I just picked some long grass strands out of a flower pot that had grown up unnoticed against the window and gave them to my canaries today.  Oh what fun they had with those.    They had to work to eat them, picking the strands off the floor, carrying them to a perch and holding them down with their feet to bite off pieces with their beak.  Now I could have cut the strands of grass into little pieces but that wouldn’t have given them the hour or so of fun that they had.  I am lucky that since my plants go out for the summer that grass and other things grow up in the pots that make great canary greens. 

I like watching my canaries inside when it’s too cold to watch my turkeys and ducks outside.    Birds have such fascinating behaviors.   Canaries are not supposed to be birds that pair for life, at least that’s what the experts say, but I have a pair here that say otherwise.  I wrote about them last year and their devotion to each other continues.   

In December I had separated this pair,  a little variegated hen and my youngest male canary because she just kept laying eggs that weren't hatching.  I was worried that her long laying season would wear her body out.  I thought that by separating her and removing her nest she could rest a little until spring breeding season.  They were never quite the match I wanted anyway and I was hoping the male would take another hen.

I have two cages with removable dividers stacked on a table with a similar cage at right angles to those on top of a filing cabinet next to them.   The bottom cage in the stack doesn't get as much light.  It had been occupied much of the year by one little orange canary hen  and she seemed happy enough but I decided I would like to breed her to the young male this season.   So in December when I separated the laying hen from him I put variegated hen in the orange hen’s cage, put the divider in the males cage and moved the orange hen next to him.

The young male was interested in the orange hen next to him.  He sometimes still called his previous girl and she answered but they couldn’t see each other with the cage divided.    He began to feed the orange hen and sing to her through the divider and I thought we were set for a breeding season.   On Valentine’s Day I removed the divider from his cage, ( along with the divider in the older males cage – who has another hen with him).  Young male and the orange canary were quite interested in each other for a few days and the hen began building a nest.  Then it happened.  Young male discovered that from the far corner of the undivided cage he could look down and across and see his old mate

An intense round of calling began between them.    The ex. began building a nest in a seed cup, finding anything she could to put in it.  The young male spent all his time in the corner of his cage, ignoring the orange hen and pacing and calling to his ex.    Then he began attacking the orange hen whenever she came near him.   I tried blocking his view but now that he knew where she was the young male wouldn't rest.   Finally, yesterday I could see the orange hen was miserable, huddled in a corner much of the day.  So I decided to give the young lovers what they wanted.  I moved the two sweethearts back together and the orange hen back to the bottom tier cage.

It was touching to see the reunion of the two birds.  They fed each other and kept up a running chorus of love talk immediately.  They mated 4 times in the hour I sat watching them.   There was  a nest in this cage and the hen flew to the task of filling it.  This morning she already has a huge nest built and she barely came off to eat some grass.  After he played with the grass for a while the male has been helping bring bits of stuff to the nest and standing by proudly while the hen turns around and around in it to mold it.  Their soft talk rarely ceases.   True love.   I hope they are more successful  hatching eggs this season, if so the love affair will be worth it.

Orange hen seemed very happy to be back in her old position, even though it really wasn't her old cage.  I suppose the view from that spot was familiar.  She spent a lot of time eating as soon as I moved her; I think the male was keeping her from eating.  I would still like to breed her.   However my only other male is an older male named Petey who while he sings, and is kind toward the hen who is with him, doesn't really seem that interested in mating.  I don’t know his exact age but he is at least 4 years old.   The hen with him is young, a sister of the orange hen, and she is playing a bit with nest building but hasn't really accomplished much.

I may do something else unusual and put the orange hen with her sister and the old male.  The two hens lived together amicably until about March last year when I put pairs together.    Maybe if the one hen doesn't excite the old male the orange hen will.  You know what they say about redheads.    Or maybe later in the spring I can try again to separate one of the males and give the orange hen a mate.

It just goes to show that animals don’t always follow the rules people attach to them.  

winter returns

As I walked to the barn through the 6 or so inches of snow that had accumulated overnight I thought about how this wouldn’t have been considered anything special when I was young.  No school cancelations, I would have been walking the mile to my Junior High or the 2 miles to my high school without a thought.  Everyone would be on their way to work and they would leave early enough to get there on time.  It was winter- you expected snow.  Six inches of snow might be a little inconvenient but it wasn’t worthy of emergency status.

Now inside the news was crowing about it being the storm of the season, winter storm warnings scrolling across the bottom of the screen along with school closings.  When did we get to be such wimps?    People its winter in Michigan, get over it.  Now I know that in some areas there was more snow than here.  But still, this shouldn’t rank as a winter emergency.  It came in overnight, the roads were mostly plowed by the am rush, our back road was even plowed.

I’m glad I no longer have to drive in it though.  No getting up early and cleaning the car off before leaving early for work.  We went to the store yesterday to stock up on essential groceries and we are set for a few days.   I’ll just stay home and wait for the rain that’s coming to wash it away.    Since it’s only going to be a day or two before it gets warmer I am not even going to worry about shoveling our drive and risking my health.  I have a path started to the barn already and a day or two of walking that will be just fine.

This is a heavy, wet clingy snow.  Pretty to look at although with the wind coming up I worry a bit about it breaking some of the evergreens.  And I worry about our tarp roof on the chicken run collapsing too.

The wild birds are happy.  I filled the feeders this morning and a little chickadee got so eager he landed on my head.  The cats were out a bit but they aren’t so likely to lay around in the snow waiting to pounce on little birds.  And the chickens don’t like to wade through snow to pick at the spilled seed under the feeder so the doves will get that today.  There were tons of birds at the feeder today, lots of little housefinches with their red bellies, chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, goldfinches, cardinals, doves, titmice, song sparrows, grosbeaks, you name it.

The snowmobilers were happy too.  That’s one thing I don’t like about it snowing, the people who think that because there is snow on the ground they don’t have to think about whose land they are trespassing on and the damage they are doing to small trees and shrubs and crops.  Around here you have them popping up at the roadside and barreling across it in front of you or traveling 4 a breast down the road and expecting you to go in the ditch to avoid them.  Not me kiddo, move or get squished.  You have them racing around at night with their bobbing headlights keeping you awake, scaring the farm animals.  Snowmobilers just make me grouchy.  Too bad it’s illegal to shoot them.

I just need to remember that snow is good for replenishing the pond, the ground water and protecting the plants.  I can sit home and look at it.  And a warm up is coming – oh crap that means mud!

Time is gliding by

It’s been a week of technology improvements around here. My computer was acting up and I bought a new one, more powerful so it can hold all my pictures and files without struggling with memory freezes.  I choose to have windows 7 installed instead of 8 because everyone I know who has 8 hates it.  But even windows. 7 is taking some getting used to as is the new addition of office.    And the computer may be great but the included keyboard is crap.  We set the old computer up in the bedroom for my husband to use and took a lot of the files off it.  That meant moving the router, which was fun. 

One more thing we are going to set up next week is a Roku- to stream movies.  After that hopefully our tech upgrade is done. 

We lost another dog last week too, Cricket, my office dog.  She was a 15 year old Yorkie mix.  She was black and tan but she was a bit larger at 20 pounds than a Yorkie and her long coat was wiry, not silky.   She was the office dog because until the last year she couldn’t be trusted to be around the other dogs- she hated females.  When she was younger she sent several of the other dogs to the vet and the other older girls were terrified of her.  All we had to do was say “Crickets out”- and they ran and hid.  But she was very friendly to people and to male dogs.

In my office she had a doggie door to her own private outside run.  She liked to sit under my desk as I worked in here.  Until last spring she always had a companion too.  First her son, then our old stud Jack Russell, Gus, after he was neutered. But she outlived them both.  This year she had mellowed to the point that we allowed the door of the office to remain open when I was in here and the other dogs filtered in and out, although she seldom left.  My bitchy female Tina, her old arch enemies’ great granddaughter, was not afraid of her, because she was not around during Crickets reign of terror and challenged her whenever she came out.  Knowing that she wasn’t up to her old level of aggressiveness Cricket just chose to stay in the office most of the time.

First she stopped eating regular food but I was able to get her to eat things like scrambled eggs or chicken soup.  Then she couldn’t keep any food down, vomiting about an hour after I fed her.  I took her to the vet; whose diagnose was some sort of cancer in the digestive system and kidney failure.   There was nothing to do but put her down.  Steve was able to bury her in the little warm spell we had, but it wasn’t easy. 

I guess when you have a bunch of dogs over 10 years old it’s inevitable that they start dying but this year has been tough.  I checked on Cricket every night before I went to bed, to make sure she had food and water in case I wasn’t going to be coming into the office early in the morning and it’s hard to break that habit.  Ginger, who is her daughter, has taken her place under my desk as I work, although she doesn’t have to be locked in like her mom was.  Our oldest dog now is Sadie, who is actually close to 16.  She still seems to be going strong, but I will be taking her for a health check-up soon.

More egg problems

After a week or two of no problems with the eggs in the chicken coop we now have something in the back part of the barn, where the ducks and turkeys are.  One of the turkeys and maybe a duck or two had a pile of eggs in one of the doghouses I had put in there for them and something got in there and chewed them up- I found the shells all over and it looks just like the possum damage in the chicken coop.  I don’t know if the eggs were any good since it’s so cold they have been freezing if not sat on constantly but I was hoping to get some babies a bit later in the spring so the egg eater must be stopped.

The hard part of this will be finding a place to set the trap.  I don’t know where the possum is coming into the pen like I did with the chicken coop.  If I put the trap out in the open it will probably catch a cat.  But as Steve says- I have to try. 

Crippled deer is still around

Last summer I saw a crippled doe hanging around my pond.  A neighbor mentioned seeing her too.  I actually felt sorry for her and wasn’t trying to scare her off as I do most deer.  It looked like the leg had been broken; she probably was hit by a car.  I guess she managed to survive even though I hadn’t seen her in a couple months.  Yesterday another neighbor called asking me what “we” could do to help the poor crippled doe that was eating out of her bird feeder.  It seems that she has been coming everyday with another doe to eat out of the neighbor’s feeder.  (She actually spreads feed on the ground under the feeder for the deer.)

I told her there was nothing we could do- no one was going to come out from DNR about a crippled deer and if they did it would be to just shoot her.  The neighbor said it appears she is healed, but the leg healed in an odd way.  I warned the neighbor that feeding the deer up close to her house like that would mean that the deer would likely ruin her shrubs and garden but she doesn’t care.  I still feel a little sorry for the doe but I like my plants too, and I won’t be putting food out for her.  So far the snow hasn’t been that deep and the deer shouldn’t be too desperate. 

Now that I am retired I plan to spend a little more time just sitting out on my property observing the deer and birds – that is once I get done revising my gardens, fixing the chicken coops and other things. So much to do- so little time- I feel it more and more as time glides by me.