Twilight of the Chickens

Jeez, chickens go to bed early. I’m outside getting the washing, and ok, it’s heading towards dusk, but not only can I see the location of my smalls, visibility’s so good I can even spot and dodge the brush turkey doings as I go. But the chooks are already tucked up in their palatial quarters, or in the case of Snowball (pictured above), having a nap in an elevated position while waiting to be eaten.

So, twilight is more complicated than you might think, and I’m not talking about the teen vampire series. Apparently it comes in three types. As the sun first sinks, there’s civil twilight. Technically, that’s when the centre of the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon – in good weather you can still see the things around you (say, your knickers on the line, or an inconvenient pile of guano). Then, after about 20 minutes, more (as you get closer to the poles) or less (closer to the equator), you have nautical twilight. The sun is 12 degrees below the horizon now, and if you’re a sailor, you can take a bearing on the stars with the horizon still visible. If you forgot to pick sweet potato greens before sundown, you’re rummaging around in the cupboard for a torch.

After nautical twilight comes astronomical twilight, with the sun 18 degrees below the horizon. To an untutored eye it might appear as if night has finally arrived, but impatient astronomers wanting to check out nebulae will be still pacing up and down waiting for full dark. Of course, you won’t get the full sequence come the summer in Trondheim (civil twilight from sunset to sunrise), Glasgow (nautical twilight for most of the darker hours) or even London (astronomical twilight all night long, even without throwing in the orange glow of light pollution).

I find this orderly taxonomy of darkening moments curiously soothing, an effect only slightly diminished on reading that nerdy acronyms like EENT (end evening nautical twilight) aren’t just used by meteorologists and astronomers to document the passing days and track the movements of the stars, but also in military campaigns to synchronise watches.

But all this is from a human point of view. For chickens, it’s different.

If possums have got pretty dud typical mammalian dichromate vision, chickens are rocking their cones. Not just three sets of cones like us, but five, including one that enables them to see ultraviolet light and a double cone for detecting motion. And “cellular sunglasses”: an oil-drop to filter particular wavelengths of light.

But wait! There’s more! Chickens also have, in essence, a third eye. Okay, not as visible as parietal eyes of Tuataras and other less famous reptiles (and related organs in the eyes of other tetrapods – like the receptor that looks like a little blue pimple between this critter’s eyes).

But still, a pineal gland perched up just under skull that receives enough light to regulate sleep and trigger annual reproductive cycles. Extremely cool. Perhaps too cool for some. While researching this post, I noticed, right underneath a webpage spelling out the multidimensional excellence of chicken vision, an advertisement for eye surgery.”Replace tired and baggy eyes with a younger look!”. Presumably the reader, ruminating dolefully on the superiority of the avian retina and the failings of human sight, is primed for this kind of thing.

But perhaps we humans shouldn’t be so grim about our drab colour vision, our tediously symmetrical pair of eyes. At the very least the time our mammalian ancestors spent cowering in a burrow while the dinosaurs strode the earth gave us respectable night vision. We can revel in our fine array of twilights while the shutters come down with a clang at the end of the day for our long time companions.

Okay, The Twilight of the Chickens may not have the apocalyptic ending of the Ragnarøkkr, the Twilight of the Gods. The rivalry between Treasure and Shyla over who gets the highest perch in the upcycled coop doesn’t have the same Wagnerian grandeur as Odin’s battle to the death with the wolf Fenrir. But pleasingly, even the Norse myths have a place for chooks: the end of days is heralded by the crowing of a crimson rooster, a golden rooster, and a rust red rooster. I must tell Andy Ninja.

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April 25, 2014

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Anthropomorphism, Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, pecking order

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Cliff hanger on Chicken TV

“Who are these people? And why are they eating my breakfast?”

Last night we moved the young’uns out of the veggie garden and into the chicken run. At dusk, I found them wandering disconsolately around the spot where the coop had been the day before, scratching out symbols in the mulch in an attempt to reverse the invisibility spell that had obviously been performed on their living quarters. Having sorted out that problem, I made a late breaking decision to grab Snowball from her highly exposed roost and throw her in with the others.

Public holiday sleep-in abandoned, I was up at dawn to watch the next gripping episode of “Chicken TV”. Who would be new Top Chook: Andy Ninja or the feisty contender, Treasure the Light Sussex? How would Snowball react after her night sleeping with strangers? Could there be peace between the two clans, or would blood be spilled?

Major turn-up in the pecking-order stakes: Treasure not only monstered little Snowball, but had Andy on the backfoot as well. The two veterans, driven together in a “spirit of the blitz”, paced up and down while the two most brazen of the new girls muscled in on brekkie. We took 2 weeks to train the older chooks to use the foot-pedal feeder: it took Shyla the Australorp about 10 minutes.

So much for getting the new birds for Andy’s mental health – she spent much of the afternoon in her usual haunts in the front garden, on her own or in the company of one of the brush turkeys. Snowball hung with the young team for a while, but it looks like it was a one-night stand in the coop – she’s back on her “fox appetiser” roost this evening. So I guess Chicken TV is the poultry Home and Away: mostly about the triumphs of good looking teenagers.

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April 23, 2014

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Animal senses, Backyard chickens, Death

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A sentimental chicken recalls the good old days

From a sentimental chicken remembers the good old days

Long ago, Andy Ninja the ISA Brown laid an egg a day, regular as clockwork. The laundry, attached to the back of the house, was her chosen spot. The eggs started appearing on the tiled floor, so we put out a straw-filled cardboard box, to stop breakages if nothing else. For Snowball the Silkie bantam to lay, everything had to be just right: clear blue skies, light yet refreshing breezes, no interruptions to routine or uproar of any kind. She is a right diva. Looking around at the picnic-perfect weather and hearing some self-satisfied cackling you might well figure that she had done the business, but you then have to find the damn things before they started to rot. If you successfully track down her hidey hole she immediately looks for a more private and profoundly inaccessible location.

But you could set your watch by Andy and her much missed sister Harley as they hopped up the back steps on their daily mission. I used to joke that the only way of making egg collection more convenient would be to put an egg carton next to the washing machine and get them to lay directly into it.

Sadly, those days are well behind us. Harley succumbed to some nasty bite or bug and, after a few months of laying soft-shelled eggs, Andy stopped producing eggs over a year ago. No amount of shellgrit or other calcium-enhancing pampering seemed to toughen those babies up. I guess it was the beginning of “the change”.

Despite her recent “transition” from egg-laying stalwart to quasi-cockerel who crows at dawn, Andy still seems to have a soft spot for the laundry.

She loiters on the steps while waiting for her breakfast to be delivered, but when she’s fed, she’s there again, trying to sneak past me while I’m filling the front-loader. She’ll settle in a corner near the sink, fluff out her feathers and hunker down in position that says “I’ve got some serious egg laying to do”. Given half a chance, she’ll roost in there at night as well. Here’s her, shut out, roosting on the next best thing: the back doorstep.

The laundry probably is a cut above the other dry and sheltered places to bunk down for the night, at least until Palm Beach, the new coop, is open to the general public. But I wonder if she goes there because she hankers after the good old days when she was Andy the regular layer, top chook in the pecking order, Andy the laundry ninja.