farm missives

Vigilante Farm, that leading Bethel producer of agricultural whimsy, is pleased to announce that it has expanded rabbit production yet again. I am now running what rabbit breeders call a nineteen hole operation. That is, I have nineteen rabbit cages of varying sizes, each containing an average of about three rabbits.

I have, however, gone from a six doe operation to a four or five doe operation, what with the demise of Alice and the questionable reproductive status of Claudette. Both of these does are contemporaries of the infamous Sister Mary Bertha, the Rabbit That Wouldn’t.

Alice died two weeks before her last litter (perhaps her 12th litter altogether?) was due to be weaned, but those young rabbits never missed a beat. Claudette has taken to planting her tail firmly on the deck when in the presence of Bucko, which could mean one of two things:

1. She could be letting us know that she is done breeding; after all, we’re approaching the end of her third year of breeding, and one generally gets two or three breeding seasons out of a doe.

2. She could simply be too heavy to breed, which condition I can remedy with short rations; this was not an option as long as she was sharing a cage with some of her recent litter, thus the need for the new cages.

The pigs now have the run of the entire pig pen. Until a week or so ago I was keeping them out of the portion I was using for a garden, but we have finally harvested and processed my spinach and beets and given up on my radishes. Radishes are just about the easiest thing to grow, but if you never get around to thinning them out, then they never get around to turning their little roots into radishes.

The pigs are digging up an impressive bunch of rocks there. Was I really able to grow stuff with all those rocks in the soil?

I may have mentioned the pleasures of giving raw eggs (out of date, non-sellable raw eggs) to pigs. In fact, this is an excellent beer sport. Last week I was doing exactly that with my friend Dave, when one of the pigs happened to put her feet in the trough. I yelled, “Get your feet out of there!” and the pig did just that. Another pig put her feet in the trough, but obeyed rapidly when I shouted, “Feet out!”

My, wasn’t Dave impressed by being in the presence of trained pigs! Well, I had trained them (with the help of a stout stick) to keep their feet out, because while a pig will happily eat pelleted food, it will not eat dry powdered food, which is exactly what happens to pellets when trampled on by hoofs. Then, too, you have to remember where those pigs have been walking.

I went off to feed other animals, but heard Dave occasionally tell the pigs to get their feet out of the trough. The pigs, however, paid him no mind whatsoever, and this bothered Dave. I consoled him with a quote from Will Rogers along the lines of “If you ever get to thinking that you’re important, try telling somebody else’s dog what to do.” Apparently the same principle applies to pigs.

I recently visited an emu farm in Massachusetts, one with upwards of 200 emus. I spent an enjoyable three hours talking with the emu farmer and came away with a number of useful tidbits of information. Here’s one: emus should be fed free choice. That is, they should always have food available to them, for if they do, they will actually eat less. It seems that once they see the bottom of their feeder, they panic and gobble, as if to make sure that they are the ones to get the last bit of food.

Remember the gasoline shortages of the late seventies? Remember the people who lined up for hours to fill their tanks that were already 3/4 full? Seems like the same sort of panic to me.

Paulette, my original girl goat, stopped eating the other day. This is a serious matter with a goat, for unless you can get its rumen operating again, it will starve. This is more or less what happened to Roscoe, so on the two occasions since then when Paulette had stopped eating, I had intervened quickly with a shot (intramuscular) of vitamin B complex and a mixture of mint tea, yogurt and yeasty beer applied orally with a turkey baster, all on the advice of my vet, and it worked.

This time, however, I had no beer, so I went with the shot, the mint tea and the yogurt. When Paulette hadn’t responded by nightfall, I was concerned. When she still wasn’t eating the next morning, I was very concerned. I hustled up some beer from a home brewing buddy, gave Paulette the complete treatment, and she was fine within an hour.

What I gather from this is that of the four components of this treatment, beer is one of the essential components. I could, I suppose, “separate the variables” by omitting, say, the mint tea or the yogurt and see what happens in their absence. Such an experiment would be unnecessarily tough on my goat, though, so I probably won’t do it.

Still, I cannot help but feel that the two essential components are a shot and a beer.

Scott

Vigilante Farms, that leading Bethel producer of bizarre livestock facts, is pleased to announce the result of the experiment promised yesterday. That is, would a chicken placed in a barrel full of maggots be an ecstatic chicken or a grossed out chicken?

The first hen I placed in there was a broody hen, selected purely because she was so much easier to catch than a hen that is walking around in the yard. She not only did not eat the maggots, but she stood erect the entire time she was in the barrel, not even bending over to inspect the delicious maggots.

Well, maybe she wasn’t hungry? Broody hens don’t appear to eat much; a setting emu goes for 50 days without eating, so maybe broody hens don’t have much of an appetite. Thus, I set about catching one of the hens-at-large and repeated the experiment. Same result. Didn’t even want to put her head down.

So, were these chickens grossed out by the maggots? I doubt it. I think they were grossed out by the smell of the decaying rabbit parts that occasioned the maggots in the first place. Things smelled pretty bad over that trash can, which is as close as I got to the decaying rabbits. I imagine it was much worse in the barrel.

To separate the variables, I could scoop out a pint or two of maggots and put them in a fresh barrel, one with no dead anything in it, and drop a chicken into that. OK, that’s on the list of things to do, but it is nowhere near the top of that list.

You know how a dog, once it comes out of a lake, likes to come over to you and shake itself off? You tend to get both wet and upset but, after all, it is just lake water. Just as dogs like to swim in a lake on a hot day, so do pigs like to wallow in mud on a hot day. Now, “mud” is a charitable description of the aqueous mixture one finds in a pig pen. I learned today that if I am nearby, at least some pigs will shake themselves off. Pigs don’t have loose hair and loose hide to help them to fling liquid, but those pig ears can fling a lot of stuff all over you, and that stuff ain’t lake water.

Scott

Vigilante Farms, that leading Bethel producer of, some day, emu burgers, is pleased to announce that the Btu barn is starting to become functional.

What function, you may ask? My soon-to-be-operational Btu barn is, as I may have mentioned, designed to store heat from diverse sources and to use that heat to keep the greenhouse beds from freezing in the winter. There is always surplus heat available in the top of a greenhouse on a sunny day, even in February, and I plan to capture that heat and store it in my large water tank. There is always plenty of heat in a compost pile, at least a fresh one, and I plan to gather that heat as well. Hey, I know a guy that used to take hot showers courtesy of a garden hose buried in a compost heap.

How does one fill a 6,000 gallon water tank, anyway? My well cannot handle Kathleen’s drip irrigation system and my shower at the same time, so I don’t want to try filling this tank with my well water. So, I plan to fill it with rain water. The roof on the Btu barn has about six times the footprint of the tank, so each inch of rainfall should add six inches to the level in the tank. It will take 120 inches to fill the tank, so I’ll need 20 inches of rainfall. Could take a while.

However, I cannot use that tank water directly in my circulation loop. The circulation loop may stop flowing on some cold day, through loss of electricity, so the circulation loop needs to have antifreeze in it. I cannot afford enough antifreeze to treat a 6,000 gallon tank, so my circulating water/antifreeze mix will flow through 100′ of copper tubing deployed within the 6,000 gallon tank. A big old heat exchanger, if you will. A big old heat exchanger that had to be built inside the tank, by me, having crawled in through the manway, which is a large, flanged hole in the side of the tank with a cover that is secured by 24 bolts.

Yesterday, I crawled into that tank and built the heat exchanger, with Kathleen handing me stuff in through the manway. You see, getting myself in and out through the manway is, while possible, both difficult and awkward. Let me tell you, a translucent fiberglass tank baking in the sun on a hot day is a very hot place to spend much time. Fully half of the things I asked Kathleen to pass in to me were containers of drinking water.

Well, it’s done, and the manway is again securely covered, so the overflow from Kathleen’s rain barrel, located just beneath the gutter on the barn, now flows into the tank. I have now to finish the rest of the circulation loop, before winter. Plus the rest of the siding on the Btu barn.

Waste almost nothing - that’s the mantra of this Maine farmer. Though I am assured by the local fur merchant that rabbit hides have no value, I still save them for a local camp that teaches its campers, among other things, how to tan hides. Because rabbit brains are desirable to make the tanning fluid, I save the heads for them as well.

This might sound a bit macabre, but the alternative is to compost them, and neither heads nor hides compost all that quickly. You may recall that some critter has been known to take these hides and use them to plug up my culvert. Heads compost even more slowly. A couple of months ago, when I introduced this year’s pigs to my new, enlarged pig pen, one of my pig partners wondered what it was that the pigs had found on the ground to munch on; it turned out to be rabbit skulls, from the not-quite-complete compost I had spread on that pig pen late last year.

Recently came the day that I processed nine rabbits, and the camp counselor that taught tanning was nowhere to be found. So let’s make a special composter for these, said I, out of an old trash can. I put in some hay from the goat barn floor, then the rabbit heads, then more hay, the rabbit hides, more hay, an entire rabbit that had apparently succumbed to heat stroke, more hay, and a large scrap of concrete to keep critters out. I added some water to hasten the composting, put the trash can far enough away so that I needn’t notice its smell, and moved on to other things.

A week later Lyndsey and Mark, friends of mine from that camp, asked if I still had those hides. “Well, yes, I do, under this chunk of concrete in this trash can, but I don’t know what shape they’re in after a week. But, let’s find out.”

After a brief inspection, Lyndsey said, “Uh, Scott, are those maggots in there?” Turns out there were maggots in there, and plenty of them too, perhaps a quart of maggots. This is not good, because a quart of maggots could turn into a bushel of flies, and who needs that?

Without missing a beat, Lyndsey said, “I wonder if chickens might like to eat those maggots,” and scooped up a teaspoon or so of maggots and put them in the middle of the goat yard, where a dozen or so chickens ranged free. The chickens didn’t notice the maggots despite our enthusiastic pointing to same, so I scattered a cup of cracked corn around the maggots, which corn the chickens did notice. They set about quickly gathering up the cracked corn, one piece at a time, as they do every day.

Finally, one chicken noticed the maggots, and she set about gathering those maggots at maybe four times the speed at which she had been eating the cracked corn. That chicken got just about all of them before another chicken noticed.

Now Mark gathered up about a cup of maggots with a grain scoop and took them to a pen containing another dozen chickens. Along the way, he put his ear near the maggot scoop and observed that he could hear the maggots. Were it anybody but Mark, I’d have to doubt it, but sure enough, I could hear them too - sort of a crackling sound. Lyndsey confirmed it.

Now, when one flings a cup of maggots onto the ground, those maggots fill up a pretty large area, but it still took the first chicken a while to notice them. That chicken did not say, “Hey, gals, look what we’ve got here!” No, she set about eating them as fast as she could all by herself. Another chicken noticed and joined in, again without alerting any other chicken. One by one, they all joined in, but it took about a minute for them all to get on board.

We may be onto something here. Instead of turning rabbit hides into compost, try turning the rabbit hides instead into lots and lots of maggots, then feeding the maggots to chickens, and turning the chicken shit into compost. Same end result, but you get to feed your chickens for nothing along the way. Waste nothing, right?

Tomorrow, I intend to drop a chicken into the maggot barrel, and see what happens. I could get an ecstatic chicken, I could get a grossed out chicken. We’ll see.

Scott

Vigilante Farms, that leading Bethel producer of, for the moment, rabbits is pleased to announce that we’ll soon be eating grass fed heritage turkeys.

Wasn’t that the whole point of creating the turkey pasture over the past couple of years? Wasn’t that why all those trees were not only felled but disposed of as firewood, goat fodder and brushy fill? Wasn’t that why I kept five pigs there, to dig up rocks and fertilize the soil?

Yes, but - the numerous next generation of turkeys, which was to fill all that space, never really materialized. My turkey hens do lay plenty of eggs in the nesting boxes, alright, and they definitely do go broody - which is to say, they stop laying eggs and set on those eggs interminably, with as many as four hens crammed into a single nesting box - but all to no avail. From each nesting box eventually emerged the unmistakably foul odor of rotten egg, which led me to evict those setting hens. Once I did, I found fewer eggs than there once were, and those few that were there were filthy. Ah, well, compost.

I do have two young turkeys that have graduated from the brooder to the chicken tractor, from which they can see, through two layers of chicken wire, the chickens with whom they once shared the brooder. What with their limited ability to raise a brood, and their readiness to identify with chickens, it is little wonder to me that this is an endangered breed of turkey.

From their enclosed pen, my five adult hens and one remaining tom have watched “their” pasture raise its second lush crop of grass and clover. They have happily eaten whatever grass and clover I harvested from that pasture and tossed into their pen, but they must have lusted for the freedom to roam that pasture and eat whichever part of it they damn well wanted to. Yet, here they were, penned in an area in which nothing could grow, for the ground on which they walked was merely sand and rocks, all covered with trampled turkey droppings.

For me to allow them to enjoy the pasture, I needed some assurance that they would not fly out of it. This meant clipping wings - actually, one wing per bird, for if they cannot fly straight, they won’t fly, or so the story goes. Probably not too hard to do with young birds, but could I do it with adult turkeys? If you’ve ever been smacked in the face by a turkey’s wing, you know that this is something to be avoided; and if you are messing with their wings, why wouldn’t they smack you with them?

OK, we’ll let it be my job to catch and subdue the birds, and Kathleen’s job to snip off the ends of the feathers. Actually, one can cut off quite a lot of a fully grown feather - it won’t bleed. But how does one catch and subdue a turkey?

Catching a bird in an enclosed pen, where it cannot fly for long, is not all that hard. First, you maneuver the bird into a corner so that you can lunge for one leg; now, if you can read this message, then I assure you that you can outsmart a turkey enough to corner it. Once you have that one leg, you then have to ignore the frantic flapping of wings and find the other leg. A bird held upside down by both legs will calm down soon enough and, when it does, you just lay it upside down on your lap. At this point, I was pleased to discover, the turkey become essentially comatose and will not resist anyone messing with its wing.

Now that the bird is subdued, what else might I want to do to it? Well, the day may come when I want to distinguish between one hen and another, so Kathleen affixed plastic bands of different colors to the right leg of each hen.

What about the big old tom? Mightn’t he be a bit tougher to subdue? I may never know this, because I didn’t bother with clipping either wing on the tom, figuring that if the hens stayed put, then so would he. So far, that has worked out.

Now it was a simple matter to install a door in the fence separating the enclosed turkey pen from the turkey pasture. It took those turkeys a couple of hours to figure out that they could go out the door into the pasture, and even longer for them to realize they could walk back in. After a few days, though, we’ve got it down to a routine - I open that door in the morning, let them come and go as they please during the day, and herd them back into the enclosed (thus secure from predators) pen in the evening and latch the door.

Ah, it’s a grand sight to see a flock of Narragansett turkeys moving through tall, green clover. Remember, these birds don’t look like big, round, white domestic turkeys. They look very much like wild turkeys, though a bit larger and a bit lighter in coloration. In fact, I have seen wild turkeys in that pasture before. I look forward to seeing what happens when my Narragansett turkeys and local wild turkeys encounter each other with no intervening barrier.

Remember Dumbass? The pig that couldn’t figure out how to work the waterer? Well, she never did figure it out, so I replaced the waterer with one of a different configuration. The old waterer was configured much like a men’s room urinal, though without the urinal mint; the nozzle, and the lever that activated it, were both deployed vertically downward. The pig had merely to nudge that nozzle to either side for the bowl to fill up, and every pig until Dumbass did figure it out, and quickly.

My new waterer consists of a similar nozzle deployed horizontally outward from the wall, with no bowl at all. The pig just gloms onto it much like it would the nipple on a sow. Dumbass did figure this one out.

This new arrangement does seem to spill a lot more water, though. Good thing I have a rock cairn beneath the nozzle, to drain away that water. However, the dirt surrounding that rock cairn is now a mud puddle occupying perhaps half of the pigs’ sleeping area. As time went on, and as both the pigs and the puddle got larger, they had to crowd more and more into the remaining dry space. Now that the weather has turned hot, though, they are quite content to wallow in that mud puddle.

My rabbit operation is expanding. I’m now running 16 holes (cages) containing 60+ rabbits of which six are breeding does, each of them currently nursing a litter. I’ve got 22 rabbits on Death Row alone. One is supposed to process these rabbits at between five and seven pounds live weight. Now that I’ve got the cage space, I’m letting at least some of them grow to the full seven pounds, which gives me more product for the same processing effort.

I’ve got three new does in the breeding lineup this year. They’re fresh up from the minors, so to speak, and they need some seasoning. Faye ate all her first litter save one, who was so well nursed that he couldn’t even stand up for a long time; I call him Fat Albert. Georgia ate her first litter save two, who seem to be doing well. Hermione refused to put out for Bucko on their first half dozen encounters, then relented by lifting her tail off the floor for a split second, then refused him again that evening. So, was she pregnant or not? A “test-mating” after one week, at which a pregnant doe will resist noisily the attentions of Bucko, was inclusive, given Hermione’s usual reticence. There was no way of knowing until the full 31 days were up; however, Hermione had, or at least kept, six kittens. All three of these rookies remain on probation.

Looks like my six new layers may instead be two layers and four roosters. Oh, well, I’ve got twenty more of my chicken eggs in the incubator, plus two turkey eggs, plus twenty more chicken eggs belonging to a friend. A week from today should be the big day.

Scott

Vigilante Farm, that leading Bethel purveyor of, for the moment, rabbits, is pleased to announce that the critter count is, as it should be in the spring, rising.  Four pigs are now in residence, chicken and turkey eggs are hatching and, to the surprise of nobody, the rabbits are multiplying.

Time was when I dealt with the animals and Kathleen dealt with the vegetables, but this is no longer strictly the case.  I am again growing spinach and beets in last year’s pig pen and, for a while at least, Kathleen was housing my three ducks in her garden.

Many years ago, I raised six ducks from young ducklings.  Last year I bought a couple of Indian runner drakes for their amusement value and, a month later, was given a pair of call ducks, of which only the drake still remains.  Finally, I bought and read a book about raising ducks.

Significant fact about ducks: they love to eat slugs.  Significant fact about Kathleen: she hates slugs, especially anywhere near her garden.  There is an obvious connections between these two facts, but before you draw it, I need to point out that ducks also like to eat young plants, which trait makes them rough on gardens.  I mentioned to Kathleen that the duck book said that one can put ducks in the garden before it is planted, so that they can eat slugs, slug eggs and whatever else might strike their fancy until planting time.  After planting, one can then put the ducks outside the garden fence, but still contained by a second fence surrounding the first one, so that the ducks can prevent the immigration of replacement slugs.  Sort of like a moat around a castle, you might say.

Kathleen showed only faint interest in this idea at the time, but a few weeks ago she fenced off part of her garden from the rest and asked me to loan her my ducks for a while.  “OK, but you’ll have to take care of them,” said I.  “They need water for drinking and bathing, and they need cracked corn now and then.  They don’t seem to need shelter, though a wind break would be nice.”

Deal.  I transported the ducks in a cage in my car to her garden.  They could have walked there, of course, for this is exactly what Indian runner ducks were bred for centuries to do - walk from home to their job cleaning out rice paddies every morning, and walk back to predator-proof housing every evening.  I didn’t want them to make the connection between their digs and Kathleen’s garden, though, or they might not hang around her garden very long.  Likewise, I never want them to have any idea that they are less than a hundred yards from a six acre pond, or that is where they would likely spend all their time, forsaking both my amusement and Kathleen’s garden.

For a while, Kathleen gave glowing reports about these ducks.  They showed no particular interest in the cracked corn, not while they had animal matter to exhume from the garden, which they did with admirable industry.  She was thrilled to see the smallest duck eat a huge slug, no problem at all.  After that, she threw into her garden any slugs that she found elsewhere.  This seemed like strange behavior for a gardener, but functionally it was like throwing raw meat to hungry lions; you can count on hungry lions, and you can count on ducks.

Problem was, her garden was already planted.  Asparagus and rhubarb are perennials, so they come up when they feel like it, and she had already started onions, leeks and shallots.  The Indian runners respected the fence that separated them from these vegetables, but the little call duck could, and did, fly over that fence whenever he was being picked on by the larger runner ducks.  Once over there, he nailed everything but the rhubarb.

The ducks are now sequestered with the chickens in a covered pen, so that neither can mess with the grass I’ve planted in the goat yard.  Kathleen is now sequestered in her garden, planting away.

More birds, and still more birds.  I recently hatched in my incubator six chicken chicks (out of seven chicken eggs, not bad) and two turkey poults (out of sixteen turkey eggs, not good); all of these are in the brooder I built in the guinea barn.  Two of my chicken hens are finally setting on who knows how many fertile chicken eggs, as are two turkey hens on who knows how many fertile turkey eggs.

Foghorn set on three infertile emu eggs for well past the requisite time.  I say infertile, as none of the eleven emu eggs in the incubator hatched, and I have to wonder why.  My three adult emus are old enough (three years old), and the female has spent one winter penned up with each of the two males.  My guess is that neither of these males strikes her fancy; emus are, after all, known to be selective in their mating arrangements.

I have located an emu farm in southern MA that will sell me a proven breeding pair, so I think I’ll take them up on it some time this summer.  Road trip!  This will be the furthest I’ve traveled from the farm since I’ve had the farm.  Just wait until U-Haul gets their trailer back.

Foghorn, now back with the other emus, is being shunned.  Hey, did I put Grace with the wrong male emu for the winter?  Was Big Burp her heart throb all along?  Did I separate them last fall over a mere lovers’ spat?  Do I understand females?  Answers: maybe, maybe, maybe, and are-you-kidding?

I now find that I actually miss pigs during the part of the year that I don’t have them; well, I guess I’d rather be addicted to farming than to cocaine or golf.  A couple of weeks ago I, along with my pig partners Doug and Jay, took delivery of four pigs from just down the road.  These pigs have enough spots on them that they are individually identifiable, so they can be assigned specific names: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Dumbass.

After two weeks here, Dumbass still hasn’t figured out the pig waterer.  The others all know that you push against the lever, water squirts into the bowl, and you drink the water.  Dumbass just drinks whatever water is left in the bowl after another pig has had her fill.  I suppose it is at least possible that Dumbass knows damn well how to do it, but just can’t be bothered by pushing against the lever, so instead she should be known as Lazyass.

Scott

Vigilante Farms, that leading Bethel producer of someday, maybe, exotic poultry is pleased to announce that spring is manifesting itself in both the usual ways and in a new way or two.

Kathleen, the primary exerciser and trainer of our dogs, was gone for a day, so I figured that I could at least take the dogs for a walk.  I leashed up all three, without their Gentle Leaders that make them docile on leash, and got as far as the paved road before the trouble started.  Coming toward us, though on the other side of the paved road, were four guinea cocks, yammering noisily at my dogs.  I told all the dogs to sit, and to stay, but I didn’t think they would; were I a dog, guinea fowl would be just the sort of thing I’d want to chase.

Well, the dogs stayed put just fine, and I couldn’t wait to tell Kathleen how well trained they now seemed to be.  No sooner had those four guineas gone by us, when along came four pigs, four running pigs.  Sit!  Stay!  And, dammit, the dogs did just that.  I didn’t even know that the guy across the street had pigs, but I figured they must be his, because the pigs ran up his driveway.  I walked the dogs back home, phoned my neighbor to inform him of his loose pigs, and went over there to help him get them back.

I’ve never had pigs get loose, and have always assumed that getting them back in the pen would be difficult.  Not at all.  In fact, these pigs were apparently in the custom of getting loose, so I gave my neighbor a scrap of chain link fence to repair the weak part of his pig pen, through which his pigs were in the habit of escaping.

I’ve begun construction of my Btu barn, in which I plan to collect, generate and store heat to keep Kathleen’s greenhouse from freezing all winter.  A friend was helping me, and he had a three year old boy in tow.  Once the concrete was poured and setting, and the tools washed off, it was time for a farm tour.

Never again will I go into the barnyard without a camera.  I’m not usually one to bemoan missing a great shot, but the one I missed that day was of this young lad utterly enthralled by watching Old Bill, my tom turkey, servicing one of his hens.  This is a process that involves perhaps a minute and a half of foreplay followed by a second and a half of action.  The hen initiates the procedure, and she can call it off any time she likes, with no hard feelings, at least none that are overt.

The farm tour always finishes with the emus, because they are a hard act to follow.  We walked along the outside of the smaller pen containing the breeding pair, Grace and Foghorn.  Grace was sounding off with her distinctive female emu call, so I pointed out that this was the girl emu.  “And there’s the boy emu,” said the lad, pointing to Big Burp in the other pen.  “Yes, well, that’s one boy emu, and the other boy emu is in this pen with the girl emu. . .uh, where the hell is he?  Omigod, we’ve got a loose emu somewhere.  Mark, you’d better be ready to scoop up Jake, because this could be a dangerous situation.”

The last time, the only previous time, that an emu got out, he hung around the outside of the pen, but there was no emu hanging around anywhere outside that I could see.  I started walking the outside perimeter, to see if I could figure out where and how he got out.  I got part way around, and found poor Foghorn lying on the ground just inside the pen, hidden from our view by a mere three foot pine tree.

Foghorn’s eyes were open, but his head and neck were lying flat on the ground.  He didn’t even move when Grace walked up an pecked him, hard, on the neck.  This probably wasn’t the first time she had done this, either, because his neck was a bit bloody.  Did they have a fight?  How badly injured was he?  Could he be saved?

It is generally considered a real bad idea to get between two fighting emus, but this was Foghorn, my friendliest emu.  I asked Mark to latch the barn door from the outside, so that I wouldn’t have to latch it from the inside, just in case someone needed to drag me out.  I unlocked the door to the smaller pen and went inside, nearly tripping over an emu egg.  This egg had not been there when I fed them last evening, and she always lays her eggs at about sundown, so it had been here all night and probably got too cold to ever hatch.  Can’t worry about an egg now, gotta attend to Foghorn.

Foghorn didn’t move, not even when I picked up his head and his limp neck.  Not good.  Let’s pick up enough of his body so that I can assess the damage underneath, which damage is presumably rendering him unable to stand.  He must have been helping me lift him, because I don’t think I could pick up a dead emu without help - they’re pretty big.  I got him about eight inches off the ground, and what I saw told me that I didn’t have to lift him any further.

Underneath that large feathered mass were two big, green, eggs!  Foghorn wasn’t hurt at all, he was just catatonic, setting on eggs.  He won’t be getting up, other than to turn the eggs over, for the next fifty days, not even to eat.

And what if they don’t hatch at all, how long will he stay there then?  Who knows, but I guess we’ll find out.  These eggs have to be at least three days and six days old, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him in the barn since then, so these eggs have experienced temperatures well below 40°F, the minimum temperature at which one should store them.  But, maybe not.

Emus generally don’t start setting on eggs until they have seven or eight, which can take almost a month to lay.  Were they to set on them as they came along, the first one would hatch almost a month before the last.  How could papa emu keep six chicks under control, ranging in age from three to twenty days, while still setting on the last egg?

So Foghorn probably hasn’t been setting on these eggs until just now.

There is no point in explaining any of this to Foghorn.  Even if he could understand me, and even if he were inclined to take my advice, and I’d give big odds against either, I just could be wrong.  After all, he’s setting on just two, and hasn’t waited until he had seven or eight to set on.  So what the hell, let him be.  In fact, I even gave him that third egg.  I also escorted Grace into the other, larger, pen.

Today I saw Foghorn stand up, carefully roll the eggs a bit, and flop back down on them.  I gave him a flake of hay, just in case he wanted to build a proper nest.  So far, no.

I got my first two turkey eggs yesterday.  If I can snag some before they get too cold, I’ll save them and incubate them.  Once the turkey barn is warm enough that eggs won’t go bad before a hen sets on them, I’ll open up the nesting boxes and let nature take its course.

My chickens are now divided into two flocks.  One flock sleeps in the goat barn and gets layer pellets, appropriate for table eggs.  The other flock is sequestered in the guinea barn with the rooster; these all get breeder pellets, appropriate for hatching eggs.  Now, if only one of these hens would go broody, I’d quit gathering the eggs from the breeder flock.

Last year, I managed to grow out only one chicken chick and only one turkey poult, and no emus at all.  Hoping to do better this year; can’t do a whole lot worse.

Scott

Vigilante Farms, that leading Bethel supplier of someday, maybe, emus is pleased to announce that yes sir, we grow some tough rabbits around here.

Kathleen and I were driving home one night and had to slow down to avoid a rabbit crossing the road, about a mile away from home. This rabbit was doing the suicide dance much like a squirrel - “No, I think I’ll get run over by those wheels, no, let’s try for these wheels” - when I yelled, “Hey, that’s one of my rabbits!”

Sure enough, it was white with gray ears and nose, which is how all of my crosses between my Californian buck and my New Zealand White does turn out. It was certainly neither a cottontail rabbit nor a snowshoe hare, which is what we have in Maine. I checked my rabbit cages when we got home, and everybody was right where they were supposed to be. Then Kathleen reminded me of the three young escapees last summer.

Three rabbits, yet to be weaned, had squeezed through a hole in the cage (since repaired), fallen to the ground and sneaked out through a hole beneath the rabbit barn’s sill (since filled in) to freedom. I didn’t even look for them at the time, figuring that they probably had already been nailed by a hawk or something.

Now, it appears that at least one of them has survived most of a Maine winter. Well, this winter, that isn’t saying much, as all of the snow storms lately have gone well south of us. But for this rabbit to have survived in the wild at all is remarkable. That rabbit was born in a cage, as were all of its ancestors for who knows how may dozens of generations. Where did it get its survival skills?

More questions: Could there be a breeding pair surviving in the wilds of East Bethel? Might we find feral gray and white rabbits some day helping themselves to Kathleen’s garden?

Paulette went off her feed a few days ago. This, you may recall, is what led to Roscoe’s demise. I now know enough to act quickly when I see this, so I called my farm vet. He told me to give her a 4 ml intramuscular shot of B-vitamin complex and to cram some peppermint, spearmint and yogurt into her. Getting yogurt into a goat can be tricky, though; it never worked very well with Roscoe.

What I did, to the subsequent approval of my vet, is this: I made a cup of peppermint and spearmint tea using ground leaves and a tea ball, diluted that tea with cold water to about body temperature, added several tablespoons of plain yogurt, and used a whisk to get it all into solution (or at least, a suspension). Cooling the tea was intended to keep the yogurt from curdling and the bacteria within it from croaking. This mixture, it turns out, can be administered easily with a turkey baster, and Paulette didn’t seem to mind it much. Paulette ate a bit that night, and once I repeated the treatment in the morning, she resumed eating her grain and her hay with the dedication of a normal goat.

A friend of mine recently got a dozen chickens, and I helped her build a chicken coop out of stuff she had lying around. A couple of days later, four coyotes ripped the chicken wire right off the wooden post and got all but one chicken. She hung in there and got more chickens, sheltering them behind plywood and an electric fence instead of chicken wire.

Her second batch of chickens is still with her, but one day she informed me that she had three extra roosters which were fighting, and could I please take them? I said that I would, reminding her of the protocol regarding gift roosters - that one mustn’t ever ask what became of them.

I showed up with a traveling cage, and proceeded to grab each bird that she identified as a rooster. Yes, I could tell they were roosters, but far better to let her make the call. I realized too late that I should have exercised some bedside manner. The right thing to do would have been to pick up each rooster, cuddle it in my arms and whisper sweet nothings in its ear as I escorted it to its nice, clean, comfortable cage, in which it would ride to my happy farm to live out its days. Instead, I grabbed each rooster by the legs and carried it in my customary fashion, hanging upside down, to the cage, into which I released it, still upside down.

Most birds deployed thusly quit flapping after a few seconds, but these didn’t really get a chance to quit flapping because I didn’t have to carry them very far. All the hens got upset at my treatment of the roosters, as did my friend. In a lame effort to relax her, I told her that she was definitely doing the right thing in getting rid of excess roosters. Fighting with each other wasn’t the real problem, I explained. The real problem came when they reached sexual maturity, for then they would make the hens’ lives miserable. One rooster for a dozen hens is about right, I told her, but four roosters for nine hens is way too many roosters.

I could tell by her face that this wasn’t registering with her. “Put it this way,” I said, “Having four roosters instead of one is like being married to four guys at the same time, each of whom expects full privileges.” That registered, alright.

Vigilante Farms, that leading Bethel producer of agricultural drama, is pleased to announce that Paulette is no longer a solo goat. Last night I acquired, and installed with Paulette, one Maggie the goat.

Maggie is a five year old Nubian doe, one year older than Paulette. She has the same floppy ears, and could easily share the vocal, even nutty, characteristics of that breed. While Paulette has never been bred, thus never kidded nor given milk, Maggie has done all this more than once. Through happenstance, Maggie was not bred this year, but she could be again.

Roscoe was known for going nose to nose with people, in an affectionate way; all part of his charm. Maggie has the reputation of actually kissing people, which could make future farm tours even more interesting.

These two goats have yet to get a good look at each other, because the power was out when we got back; it just now came back on, hence the hour of this message. This didn’t stop the new roommates from engaging in more than casual head butting, which I had been warned to expect, as they sought to resolve issues of territoriality and dominance. We humans do the same, of course, though we butt heads only in the metaphorical sense. On a cold night like this one, we humans will often still find a way to snuggle up together, and these two gals may well have done this by now.

Last night was the first time I had traveled with an adult goat in the car, and I would have no qualms with doing it again. Maggie rode in the way back of my Subaru wagon, standing with her head over the back seat the entire time, commenting gently.

I am proud to claim, and Kathleen is embarrassed to acknowledge, that I

• discovered and announced Roscoe’s demise,

• accomplished his removal and interment,

• mucked out the goat barn, and

• acquired and installed and announced Roscoe’s replacement;

all without once doffing my union suit. This bespeaks more the hectic nature of the last couple of days more than it does any permanent deterioration of my personal hygiene. Now that the goat barn is again at full strength, though, and now that the power is back on, I plan to treat myself to a hot shower.

Scott

Vigilante Farm, that leading Bethel producer of agricultural mayhem, regrets to announce the passing of Roscoe the goat. He and Paulette were the original livestock on this farm, unless you count the bees, but none of those original bees survive today.

I’ve regarded both my goats and my ducks as pets; every other critter provides food, one way or another. Maybe if I had a dozen goats, I could regard them as a commodity, as I do, for example, my rabbits. But I don’t, and I won’t, so I can’t.

The best guess is that he died of goat polio. Not the poliomyelitis that humans get, but polioencephalomalacia, which attacks the nervous system and interferes with the operation of the rumen. A goat can get this from eating moldy bread, and if he did, then it is my fault for allowing him to get anywhere near the chickens’ snack food. Each of us has his list of things he’ll never do again, and mine is probably larger than most.

Roscoe had his legion of devoted fans, some of whom can’t remember Paulette’s name, but Paulette is my concern at the moment. Goats are herd animals, and they are known to fare badly, even wither away, as sole survivors. I know of a perfectly acceptable five year old Nubian doe that has been bred in the past but happens to be dry this year, which I could pick up tomorrow. Or maybe this is the right time to acquire a llama which, as a fellow ruminant, should constitute a suitable companion; after all, goats are used as companion animals for single horses. I’ll sleep on it.

Two rabbits are pregnant, and Grace the emu has laid four eggs so far. Pretty soon I expect Old Bill the turkey to start servicing his five hens. VF will bounce back.

Scott

Vigilante Farms, that leading Bethel producer of rural whimsy, is pleased to announce that the cycle begins once again.

Just after 4:00 this evening, Grace presented me with her first egg of this season, her 31st overall. 548 grams. I grabbed it while it was still warm, so it is a candidate for incubation. I think I’ll put these eggs into the incubator in batches of eight, which is about how they do it in the wild. It could be tricky to house several batches of chicks differing in age by a month or two, but that is a problem I’d love to have.

Who knows if this year’s emu eggs will be fertile? All these emus are a year older now and, unlike last year, are definitely old enough. Grace is sequestered with Foghorn this year instead of with Big Burp, but I’ve yet to witness any emu nooky, ever. The only obvious pass I’ve seen either male emu make was made by Foghorn, and that pass was directed at me.

Bucko doesn’t know it yet, but he’s getting lucky tomorrow, New Year’s Day. Probably with Claudette, my #1 doe. You use your #1 starter on Opening Day, right? We’ll see if these electric nest heaters can work their magic in the depths of February. Remember, rabbits are born hairless and stay that way for their first week or so. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

The chickens have pretty much stopped laying. Not unusual for this time of year. At least, they have stopped laying eggs where I can find them. One by one, they seem to be trying to move into the goat barn. The goats are, of course, thrilled.

I still have yet to see any duck enter any building, despite cold, snow or wind. There is nothing but their pride keeping them from going into the chicken coop, the goat barn, or the dog house. Twice a day I have to knock the ice out of the pigs’ rubber dish so that I can give the ducks water in which to swim, and they generally do just that.

The old guinea barn is now empty, having most recently housed broilers and then turkeys. I hope to use it to grow out rabbits, then brood emus, then brood turkeys before I once again grow out organic broilers in it.

Lo, the Vigilante Farmer hath said unto the animals, “Go forth, be fruitful and multiply, so that I can eat your multiplicands.”