Well it's taken months but Princess Layer now hangs around with the other chickens, AND she started laying eggs in the middle of September. Tiny little eggs, mind you - smaller than when Cacciatore first started laying. I found the first one on the ground and since then she has been laying steadily, and in the coop.
Snowy is being broody again but I thought I would take advantage of her broodiness this time and get her to do some parenting, since I had a rooster fertilizing my eggs. I don't know for SURE if they are fertilized, having not seen a blastoderm in the eggs, but I'll assume that they are since he does his business a few times a day.
However, the crowing at 545 am was getting to me. Before the neighbours started complaining and I got nasty letters from the council, I decided to adopt him out to someone at work, whose father said he would take in my rooster.
So I took Luke down to the farm (he has a dairy farm) and there were plenty of ladies there to keep him busy, as well as only one rooster to compete with. So, I think he will be doing quite well there. The kids said their last goodbyes to him and they gave me the Spanish Inquisition treatment at the end of the day, asking about the farm he went to and whether they could visit.
As to my rodent situation...
After weeks of not catching a THING, I had left the trap empty and open with no food in it (peanut butter didn't work), there was something trapped in there last week. The worst part was that the rodent caught was NOT the one that I had seen running around the yard - this was a mouse. And it was dead - or so I thought. As I went to empty the cage it twitched, but when I put it on the ground to examine, the next door neigbour's dog had his nose to the fence and sniffed it, so I let him sniff it some more, then went to get a plastic bag to dispose of the mostly dead rodent, when ZHOOM! Out sprang a paw from under the fence, trapping the mouse, and then slowly dragging it back to his side of the fence. I was too surprised to stop him - who knew that big paw could get under that tiny bit of exposed fence!
I reset the trap, but did not expect that there would be a victim the next day! This time it was the rat that I had seen frequenting my yard, and unfortunately it was very much alive. I had to dispose of it, which seemed pointless after going to all the effort to trap it humanely. So we killed it and disposed of it and I reset the trap again. Hopefully there will be no more rodents, but there were 2 when I thought I had one, so no doubt there are more there... somewhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment