Been a while, so let's go. Grab a drink, and get ready for today's
I don't remember when it was, the last report. All I really remember is that I talked about the chick that lose all her feathers. Well, I am happy to say that she regained her feathers after 3 whole months being naked. Oh, now I remember that was about one year ago, my partner was worrying that she wouldn't grow them in time for the cold weather. She did. Now she went from being baldie to being plushie. She's a cute little "sapa" chicken. They call them like that, small little midget chickens. They have short legs which makes them walk funny, they are also smaller than usual. Anyway, her mother, the older sapa, she died. She was the first one that came out. She got sick and died after three days. Doctor says it was parasites but I think I took too long to check her. Anyway, I liked that chicken. There is another sapa in the family, I don't remember who had this chicken (and the eggs always end up getting getting mixed anyway), this one is white. The nice thing about these chickens is that because they have a hard time walking about, they stay close to home all the time.
This year I decided I wanted less chickens, not more. And I also only wanted small chickens. I have succeeded in having small chickens. But right now I have way too many chickens and ducks and I am already thinking of who's meeting the pan next. I have two curros, hen and rooster. The hen had 4 little chicks this month, we're trying to look after them.
A non-chicken but related news is the arrival of a perro, indeed, a собака found his way to our homes and to our hearts. A funny little viejito who one day just... showed up. Anyway it's related because he seems to be doing a good job taking care of the chickens. But not the ducks. Funny, before he arrived, chickens would regularly get eaten, but not ducks. Now it's the other way around.
A duck had 4 ducklings this month, too, and they all disappeared. First off, she is a bad mother. In the nights she would fly to a high spot to sleep in which time the babies were at large with their older brothers. Those brothers like to go about all night long. We could hear them calling each other in the nights and each night there was one less duckling. It was a sad thing.
Another chicken got kids of her own. They're going along, one of them has a nice hairdo.
This means I have a lot of chickens and ducks now, and I really need to start reducing their ranks. I want to get rid of the curro because he's a bit aggressive with the other rooster, and my partner doesn't like him, too. We have another male who has recently started singing. He looks really nice because he's got a kind of beard and shiny feathers, and he's been growing some white ones on the neck. I don't know what I'll do of him, he's rather big, but I have to eat his two brothers first, so this one gets to stick around for a while.
Oh, we are also in the process of making brooding apartments for the chickens. The curra had her chicks at the foot of the firewood stove, so we are building a similar space for them in their corral, with cement and bricks. I've been working cement this whole summer, but this is the first time I do an actual brick wall (I've been using stone and sticking mostly to making floors), and it looks... well, crappy. But this is the kind of experience that I need to build better structures later on for myself, and anyway they'll have a nice little house later on.
I'm also building the lab, but I guess that goes beyond the scope of the chicken report, maybe a... ferment report? probably not. But it relates to chickens at least in that I'll be using that excess chicken fence to keep them out. Indeed, that place was used for germinating seeds a long time ago... until the chickens I brought (the very first generation of chickens we had) would wreck havoc inside it.
Despite how fun it is, writing these chickens reports, it comes to my attention how much my idea of bringing chickens to the household has caused my partner nothing but distress, with a few eggs every now and then. I don't know, maybe I am a bit selfish having brought chickens?
Well, that is all for today's report, hopefully sometime before a whole year passes I'll come with more updates.