I’m not counting chickens before they hatch, I’m counting eggs as they’re laid.  It’s less than a fortnight past solstice, and already the egg count is starting to rise.  No, we’re not getting dozens a day yet, and it’s not enough to put out the newsflash bulletins for everyone to start putting orders in for eggs.  But it’s definitely an uptick and numbers, and the color mix of our daily eggs has changed.

Maybe it’s just the excessively warm spell we’ve had this December, and not the passing of solstice at all.  It’s definitely clear though that some of our layers are back after their molt… we haven’t see a blue or green Auracauna egg for a month now, and in the last three days two of the Auracaunas have started laying again, nice big eggs.

We love how big the eggs are from the older birds.  We love having older birds around, actually, and not just because their eggs are among our largest.  Our two flocks have great leadership, both from the roosters and the hens.  A couple months ago now we took the thirty or so new pullet hens and their roos from their chick-to-pullet-coop and split them up and introduced them to their permanent flocks… the new Welsummers went west to the bigger flock, and the Cuckoo Marans to the east flock.

Having older birds and a stable flock/coop situation allows newcomers to settle in quickly.  There’s some initial confusion and a bit of put-you-in-your-place pecking, but that’s why it’s called a pecking order.  New birds come in near the bottom of the order, and work their way into a comfort zone.  Everybody finds a place, and within a short time, everybody knows everyone else and things are fairly settled socially.

Brunch with friends in the snow.

I read once that 50-60 birds in a chicken flock is about the most that they can handle well, because more than that and their little chicken brains can’t keep track of the social structure and civilization breaks down.  We haven’t pushed the upper limits of that range too much;  our west flock is around 70 right now.  But it’s very clear that everyone knows everyone else, and they all understand the pecking order.  So I think the maximum reasonable Facebook friendslist for chickens could actually be much higher, given a comfortable coop and roosts at night and plenty of room for free-ranging during the day.  Not such teeny chicken brains after all.

Back in November, there were three Barred Rocks from the east side flock that refused to stay in their fenced pasture, and kept escaping to greener pastures.  The west flock has better fences, so after a week or so of this, we simply took the lead escape artist and carried her back to the west flock, setting her on a perch after dark so that in the morning, she’d find the new water, food and “friends” before setting out for the day’s foraging in new territory.  We’ve found this a pretty reliable way to introduce birds to different flocks, that they always seem to find their way back to the coop after waking up there.

Two more escape artists headed for the West Flock.

In the morning at roll call, the escape artist found she’d fallen a few notches (plummeted, more like) and needed to find her new place.  Everyone in the West Flock knew this was someone different and yet someone who could belong here.  There were no death struggles, just don’t-stand-so-close-to-me messages and minor display-fight skirmishes.

Our wild/tame Tom turkey (who lives outside the flock in the trees, but spends all day with the west flock chickens) knows instantly who any newcomers are and quietly chases them around the hen yard, walking along with his long strides causing them to hop and run a little and behave themselves.  After an initial chase, Tom leaves the newcomers alone most of the day unless they get into skirmishes (which they do).  He’s our cop, breaking up all the fights, or trying to by sticking his head in and getting between skirmishers and *peenting loudly at them.  I don’t think the peenting does much, it’s not a very threatening sound, but he’s getting to be so massive that he’s definitely imposing.  He takes this job seriously, always picking out who he thinks is the troublemaker and targeting him/her specifically for little snakelike jabs with that big head of his.  So the newcomers learn fast to work their way up the ranks gradually, and not set off The Big Guy too much by being too much the social climber.

And it works.  We have happy flocks.  Whenever there’s a singleton newcomer introduced to a flock on either side, the process seems about the same.  Brief universal shunning, a few short spats, begrudging acceptance into the lowest tier, and gradual tolerance of the newcomer and a place on the roosts at night with opportunities for social advancement, given time.

Are you my neighbor?

It’s not a bad system.  Better than some human ones I’ve participated in.  Similar to several of them, more humane than a couple.  I think it’s closer to being a newcomer in high school than to being a new professor in a mid-tier academic department… the latter situation can range from uplifting to downright horrifying, depending on the roosters in that flock.  I’ve seen it both ways, occasionally at the same time in the same department.  Being now a bit removed from the daily academic environment affords me the luxury of looking back and seeing it with new eyes.

Roosting neighbors

Overall, I loved being a professor.  And now I love being with my chickens even better.  Happy New Year.

*note to birders: I know that only woodcocks are said to “peent”, yet this unique and seldom used vocalization of the turkey reminds me of peenting (search “peenting” and you can hear woodcocks on YouTube), although it’s far from being the same call.  Someday I’ll record this insistent, nasal warning the turkey makes and post it.  Meanwhile, I’ll call it a peent.

It’s not really Dragonwood’s first ground-coating snow of the season… but we missed the first one, being away on visits.  So it’s OUR first snow, and it didn’t arrive until after Christmas!

So, to celebrate my morning walk with birds and cats, here are the first snow footprints that I found this morning:

1. Unknown polydactyl cat print, front foot, five toes across the front.  Non-polydactyl cats normally have five toes on the front paw, but arranged as four across the pad and one behind, as a dew claw.  Gina and a couple other kitties here have five toes on the front, but arranged straight across the top like this one.

2. Sassy (aka Sasquatch), who came running through the snow to see me.  On the bottom is her front paw print, with seven toes, and on the top is her back paw, which has five toes (non-polys have four in the back).  It’s harder to see the fifth claw and matching pad, but they’re on the left of the main print and other toes.

Sassy has 24 toes altogether, tied for our local record holder.  You can only see six toes/claws on her front paw print here, arranged with four across the front and two out on a “thumb” (to the left, since this is her right paw)… the seventh claw has no pad, and grows neatly between the thumb-pair and the four-pad above, and curls under (rarely leaving a mark).

Also… Sassy seldom retracts her claws, and we’ve never known her to do so while she walks.  Normally cats retract their claws, leaving a distinctly different pawprint (like #1 above) from their friends like dogs and raccoons (always show claws in their prints).  But Sassy walks on her claws, whether in the snow or on our hardwood floors… you can always hear her click clacking along in the night.

3. The turkey.  Our Tom greets me every morning, and on a morning like this it’s easy to see where he’s been exploring before I get out to greet him in return.  Tom is now 2-1/2 years old.

I shoulda shot the chicken prints too, I suppose.  And the juncos flitting around the kitchen garden’s remains.  But this isn’t a documentary, it’s a celebration.  It snowed!  Yay!

Although today was nice and warmish, I am not fooled.  Frosty time has come again to Dragonwood.  I love frosty weather, and cannot, cannot, cannot help taking photos every time the frost appears, especially in the mornings when I go out to open up the chickens.

These last few weeks, the frosts have all been light, and in the early morning it’s common to have frost gone in the very early sunlight but still present in all the shadows.

brittle star

Also we’ve only had one or two hard frosts where the frost extended right up to the garage and under the big trees… usually the frosts have just been out in the open.

Colder weather is coming.  Snow picture season will be next.  I love snow picture season. :-)

Sorry, it’s just been so long since I posted anything at all, that I thought I’d just post this photo I took this morning with my new phone.  The morning sun on the sage caught my eye, and since the best camera is the one you have with you, you get to see what I saw.  The chickens had to wait a couple minutes more to get out to pasture, but them’s the breaks.  You don’t get much from this tiny view… click through to see it bigger (along with the spotty beetle adding color).

It’s not consolation, but taking the photo and posting it helps a little with something else I had to do this morning.  Boy George died last night, and I buried him this morning.  He was a wonderful friend, and I miss him.  I’ll repost this photo of him, as a little memorial to the way he loved to curl up with you. Sniff.

Goodbye, Boy.

A lot of things are halfway done.  We could always do more, and we did more than some.  I’m on break to post this, and here’s my halfway photo to prove it.

If you click on the photo you can see a bit more detail, but among the projects visible are (far left) the garage (which is halfway cleaned up for the spring), and the newest chicks in their fenced coop (30 of them, about half the total chicks we should have housed there by the end of May), the kitchen garden (distant background fenced in, which is about halfway planted), the “big field” with a rowcover tent (foreground, with tiller marking the halfway mark of the tilling), our two biggest apple trees in full bloom hiding our neighbor’s house, and behind the big field on the right are a bunch of our spindly new apple trees, just starting to bloom.

I just finished (no halfway job) some coding that needed it.  So I’m going to take a break and head out to push the big field tilling job to a little beyond halfway.  I expect M will have the field halfway planted within another half day.  And when I get the big field done, I should be halfway through the tilling I intend to do.  And the green green grass here will be half again past where it should be when I should mow it.  I can’t wait to get the new hoop house halfway finished.  Now that’ll be progress.

This weekend’s weather was beautiful, in the 60s and delightful for gardening in short sleeves, and for getting the first taste of sunburn.  Earlier in the week though, we planted out a bed where we weren’t using our sprouts from the living room, but instead sowing tiny seeds in long rows.

The weather was alternating between overcast sunny and scudding cloudy, but the wind was constantly whipping us this way and that.  We in our winter coveralls laid things out the bed, and I learned a new trick.

We got the bed ready, and M started laying out the rows the way she does, with a board making tiny Vees in the soil.  I added the steel wire hoops across the bed, about every 18″.  Then we unrolled a fresh piece of row cover cloth, long enough to make it easy to fasten down at each end after the last hoops.

Usually we plant the seeds and cover them and then put the row cover cloth over the hoops.  But it was so windy there was no way we could keep the seeds from blowing away, so on went the row cover first.  Then M ducked her head under the cover’s edge on one side of the row while I held on to it (and took a picture one handed).

Won’t tell you what we were planting though.  Secret stuff.  You’ll get to see it later this summer, at the market we hope.  Some of it.  The other is even more secret, and we’ll all have to wait until late next fall, or even early winter before we know for sure how it comes out.  But the seeds of this secret are planted.

We spent most of yesterday in the gardens, digging out grasses, planting out lettuces, readying other beds for more of the same. Two tables in the living room are taken up with sprouts under grow lights, and the porch overflows. Conservatively Mandy has 5000 plants growing in pots and/or already planted out.

It is so nice now to be eating fresh greens every day, and sometimes at two meals a day already. Fried eggs on a bed of baby greens, mmmm.

Coldframe littuces getting some fresh air. Missing ones in the middle have been planted out in the new bed, top left.

Two days ago I found Mandy planting out some rows of 3-4″ tall deer’s tongue lettuce… I didn’t recognize them from the sprouts she’d been growing. Instead, these had been planted as seed last fall outside and then covered with a cold frame… a small garden spot about 3′ by 3′ with a hay bale back end, bricks and hay sides, and a south-facing 50-year old wooden window frame to make a tiny greenhouse. All winter the lettuces sat there mulling things over, and in the past two months of slow spring they came out of hibernation. Now they’re so crowded that she took out just two handfuls and filled rows of lettuce sprouts ready to grow big and strong.

And much more to do in the garden.  Mmmmm.  Recently we’ve been doing a lot, as is our wont in April, weather and circumstances permitting.

Red, red newbarb.

There’s rhubarb to discover under the leaves, to expose and (for some of them) to cover under ceramic pots.  We get nice long juicy stalks with less energy going into making big big leaves.  The first of the season though (the newbarbs) are just so red and beautiful and luscious.  Rhubarb custard does not last long around here.  Very nice with coffee for first breakfast (before the eggs and greens).

Last week, not in our gardens but a few steps away in the hens’ free-range territory, I found a patch of white tucked away in the barbs of the black raspberry patch.  We hadn’t seen it before, but there it was, a nice patch of Bloodroot flowers.  I haven’t tried breaking off a stem to see the reddish juices inside.  They’re just too nice.  And the hens have completely ignored them, it seems to me.  They might know something I don’t about bloodroot’s flavor (or perhaps the aftereffects).

And finally, inside, we find Sassy expressing her innermost desire for the high diving board.  Nearly every day she finds a comfy spot and assumes a near-10 quality tuck position in her sleep, dreaming of her splash-free pool entry at the bottom.  May we all have such dreams to tuck into as we sleep.

Diver cat, tuck position.

This is another Dragonwood egg report… we haven’t had one in a while.  In short, February has been nothing short of amazing.  In the first week of February the hens were laying about 6 eggs a day (range 3-8) and had been doing so since November.  It’s now the 26th of February as I write this, and today we got 26 eggs.  That’s an increase of about one egg a day for three weeks straight!  Go ladies go!

For reference, this is the way egg season seems to work.  As the hours of daylight get longer, the ladies lay more eggs, more frequently, and as the hours of daylight wane across the summer, the egg laying falters.  For us, it means eggs start coming back in February, peak in June, and start waning in earnest come September.  From mid-October to late-February we don’t get enough eggs to sell, and barely enough to eat ourselves (and an occasional dozen for nearby family).  In mid-summer, we get roughly 2/3 production daily - two of three hens lay each day.

Our flocks are pretty naturalized… we don’t give them artificial light or artificial anything during the winter to force them through molting faster or to stimulate laying.  The most artificiality they get from us is that a couple times a winter when the temperature at night is going to fall below zero we might turn on a heat lamp for the coldest hours.

By contrast, it’s standard practice at egg farms to completely manage lighting cycles for hens so that they lay as many eggs as possible with as little seasonal downtime as possible.  This is equivalent to cracking the whip over those slave hens.  The hens have a brief molting period artificially imposed, and then it’s back to work.

Them: Egg Slave Factory Farms.

Us: Hey, take four months off, you deserve it.  Thanks for all the hard work.

So, now it’s February and the eggses are landing.  We’ve got lots of teeny pullet eggs coming in from the new flock we raised last fall, as well as increasing numbers of large eggs from the older ladies.  This photo is the first dozen eggs I collected today, laid out in the fresh snow on our picnic table.

We get so used to our big eggs that we think the pullet eggs are just SO TEENY that we call them “culls” and never sell them to anyone.  But I began wondering, just how small are these eggs?  And how big are the big ones?  So I got out the market scale to measure a few, and now I can quantificate our eggsitential nature for your edification.

Our littlest pullet eggs:  6 of them weighed in at 9.8 oz.  That means a dozen would weigh in at 19.6 ounces… not bad.

Our big bruiser eggs: today’s biggest three eggs weighed 8.4 oz together.  That means a dozen would weigh about 33.2 oz.  Wow.

Last fall I measured a couple of our average dozen we were selling at the Westside Farmer’s Market in Ann Arbor.  The dozens (with a range of all our sizes except for “culls”) averaged a hair over 30 oz.

Perspective?  At yer local store where sellers have to actually sort them by size and such, the size categories are: small (18 oz), medium (21 oz), large (24 oz), extra large (27 oz), and jumbo (30 oz).

Holy ostrich, Batman!  Our teeniest pullet eggs are halfway between small and medium.  Our average dozen we sell are jumbos.  What does that make our real bigguns?  Extra jumbo?  Super jumbo?  Ginormous?

And then talk about yer bargain pricing.  We sold eggs last year for $4 a dozen.  Chemical free, free-ranging, practically pets, beautiful browns and greens and blues in the jumbo size for $4.  By comparison, you can drop in at the People’s Food Co-op and get somebody else’s eggs there that look just like ours, browns and blues and greens all pretty, for $5.75 a dozen, in the “large” size.  Large.  That’s 24 oz of eggs.  Dragonwood’s Dozen, by comparison, is running 25% more egg (30 vs 24 oz) for about 25% less, which works out precisely to… oh, that’s not easy math.  Instead, those eggs from somebody else would only be about $3.25 at the pricing scale we use, not $5.75.  And if we sold our eggs at somebody else’s price, our jumbo dozens should cost about $7.20 per dozen, instead of $4.

Get yer Dragonwood Bargain Basement Eggs now!  Whoohoo!

M called me this morning from up the road about 4 miles, and practically shouted “I just saw an eagle!”  There was more to the story, but the sighting was nearby, so I threw on my boots and grabbed my camera and the bird book and headed up there.

I didn’t see it.  I drove back and forth in the area for about 10 minutes and nothing happened.

I was just starting home when, about a quarter mile ahead I did see a big bird wheel across the road.  I marked the spot mentally and slowed the car over to the edge where I thought it should be… and there it was.  Big and brown on a tree branch about 40 feet up, way bigger than a hawk.  I turned on the camera and turned off the car and started the video recording.  I shot just a few seconds then slowly started to open the car door… and saw him lean forward and take off.  So then I jumped out of the car and tried to keep him in the viewfinder, all zoomed up close, and not get hit by passing cars.  I didn’t do too well, most of the 60 seconds is not of the eagle.  But there were a few seconds that were just breathtaking, big swooping sweeps of wings in the gentle snow as he wheeled around and then headed off east.

Juvenile Bald Eagle, near Manchester Michigan, Feb 26 2011. Click for high resolution version.

Click it for the high resolution version.  Here are 13 sequential frames (one big wing flap down and up) starting from upper right.  I cut and pasted these all together onto the background of the first frame.  It seems to be a juvenile bald eagle, from what we can see in the books that we have.  Here’s a single frame:

It was pretty stunning.  I’ve seen eagles before, and they’re always breathtaking, but we’ve never seen one so close to Dragonwood.

We reuse a lot at Dragonwood, far more than we recycle.  We don’t buy much stuff, or even much food, and very little of that food is packaged.  So we don’t actually have much to recycle on a regular basis, and we don’t have much to throw away, ever.  We can go weeks or even months without having to get rid of a garbage bag (garbage never really smells too bad if you compost the organic parts).

Mandy wrote the other day about planting and recycling… which was really about planting and reusing.  She reuses and re-reuses constantly in that process, to the point of going to our local recycling station and rescuing reusable resources that others used only once.  We recycle something once it’s broken to the point of not being able to reuse it for nearly anything.

I’m building a sugar shack.  It’s an extension of our West Flock Coop out in the back yard.  The West Flock Coop construction project was a significant effort in reuse for us… vertical posts and siding were salvaged from a disintegrating barn, windows acquired from Recycle Ann Arbor (and streetside, curb-toss finds) over the years, so only some 2×4s and nails were new.  Even hinges for the coop doors were mostly old hinges, most decades old and kept in old tin cans or peanut butter jars until ready for some project like this.

Oh, back to the sugar shack / woodshed / seasonal storage space project.  It’s been on hold this week in the snow and ice, but I’ll be getting back to it shortly (like tomorrow), so I’ll write a bit about it now.  The Coop is about 7′ deep and 15′ wide with a fence along the east side keeping chickens on the coop side of the yard and giving them free range into the woods, but not into our flower and food gardens.  We’re extending the Coop to the east in order to add firewood storage (partially covered, against the coop) and a covered sugar shack/seasonal storage area.

So far:  we’ve got the four posts in the ground (former barn beams and supports, 100+ years old), and we’ve got the full framework of 2×4s and 2×6s on top and connected to the Coop for roof support.  The 2×4s and 2×6s were scavenged from an urban teardown project where Mandy and friends tore things apart and stacked much used/partially rotted wood and plywood in a trailer and hauled it all back here.  We’ve been using it bit by bit for two years now, and have made small coops and repairs from many parts of the stack.  These are nearly the last of the 2×6s and 2×4s, and I took out about 300 old nails using pry bar,  hammer and vicegrip plyers to get them ready for use.

LEFT PHOTO: View from the front (north), West Flock Coop on the right, and you can see my woodpile waiting to be split (mostly) along the fence that keeps chickens safe from us.  I use that tire on the stump for holding firewood while I split it (another good idea I found on the interwebs).  After the roof goes on, our splits will be stored in the new roofed area next to the coop.  The really wide overhang in the front will get angle supports to help it, and we expect to use the area for summer tool storage outside (rakes and spades and barrow).

RIGHT PHOTO: This view is from the top, looking at one of the old beams now used as a post, and our reused lumber with LOTS of old nail holes.  I do sometimes reuse old nails, but these were worthless and I’m using decking screws from another project to hold things together well.  Chickens are on the other side of the fence in their yard.  Aren’t the new Buff Orpingtons looking great?  They’re kinda like those square cows in old pastoral paintings, in that their shape is so exaggeratedly chickenesque.  Gotta love ‘em.  Elm and ash in the woodpile; we’re still fueling the house from the dead trees killed by foreign pests, Dutch Elm fungus and Emerald Ash Borer beetles.  Yet more reuse, in a sense.

More on this sugar shack (and maple weather) coming soon.