Rats!

I know there are people with pet rats.  I’m sure they are wonderful pets, but I just can’t see it.  Especially not after the mess we cleaned up this weekend.

First off, I made two serious mistakes that contributed to this problem.

1. I stored a season’s worth of peacock feathers in the feed room.
2. I also stored some baling twine in the feedroom.

Why was this a problem?  Well, the rats seemed to think chewed-up feathers and twine fluff make quite excellent nests.

They had a regular habitat built, a warren of rats, hiding behind barrels and the metal trash cans we use to store feed.  It was sheltered from the wind, they had nice little insulated nests, what with the feathers and twine, so what more could they want?

Oh, yeah.  They needed food.
And they found a plentiful supply.

We’d been noticing the peafowl’s food bowl was emptying out mighty fast.  Every morning… empty!  And we figured it highly unlikely the peafowl all of a sudden wanted so much more food.  It didn’t take a great leap of imagination to figure the rats were helping themselves at night after the peafowl went to roost.  So although they couldn’t get to the feed in the metal cans in the feed room, they still had nice high-protein chow at the local Peafowl Restaurant.

And then there was the smell.  A colony of rats, little rat calling cards everywhere, and worse, rat urine.  Really, REALLY bad.

So Saturday we had a nice, warm day, and The Farmer figured it was a good day to clean out the feed room.  While I was at the grocery store, he started in, so I didn’t get to see the first wave of rats leaving the sinking ship.  They had a huge nest built in the corner behind a couple of metal trash cans. . .

By all accounts, when he started pulling this out, the rats went everywhere!  Up the walls, out the door, out a hole in the window screen (and here we’d been blaming squirrels for that hole…).

The twine was wrapped around stuff in the feed room, and was very difficult to work loose.  We had to do a lot of cutting to get it out.  Then The Farmer carried big shovels full of the stuff to a pile outside and burnt it.

Toby was going nuts and constantly getting in the way.

He could smell the rats had been there, and he could hear the little babies squeaking.  Not to mention a few mummified remains of deceased rodents.

We did not allow the next generation to mature.

It was a long, dirty, tiring job.  We scraped up caked poop, nesting materials and urine.  We swept and swept.  We could not get every last bit off the floor or from between the outer wall and joists.  But we got most of it.  The feedroom looks a lot better, and it sure smells a lot better!

As for the Peacock Restaurant, it has been closed down.  Every night we bring the bowl of feed in and stick it in a metal can where the rats can’t get to it.  So we have evicted them from their home, and taken away their easy food supply.  I was feeling pretty good about all that until the Cave Geek wondered if they might decide to try living in OUR house next.

I could have done without that thought. . .

Manna From Heaven

Around here, our chickens get manna from heaven.

They look for it when there is sunshine, and they look for it when there’s rain.

They do not, however, stand around in the snow waiting for manna or anything else.  The chickens do not want out in the snow.  Neither do the guineas.

This is a pretty good system for the chickens.  They just stand around under the bird feeder and wait for those rotten little English sparrows to throw out some corn and sunflower seeds. . .

However, as messy as the sparrows are, they are amateurs compared to this crew. . .

.

The reason the blackbirds make such a mess is they have a tough time balancing on the little perches so close up to the feeder.  So they flap their wings and the feeder swings…. and out drops manna from heaven.

Our chickens are so blessed.

Water, Water Everywhere!

Well, actually, that’s not quite true. The problem was the water was in the wrong place!

I was all excited because today is much warmer than it’s been in a while, and I figured I could use the hose hooked to the faucet by the wellhouse, and fill up all the water buckets. Sure beats carrying water in frigid weather!

Unfortunately, when I got to the wellhouse, I was stepping in big puddles of water, and there was water gushing out of the drainage holes in the bottom layer of bricks.

Well, this isn’t the first time this has happened so I knew what to do. . . go in the house, find the circuit breaker for the pump, and flip it off.  The Cave Geek did that for me, and helped me scoot back the roof on the wellhouse to peek inside.  I couldn’t really tell much, but obviously one of the pipes froze up and cracked during the really cold weather, and when it warmed up and thawed today… water, water, everywhere, but not where one could drink!

At this point, I was really bummed on several counts. 

• The Farmer is going to have to fix the pipes, AGAIN.
• Why didn’t the little heater keep it warm enough?
• And now I’m going to have to carry water to fill buckets!

I figured with all the buckets and no more than I can carry at one time, it would take about 18-20 trips to fill them all.

Well, you know that old saying… necessity is the mother of invention!  I figured since I was going to have to use county water anyway (house has county water, not from the well… I don’t know why it was done that way…) — Anyway, since I couldn’t get any water from the well and going to use the county water, I decided I might as well hook up a hose to the faucet on the back porch and string a lot of hoses together to reach the buckets. 

Cause it seemed to me easier to string a bunch of hoses than to carry lots and LOTS of buckets of water.  So that’s what I did.

So on the bright side, the buckets are all filled up with water again.
On the not-so-bright side, the plumbing must be fixed on the well.  Again.

That’s life on the farm in the winter!

Baby it’s cold outside!

It’s winter and I know it’s supposed to be cold.  And I also know it’s not near as cold here as it is in other parts of the world.  But I’m still thinkin’ … Baby, it’s cold outside!  It’s a sharp contrast to the balmy weather we were enjoying in Florida over the Thanksgiving holidays!

The animals have their own ways of keeping warm.  During the day, the guineas like to nestle down in some leaves in the yard – of which there are plenty due to the huge oak and walnut and other trees around the house!

Some of the chickens like to shelter under a big viburnum bush in the front yard, even though it’s in the shade.

I suppose it provides some shelter from the wind, and they apparently want that more than heat from any sunshine there might be.

Meanwhile, the squirrels are still scampering around the yard gathering up nuts.

Once the nut is buried, off the squirrel goes to find another!

A little cold weather doesn’t slow down our mighty hunter, Spot the cat.  He was playing with his food again, and chasing this rodent around.

He’d catch the thing, then let it go … then catch it again.  I don’t know if he ever ate it or just played with it.

While all this was going on, the goat, llama, sheep and Maremma sheepdog just took it easy and rested in what sunshine they could find.

They like to nestle down where there is some dry grass to provide a little insulation.

And me, once I’ve made sure everyone outside has food and water, I’m headed back to the house to get WARM again!

Just Hangin’ Around!

Yesterday evening I went out to do chores. Well, sometimes you see the darndest things around here. See, there’s a woven wire fence separating the “people” backyard from the “animal’s” backyard. The fence is just a few feet from the back of the house really.

So it was impossible to miss this:

Yes, there was one of the young white roosters hanging in the woven wire fence!

As for how it got there?  My best guess is something (cough, cough.. Toby.. cough, cough) startled it, and it took off to fly over the fence and didn’t quite make it.

As soon as I saw it I went back inside and got two things:

1. Gloves, because I figured he might get a tad excited and I didn’t want spurred, scratched and damaged trying to effect a rescue, and
2. My camera… come on, it just took a few seconds to take the pictures, and who would believe it otherwise?

So there you have it, another wacky moment on the farm.