Guinea Gangsters

I looked out in the pasture a while ago, and saw two guineas running round and round the pasture. This is nothing new; they do it all the time. One chases the other, trying to prove dominance I suppose.

Then I remembered I’d taken a short video of their crazy antics back in the spring. I was sitting at the table eating breakfast, and watched those goofballs chase around the pasture for a half hour or more.

Guineas can be awfully mean to each other and any other fowl on the farm. Good thing they have redeeming qualities like being great “watchdogs”, and the best critters for cutting down the tick population.

Here’s one of the guineas keeping watch from the top of The Farmer’s work shed.

Without such redeeming qualities, I doubt if many people would put up with the Guinea Gangsters.

Peachick Surprise

A couple hours ago I looked in an incubator to see one peachick almost out of an egg, and another just pipping. But a while ago I decided there sure was a lot of peeping going on, so I peeped too… peeped right in the incubator that is!

Here’s what I saw: It’s the 3 Stooges! Or maybe it’s 3 little T-Rexes!

What a nice surprise! I’ve got 2 peachicks in a brooder box already, and 3 more hatched out now in the incubator.

This is more like it!

Sometimes Farming is Hard

Let’s face it – farming isn’t always fun.

If you raise crops of some sort, there are problems with the weather, fuel costs for heating greenhouses and running equipment, and a sometimes fickle market, to name a few.

When you raise animals, you have all those problems and then some. And it’s easy to get attached to animals, especially the little ones. Babies of any sort are cute! It’s great to look out and see lambs or kids or calves or colts or any little critters frolicking around in the fields.

Yes, it’s great — that is, IF the moms are taking proper care of the youngsters and everyone is doing fine. But it isn’t always like that. Sometimes things go wrong. That’s when farming really tops the charts in the “not fun” department. That’s where I’ve been this week.

You can raise the same sort of critters for years, using the same husbandry practices, and then all of a sudden, one year it all goes wrong. Sometimes you can figure out the cause and adapt or change things. Sometimes you have no idea what the problem was, so there’s just not much you can do about it.

When our little twin goat kids were born this spring, I was a little concerned. The mother is getting up in years and had a difficult labor. Worse, she was NOT supposed to be pregnant in the first place, but was bred by one of her sons. One of the kids had a deformed leg, but that eventually improved. Overall, they seemed healthy enough.

At least, they seemed fine until this week. Then one get sick, and within 24 hours was dead. Then the second one got sick, and within 24 hours was dead. I worked over them until I could barely straighten back up, giving them antibiotics, dextrose, vitamins, and every other therapy I could find that would pertain to the problem.

Nothing helped.

I knew it was a slim chance going in that I could save either kid. It didn’t help that I read even though they’ve had vaccinations, once in a while, some kids still get sick. They were in my care, and they died.

That’s hard.

This morning Son #2 and I had burial detail. The ground is too hard and rocky here to dig down very deep, so we opt for an above ground burial. It’s easier, but not easy. It has to be done right to make a hot compost so the body is broken down quickly and with no odor. We had 5 big carts full of stuff we put in the pile: some below, some above the bodies. It was hard work. To make matters worse, it was raining.

While we worked the llamas hummed and the mama goat cried. Their mournful dirge made a hard job even harder. I’d moved them as far away as possible from where we were working. It didn’t matter. When we were finally done and I let them out, that mama goat made a beeline to where we’d buried her babies and cried some more. It was heartrending.

Sometimes farming is hard.

Llamas, Together at Last (Sort of)

It all started last night when The Farmer and I went out of do chores. We have a routine, and things get done just fine as long as we stay with the routine. When it gets interrupted… no guarantees what happens!

We have much more fun off playing by ourselves than always following after Mama!When the older goats ran in last night, only one little kid followed, but we could hear the other one bawling loudly somewhere. When we finally located him, we saw he’d gotten himself into a real predicament.

He’d obviously been playing on The Farmer’s lawnmower. Little goat kids LOVE to climb and play on anything they can find. The only trouble is when he jumped down, he managed to catch his foot and was stuck fast.

I must say, it took real talent, because as you can see in the picture to the right, he had to jump down at just the right angle for his foot to go in there. The only trouble is that once he was down, his leg was at the wrong angle and he couldn’t get it back out.

But then, neither could we!

The Farmer finally had to get a pair of pliers and pull back the metal far enough to get the little rascal’s foot loose.

Needless to say, our usual routine got lost in the rescue operations. That’s probably why when I went out to do chores this morning, this is what I saw:
Uh-oh! Two llamas in ONE pen!

Well, surprise, surprise! I guess I forgot to walk over and shut the gate to Samson’s pen last night after putting his feed bucket in place. Instead, I was homing in on the distress call from the little goat kid, and my routine came unglued.

The good news is they don’t seem to be fighting. The bad news is I don’t know if they’ve gotten romantic either, and I feel a little guilty not being there to keep check on them the first time they were both in the same pen.

If I were a betting woman, I’d guess Samson is still looking for love, cause Keira keeps her distance. Whenever he gets within a few feet of her, she skitters off in another direction. She’s still not sure what to make of this new furball who thinks he wants to get up close and personal!

It’s still a game of hide and seek – Keira hides, and Samson keeps seeking!

Lovelorn Llama

It’s soap opera time on the farm with a tale of unrequited love, raging hormones and cold-hearted indifference.

Flash back to last Thursday night, when a new llama arrived on the farm. We’ve been thinking about getting some company for our single llama lady for a long time, and happened to see an ad for this guy. Isn’t he handsome?
However, I guess we should have placed an ad with eHarmony.com, because we seem to have a compatibility problem here. After a brief bout of curiousity, and touching of noses, Keira has since refused to acknowledge there is another llama on the farm.
Yes, it would seem the lady rejects her would-be sweetheart. In fact, she refuses to admit his existence most of the time. It’s the cold shoulder treatment for poor Samson, with Keira turning her back to him and ignoring his presence in the pasture next door.

See Samson in the background?
And there’s Keira, as usual, giving him the cold shoulder treatment.

Every morning when I let the critters out, Samson rushes to the fence to see where Keira went. He hums and groans, sounding very much like he’s trying to start his engine, desperately trying to get her attention.

It doesn’t work. She continues to thoroughly ignore him.

Will Samson ever get the attention of his would-be lover? Will Keira ever accept him as a suitor? Stay tuned for the continuing soap opera of “The Lovelorn Llamas!”