Category: aminals.

aminals. family.

doggy broke. so’s the owner.

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Doggie #2 of 4 has a hematoma on his ear flap. Taping down the ear to prevent him from shaking it didn’t work, and the hematoma has increased in size. So I’m about to take him to the vet again, which will make my third vet visit in four days. He will likely need a surgical drain & staple procedure, which runs about the price of a new iPad these days.

For Christmas, everyone is getting a dozen chicken eggs this year. Maybe there’ll be enough left in the till to buy the kids a copy of “101 Fun Games With Perishable Ovoids”.

aminals. castle frostbite. food and drink.

eggs!

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Araucanas are sometimes called “Easter eggers” because they lay pastel blue-green eggs. (Notice the size differences in this batch. They’re still adjusting their dispensing units.)

The eggs from our hens taste better than the store-bought ones. The yolks are darker and more flavorful. It’s been a fair amount of work and effort, but it’s nice to have locally-sourced eggs. And by “locally”, I mean “from the chicken coop across our driveway.”

aminals. castle frostbite.

the first return on our avian investment.

Behold! The first egg from our little flock of laying hens.

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When I factor in the cost for the flock, the feed, the labor, and that deluxe chicken house and run, that egg is worth about three grand.

aminals. castle frostbite. new hampshah. this monkey house.

cluckheim calls for aid.

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The new patio, pieced together from leftover granite and marble countertop pieces.

A little while ago I was out on the new patio area, putting together some planters and trinkets the wife had ordered for the new outdoor space. As I was screwing together the driftwood planter, I heard the characteristic “red alert” bawk-bawk-bawking of panicked chickens. I dropped my tools and sprinted through the covered porch and into the front yard, thinking that a weasel or fox had gotten into Cluckheim Keep despite our iron-clad security setup.

As I ran into the front yard with the shotgun, I saw the cause for the chicken distress swoop out of the sky and hit the chicken run a second time: a buzzard, almost as big as one of our Barred Rock hens (and they are large birds.) He flew off and settled on a tree branch at the edge of the yard.

I brought up the Remington and put the front sight bead on him. It would have been an easy shot, maybe twenty-five yards, a no-brainer with a full choke on a sitting bird.

He just looked at me and the chicken coop as if to say Screw you and your boomstick, hairless ape.

I turned the gun over to the hillside for a safe backstop and let off a shell to scare him off. He looked, spread his wings, and flew off in no particular hurry, as if he knew that he’s a protected species. (Not that I would have shot him even if he wasn’t—they eat rodents and other pests and are way too beautiful to kill, and the chickens are safe from him in the run in any case.)

In summary: birds of prey are beautiful, everything out here in the woods eats chickens, and a solid run enclosed in half-inch hardware cloth is a chicken’s best friend in these parts.

aminals. castle frostbite. friends. new hampshah.

weekend recap.

My old school friend Joerg stopped by for the weekend. He is on a business trip to Ontario, and he had the time to visit with us for two days, so I did my best to play New Hampshire Chamber of Commerce. On Saturday, I took him for a drive down to southern NH (with a stopover at Chez Vachon in Manchester for a poutine lunch), and on Sunday we just relaxed at the house and caught up on stuff over good food and a fair amount of flavored ethanol.

(Joerg was my desk neighbor in high school, which means I’ve known him for almost thirty years. When we were driving around, I asked him if that means we’re getting old, and he emphatically rejected the notion.)

The kids were out of the house all day yesterday. Trusted friends of ours took their grandkids to Water Country for the day, and they asked if our two wanted to tag along, which they did. So we had a quiet house yesterday, which was actually a little unnerving.

Thanks for all the kind words and condolences regarding our Miss Guinevere. She will come home in an urn early this week at some point. It’s still strange not to see her come into the kitchen at feeding time, or walk by her corner where she usually napped under a blanket and not see her snoozing there. But it was her time, she was in horrible pain, and in the end, we did her a kindness.

This morning I’ve already sent my friend on his way back over to Ontario for a fun week of business meetings. Now I get to put away laundry, clean the house again for tomorrow’s play date, and get a thousand words or so in on the work in progress. I KNOW, THE GLAMOUR, RIGHT?

Oh, and we humans put a nuclear-powered car on Mars last night. How cool is that? Science—it works.

aminals. castle frostbite.

guinevere, 1997-2012.

Our elderly dachshund Guinevere, the matriarch of the clan, has had health problems for the last few years due to the pancreatitis she gave herself by raiding too many garbage cans. In the last few months, her health took a nose dive, and her quality of life deteriorated. She slept most of the day, skipped many of her meals, couldn’t control her hind legs well, had trouble navigating even small stairs, and often seemed confused and dazed. We considered taking her to the vet for that last trip then, but she seemed to bounce back a little. The vet examined her, concluded that she had had some sort of neural event—stroke, maybe—and told us that we were basically down to palliative care for her.

Today was the day we had been dreading for a while. She got up, refused her food, went back to her bed and spent the morning alternating between crying in obvious pain and walking around the house on failing hind legs. It was a heartbreaking sight, and we decided that she had no quality of life left. So I let her take one last nap with me on the bed upstairs while I said good-bye. Then Robin came home from work to put her into the car and take her for that last drive to the vet, to render her dog of almost fifteen years that last service. Guinevere is no longer in pain.

This dog was the most magnificent example of her breed I have ever met. Super-smart, stubborn, combative, yet loving and loyal. She gave birth to seventeen puppies and lived to her last day with three of them, plus one granddog, as the boss of a happy little pack. She raided many trashcans, fought many battles—against other dogs, poultry, small furry critters, and once even a fully-grown raccoon—and never backed down from a fight.

I always said she was too tough and mean to die, but of course I was wrong. The fight against her ailing older body was the one battle she couldn’t win in the end. We will miss her dearly, none more than Robin, who took her home as a little puppy in 1997, and who has been her companion for almost fifteen years. Guinevere vetted me for the position of mate for her human when I met Robin, and she has been a part of my life for ten years, but she was my wife’s dog first and always.

Farewell, Miss Guin, Battle-Bitch, destroyer of trash receptacles, eater of lobster shells, implacable foe of furry wildlife. You’ve had a good and full life, and the house won’t quite be the same without you to guard it.

aminals. castle frostbite.

the return of rocky raccoon.

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Surprisingly, raccoons are actually #1 on the list of top chicken predators. They have a lot of dexterity in those front paws, they’re smart enough to figure out barrel bolt locks and other simple locks, and they’re pretty strong for an animal their size.

One of his cousins fell to our dachshunds three years ago. Maybe this one’s a relative looking for compensation for Cousin Bob’s untimely departure. Regardless, our poultry version of Supermax Florence ADX seems to have him stymied.

aminals. castle frostbite.

smile! you’re on candid camera!

We bought a weatherproof wildlife camera to record visitors to the chicken coop, just to see what’s out there trying to score a free chicken dinner. I set it up on Sunday and set it so the camera goes off whenever the sensor detects motion. I checked the flash card every day, and usually it only shows us as we let the chickens out in the morning and feed them.

Today I checked it to find our first nocturnal would-be chicken thief:

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Mr. Raccoon!

He stuck around for a while and checked the perimeter of the run until about twenty minutes later, when he scampered off without loot:

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I can look at the sequence of pictures and see where he tried to dig into the run, but failed because of the two feet of hardware cloth skirted and staked down in front of the run. There’s no damage on the coop or the run anywhere. It appears half-inch hardware cloth is too much to tackle for your garden variety midnight bandit.

Interesting little toy, that wildlife camera. It’s nice to know just what exactly lurks around that chicken coop in the middle of the night.