KDailey's Journal

[KDailey]

Hey y'all! It's been a while. lol.

Well Ryan left tuesday for Peru, Illinois to work for a week but he'll be gone 9 days. So far he says its really boring. Poor guy.

So that leaves me to do all the chores by myself and when you're used to the man of the house doing pretty much everything, it's quite the shocker when you finally have to do it all by yourself.

Feeding and watering all the chickens and rabbits was no biggy, we share that chore. But feeding the horses is a different story. He gives them their hay and I give them their grain. Now let me tell you, these are some of the biggest square bales we've ever had, I'm talkin huge! I can barely get them off the ground a few inches let alone carry them anywhere. So Ryan set up the hay so that all I had to do was pull up our yellow utility wagon and push the square bale off the top of the stack and it would land in the wagon and I would be able to get it to the horses.

So I pull the wagon up next to the stack, position it below the bale that I'm going to push off, climb up the 6 foot stack and push the bale off. Unfortunately I went with it..... I must have fallen just right though because I'm not sore or even bruised. How you fall 6 feet and not get a bruise somewhere, I don't know, but I did it. Needless to say, I'll be pulling the bales down now instead of getting on top and pushing....

Last night was the poultry/rabbit sale in Louisianna. I usually wouldn't go without Ryan but our neighbors (who got me into chickens) were going so I decided to head that way at the last minute and take 2 rabbits that I don't need. I've decided to stick with the smaller breed rabbits and these two are pretty large.

I couldn't believe the number of hatching eggs, chicks, ducklings and baby bunnies that were there last night! The sale starts at 5:00pm and they always start with the eggs and baby animals first. We didn't get to the adult chickens and rabbits until 9:00pm!! And it usually takes another 2-3 hours to get through with the adults animals! Of course since I got there late my rabbits were at the very back of the sale and would be some of the last animals to sell. I have to drive almost 2 hours to get to the sale so I was going to be really late getting back home. Thankfully the birds I wanted to buy were relatively close to the beginning of the adult birds so after they sold I was able to get some friends I made up there the first time I went to get the money for my rabbits for me and I'll get it from them next week. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to drive home or I would fall asleep while driving and it just isn't worth it.

My purchases included:
54 ducklings
8 1-day-old barnyard mix chicks
10 older chicks (black australop and unknown whites)
12 black silkie hens
1 blue silkie hen
2 black silkie roosters
1 blue silkie rooster
1 harlequin dutch doe bunny
1 ? buck bunny
3 dozen barnyard mix hatching eggs
1 dozen Welsummer hatching eggs (really super dark!)
2 small jars of pickled chicken eggs

Unfortunately I did not have a box for all the ducklings so we had a bit of a delima. They did have an extra box laying around but it wasn't tall enough to keep them all in so I put the box inside one of my wire cages and hoped they would stay in. (The holes are just big enough that the smaller ducks could get out if they really wanted, this is inside my truck in the backseat.) I'm driving down the road and about 20 minutes into the drive I hear peeping coming from the front passenger side floorboard. I pull over and turn on my cargo light and there are 5 little ducklings sittin down there! I look in the backseat and the ducklings are scattered all over!

I put them all back and hope they're ok till I get home. I'm pretty sure I got them all out when I got home and I didn't hear any peeping in the truck this morning on the way to work so I'm sure that's a good sign. lol.

If it will ever stop raining here I'll get out and clean up the coop and move out the older chicks that are just about completely feathered and move all the new babies into the coop. But it doesn't look like it's going to stop any time soon. :/

I also need to move all the silkies to the proper pen.

 

[autumnprairie]

sounds like you had a really good time. I might try and go next year, I will need to know the where is it and stuff. Do they have a website?

 

[KDailey]

It's just a little local sale barn. They do it every friday night in Dequincy louisianna.

It seems like I sure do go a long time in between journal entries but I guess that means I have more to tell when I do write. lol.

Tootsie the calf is doing fine. She's eating some calf starter now as well as her milk. We've moved her to a bigger pen where she can run and play better.

The ducks are growing soooo fast! That first week we lost a couple of the runts. The smaller ones seem to get trampled so we seperated the smaller ones until they were bigger and not so fragile. Now that they are getting more feathers we've been allowing them some play time on the pond while we feed and water everybody else. They're soooo cute! They follow me to the pond running as fast as their little legs can go and just a hollerin! The play in the pond anywhere from 10-15 minutes and then they put themselves right back in the pen.

Unfortunately, the other day when I let them out to play and they came back up to the pen I noticed that two of them were acting really really strange. They were flopping over and acting like they couldn't stand up and rolling their heads back like their necks were made of jelly or something. I let the rest of the ducks back out so these two wouldn't get trampled, hoping they could regain their feet. I thought maybe they had drank too much water becuase their crops were huge so I held them upside down so some of the water would drain back out. This has helped on a few ducklings before. One of the ducklings seemed to be better after that but the other one just wasn't acting right. Within minutes it was dead while the other one completely recovered.

I went to get the rest of the ducklings and now I notice that there are three more just floating dead in the pond and the rest are swimming really fast out to the middle of the pond. Now I should explain that the ducklings never never ever leave the this one shallow spot on the pond. They go just far enough out that they can duck and dive under but never any further. So i knew something was really wrong.

Ryan went around to the pond dam to try and get the dead ducklings out of the water and when he did all of a sudden he jumped back and hollered, "Snake!" He couldn't get a good enough look at it to tell what exactly it was but it was swimming in the water really close to where my ducklings usually are. We're assuming it was a water moccasin because it was greyish black and in the water. Ryan grabbed a hoe and ran back to where he saw it hoping he could kill it but it was gone.

The best we can figure, the snake must have a nest or something on the pond dam and the ducklings got too close. That's all we can think of to explain why so many were killed. We got the rest of the ducklings back in their pen and didn't let them back out for several days but we eventually had to start letting them out again because the pen is getting too small for them as much as they've grown. The plan has always been to let them stay on the pond as soon as they had enough feathers. So far there hasn't been another attack but Ryan keeps a look out for the snake just in case he can get a chance to kill it or find it's nest.

On happier terms, I'm starting to get lots of eggs from my chickens. This is my first spring with chickens so I haven't gotten many eggs up until now. I also bought out a guy that was selling some really nice old english game bantams. There's a pen of Wheatens and a pen of Fawn Duckwing and they are gorgeous and very friendly! My cochins are giving me at least 4 eggs a day and I get as many as 6 a day from the OEGBs.

I also have a broody Fawn Duckwing hen and I am ecstatic! I've only had one broody hen before and she was really young, barely even laying, and she quit the nest while we were out of town and we weren't able to take the eggs and put them in the incubator in time and the sitter didn't know any better. This hen seems really super serious though so hopefully she'll do good. She has 3 OEGB eggs and 2 cochin eggs.

Ryan finally found himself a horse that is broke to ride and that I approve of conformationally. He has the worst taste in horses. He'll pick every single nag in a herd of beautifully built horses. If it weren't for the fact that we ride a lot and the horse needs to be built for performing I'd let him buy whichever horse he wanted. The horse is a 10yo bay paso fino gelding and is actually a little short for Ryan but he's well behaved and built nice. Plus ryan really needs a gentle horse to build his confidence on. If that means the horse is a little to short then that's ok. When he is more confident in his riding abilities then we'll worry about height and a little less about temperament.

Also....... We have baby bunnies!!! They were unexpected but ohhh so cute! They were born Thursday.

Here's mama, black/white dutch. She's not correctly patterned but I was told I might get some correct babies breeding her with this buck

Here's daddy, a dutch harlequin and a real sweetie

And the bun buns! There are two black/white dutch. One looks exactly like mama bunny and one looks like it's pretty correct. Then there are two orange/black harlequin, they have a lot more of the black on them than daddy which I'm quite pleased with. Then we have one that looks like it's just going to be orange dutch. Then last but not least is the mystery bun. It's not black/white, it's not harlequin, and it's darker than the orange dutch. I'm not sure what color it will be. It's the one at the very bottom of the picture. Any guesses?

 

[Queen Mum]

My goodness. What a lot of fuzzless bunnies.