Mandy posted a photo of Ruff the kitten in his first snow in an earlier post, so I thought I’d add these two photos I took with my cell phone camera in the last couple weeks. We do likes our catses.

The cold snap finally broke. We stayed cold until Christmas eve, then the temperature rose, and rose, and rose. Christmas was still white, because the 9″ of snow had compacted to about 7″. But that was Thursday. On Friday we rose to the high 40s and on Saturday we hit record highs in the high 50s to 60 deg F in some areas. Saturday morning dawned dense and foggy, and that lasted through the wee hours of Sunday morning.

Now it’s back down to below freezing, and the wind chill was intense this morning as I walked over to feed and let loose the East Flock. Brrrrrrrr!! Sunny, beautiful colors, gray snow clouds on the horizon, a wonderful winter day.

During this December thaw, I found that the remains of the pokeberries along our path to the East Flock had brightened the remaining snow with their purple blessings. The pokeberry stems are a favorite of our chickens, although we never feed them the poisonous berries. It seems that they avoid the berries on their own (at least Mike never ate them when she was living outside and away from the others in the East Flock last summer), but the stalks have less of the poison and they like that fleshy green stalk. But the only time we see good pokeberry stain on the snow is when we get a good cold snap in November or December, early and cold enough to freeze the berries hard, and followed by a good snow. We need both of those to set it up, so that when the thaw comes, the berries can thaw and drip their winedark juices onto the snow before the snow all melts away. You, of course, must be out tromping in the pokeberry snow in order to see the pokeberry thaw. This photo from my phone camera simply doesn’t do the scene justice.

Then there’s the path itself. Tis but a footpath for us to travel 200 yards to the East Flock, but during the cold snap snow we find that our footprints cross and run with with rabbit highways, squirrel dartings, vole pokeholes, cat prowlings and deer trails, seeking shelter in the sumac and raspberries that line the path. Today as I hid my ears from the wind chill, I almost didn’t look down at my feet to see the red wonders lying all around me. There in the path were the red sumac berries blown down by this wind. My fingers froze, but I stopped to take a couple pictures of the berries and the sumac in the wind. In the background of the sumac photo you can see two of our dead ash trees out in the field, killed like all our ashes by the Emerald Ash Borer sometime before we moved in. The last of them is an enormous ash with a 10′ circumference near our driveway, not quite dead yet but on its last legs. We’ll let them season a bit more in place before cutting them for our fireplace, probably next fall.

Now I’ve taken too long writing this instead of going outside. Mandy’s been working through the wind damage to the cold frames in the garden. It’s so NICE writing by the wood stove though! But blue sky doesn’t come everyday. I’ll go cut down a dead elm, and split some of the remaining unsplit elm that awaits me in the garden. Wind chill be damned.

A few happy wintry pictures…..

This entry starts with a story, and a warning about the story: If you are grossed out by discussions of animals consuming each other, look away!

One very cold day recently, in a break between snows, we cut and hauled firewood. The large chunks went to the garden, where there is a chopping block for splitting firewood. It is nearby to the compost pile, which is currently a 3 foot pile of frozenness. As I unloaded and stacked wood sections, I heard a rodent squeaking somewhere behind me. Not among the wood pile - farther away. When I realized it was a continuous squeaking, I went searching, out of curiousity. The squeak/squawk was repeated, continuous, “Eeee, Eeeeee, Eeeeee…” and in the snow, easy to find. To my amazement, there was a mole frozen into the compost pile.

The mole was in a little burrow just slightly larger than his body, but the burrow had apparently frozen solid around him, and perhaps the expanding ice had shrunken it. His snout and front feet stuck out the exit hole, about 2 feet above the ground, and he was wiggling and squawking, trying to get out. He could not back up, it seemed he was in more of a blind pocket than a tunnel.

Now the chickens had caught sight of me moving around in the garden, and came to investigate. They cocked their heads for just a moment when they heard the squeaking, then one instant later were on top of the compost pile. Two hens discovered the mole immediately and went to work trying to drag him out of his hole. This caught Elvis the Rooster’s attention, and in a flash he was on the compost pile efficiently putting the mole out of his misery and dragging him out of his icy chamber.

In the time it took me to try to decide whether to intervene and save the mole or not, it was over. If it hadn’t been for the chickens, I would have helped the mole. But the mole was likely destined for slow death by freezing if I tried to free him into an environment he could not negotiate. Moles live underground. In fact, moles wreak havoc tunneling beneath the plants in the garden all summer long. The chickens provided a quick and logical solution to all angles of the story. And the mole…provided a protein supplement to the chickens.

That’s right - they ate him. They linked right into that food chain, and the mole that had lived off of our food in the garden fed the chickens that will turn around and feed us with their eggs. Chickens are little dinosaurs. Little fierce dragonlike beings, who (contrary to bucolic fantasy about merely pecking at grain gracefully) will go on rampages and absolutely ravage anything that looks remotely like a food source.

In the wintertime, the ranging chickens’ scavenged foods are cut back severely. We have a stockpile of squashes and vegetable material that is their usual, more vegetarian, source of alternate nutrients. Hopefully the beta carotene in the squash will help keep the nutrient levels in the eggs up a bit for the winter. The hens love to peck out the rind of a squash…. and I’m putting the orange squash picture next to the picture of the bright yellow beaten eggs ready to complete a fritatta, to illustrate the relationship. Colorful foods are good for all of us!

So, let’s talk about chickens and cold weather and egg production. Recent comments on a friend’s blog (The Farmer’s Marketer) suggest that people who don’t have chickens of their own have a lot of questions about chickens. In particular, there are a lot of questions about raising happy healthy chickens and how their egg production changes with the seasons. I’m no expert on this… have only been raising happy chickens for 18 months now, but I can tell you what our experience is so far.

Today is cold out… only 8 deg F this morning. Tippy the cat and I went out to feed and water our hens this morning. Well, I went out to do that, and Tippy rode my shoulder the way he always does to protect me from misstep and keep my cheek warm. The West Flock out back in the new coop was happy to see us, ready for unfrozen water and some cracked corn. We toss out a couple cups of cracked grains every morning for them, which they go after like kids after pinata candy. Thus occupied, I refilled their regular grain feeder and gave them a gallon of drinking water without them under foot. The West Flock arrived as new chicks in May, and only a dozen or two came into laying before the winter came on in earnest, but they give us about 8-10 eggs per day. This morning their were nine waiting for us, and there will probably be a few more this afternoon. They have four wooden nesting boxes in the coop with straw in the bottom, and they left five eggs in one box and four in another — typically, they take turns using one or two favored nest boxes instead of spreading out and putting two eggs in each box.

Until this heavy snow hit (9″ on the ground now), we’ve been letting them out every day to try and forage… currently we open the door and they show no interest whatsoever in going out, so they’re staying in. Most days we give them a couple pounds of kitchen greens or squash that we’ve saved over from the summer, in supplement to their regular layer feed. And they go out and scratch around looking for whatever they might find.

Now where the West Flock is all youngsters (save one year-old Barred Rock, “Mike”), the East Flock saw winter last year as chicks, came into laying last spring and all summer and fall produced about 20 or so eggs a day (from 24 hens). In November they all started losing their feathers and molting… it looked like they lost weight and got all scruffy looking. Along with the feathers dropping, so did the egg production. We went from as many as two dozen a day to roughly 3-5 eggs a day from these hens, an 80% fall in production. Fortunately though, this happened just as the West Flock ladies were starting to lay, so overall production hasn’t dropped horribly (just by half).

From what we understand, the molting and egg production drop comes to most flocks right at this time, as the length of the days shortens and temperatures plummet. Many (most? all?) factory egg farms and a number of smaller farms try to minimize this production drop by using electric lights and timers to artificially lengthen the apparent day and fool the chickens into producing eggs “normally” thoughout the year, or at least with a shortened winter slow season. We’re not doing that here. We’ll consider giving them a little light in the early evenings (heck it would help keep the coop a little warmer) but we’re not going to try and engineer their laying patterns significantly. At Dragonwood we simply like chickens; they’re “working pets” for us more than anything else. So we decide what to do for the chickens based on what seems best for them, and most manageable for us.

Tippy and I had a nice walk in the blowing snow… not snowing but the wind is gusting strongly enough to fill in my footprints during the 15 minutes it took to trudge over to the East Flock and come back. So today as of 10am we got 9 eggs from the West Flock youngsters and 1 egg from the East Flock veterans. We’ll go back out to visit them in a while, freshen the water against the cold and collect any eggs to keep them from freezing and cracking before we can get them inside the house. It’s now too cold outside to use the refrigerator in the garage… everything just freezes in there at this time of year. We need a fridge with a heater inside to keep it from freezing! But such is life.

Oh, and the East Flock chickens are starting to get their feathers back. We’ll add some pictures soon I hope, but a few of the Black Stars (in particular) and one or two of the Barred Rocks are getting their feathers grown back in and are looking glossy again. Crazy time to shed your insulation, it seems to me! But we’re glad to see them coming back.

Update 3:30pm: We took out squash and tomatoes for both flocks, and got another 3 eggs from the East Flock veterans, for 13 total today… not expecting any more. A good day. Spread out a new bale of straw for the West Flock kiddies too.

I set the book down a few minutes ago. I thought Mandyrose was nearly asleep on the couch, curled around Ferret the cat, near enough to the woodstove to feel drowsy/cozy. But now she’s adding some wood to the stove, a piece of elm we cut earlier today. We cut a carload and a half, because there’s eight inches of snow on the way tonight. The boots are drying by the woodstove… it’s cold out now (teens) but hovered around freezing during the afternoon where we cut wood in the snow.

It’s quiet though right now, mostly just the sound of the kettle on the woodstove ticking the way metal kettles with hot water in them tick and crackle (more of a “crickle” than a crackle, really). The snow hasn’t started falling yet, it’s still a state or so away. It’s late enough that there’s no traffic noise from the highway outside, just a truck every few minutes or so. No rooster noises like we hear all during the day.

The other noise we heard a while ago was Ferret being restless. She’ll get a little wild hair and charge fiercely across the wood floor toward some menacing invisible spirit, then pull up short and dive for cover under a chair until we’re both looking at her and she looks back and stands up and says “What? What are you looking at?” Tonight though, she wrestled a ballpoint pen into submission, spinning it around and around until it was too dizzy to resist. Our favorite is the way she plays soccer, dribbling a hair clip or other slidey object across the floorboards between her paws, back and forth. One more distinctive sound.

Now the floorboards are creaking. The steps upstairs are quite creaky; there’s simply no way to go up the stairs quietly. You can try, and can find a partial path up the left side of the first few and the right side of the next few, but then the path is impossibly impassible for the sneaky. It’s time for me to bank some more elm into the woodstove, pack it up full and close down the damper and go make my own creaky way upstairs.

In their first months of laying, our chickens seem to produce a higher number of double-yolked eggs. They’re really huge. When one of us comes in with one, we joke that “A goose got into the laying boxes again…”

Here’s our latest double-yolker. It’s shown in comparison to average large eggs. Double-yolked eggs are pretty interesting. They’re twins, in one shell. They sometimes look like two ordinary eggs coming out of the shell when you crack the egg… or sometimes the two yolks are smaller and nearly fused together. They are just as perfectly edible as any other egg, in fact, we remember reading a piece in Martha Stewart Living magazine about eggs, that said something about the luxury of ordering a double-yolker over-easy in a New York diner. You might find a double-yolker in the eggs you get from us on rare occasion. Many times they are too big to fit into the egg cartons, though, and go into our breakfasts instead!

Huge double-yolked eggs inspire awe for the experience of the chicken, though we’ve never seen any difficulty or any out-of-the-ordinary caffuffel over the process of passing such eggs. In fact, from a midwife’s standpoint, it’s fairly reaffirming of our philosophy - there’s quite a range of normal, and even the big ones can come out naturally!

If you’re into reading more about unusual egg formations, this site has some pretty interesting pictures, including eggs with tails! http://www.poultryhelp.com/oddeggs.html