We had another night of severe storms, with forecasted winds of up to 55 mph. After the chicken tractor went aloft in the last windstorm, we modified it by shortening the tarp providing shade and cover on top; the result was that less than a quarter of it remained covered. There’s no way that thing could take off again.
Wrong. We were using it to house our “extra” roosters, and were flabbergasted this morning to realize that it had moved several feet from its original location. Of the original 10, only 1 cockerel remained inside. When we went looking for the others, it became clear from the body count that something, either a coyote or fox, had massacred the cockerels that had escaped when the tractor was lifted by the wind. A couple of them had been eaten, but most had just been killed and left where they lay. We didn’t find a couple, but the piles of feathers is a clear clue that they were likely victims of the predator, too. Continue reading “More Weather Mayhem”
Yesterday was the 20th day of incubation for the Muscovy eggs in our incubator. We’ve been turning them 3 times a day by hand (even though the incubator has an autoturner), manually cooling once a day (even though the machine has an autocooling feature customizable for waterfowl), and misting with water daily. Are you wondering why we would choose the manual route when the incubator could do everything except the misting for us?
Can you believe that the rabbit kits are nearly 8 weeks old now? It was looking crowded in the kindling cages – there were 20 babies, after all – so we built two additional tractors this weekend. These are tractors number 4 and 5, and we made minor modifications to improve on the original design; specifically, reducing the width slightly to allow for a larger roof overhang (we get good storms out here). It’s all about continuous improvement!
Construction never seems to go quite as planned. We encountered the typical twisted lumber issues; even better, we discovered a roll of cage wire had a major defect (a gap where it was missing wire) that wasn’t visible until we had wrapped more than half the tractor and secured it with screws. Rather than undo it all to take the wire back, we patched it and continued on. It was a bad surprise, though, meriting choice expletives. 
Incubated eggs: batch #3 hatching is complete, with just one late hatcher left in the incubator. The chick in the photo was an unassisted hatch, but we noticed that one leg splayed out a bit, so we taped his/her legs together with a piece of bandage to help the leg straighten out. The late hatcher clearly needed some assistance, but we wanted to provide every opportunity for the chick to emerge on his or her own. When we did intervene, we began by partly opening the egg (last night) to see if s/he could kick out; when we checked this morning, s/he was still in the same position in the partial shell.