As you can see, Axel and Speck are now friends. I can’t really claim any credit; Speck was the one who made all the overtures and slowly got him used to her presence. I apologize for this being a poorly-composed picture; that lump under the blanket is my leg, so if I’d tried to get up to catch the shot from a different angle, they might’ve moved. Alas, Axel has not stopped being aggressive altogether; a few days ago a stray cat came into the atrium and if I hadn’t called him off it would not have been pretty. But one step at a time; at least he leaves the resident cats alone. He is now down to 50 mg of trazodone per day, in a single dose at bedtime; that’s a lot lower than what he was on when he arrived in late November, but it’s still quite high considering he’s on a typical human dose despite having only about a quarter of a typical human body mass. Even so, I’m going to keep weaning him off of it slowly; since I stopped splitting the dose between afternoon and bedtime I’ve noticed he’s a bit more antsy in the afternoons, so just cutting him off would still be a bad idea. His next reduction will be this coming Sunday, down to 25 mg, so we’ll see how that works out and proceed accordingly.
In chick news, I typically keep them inside for three weeks, so they should’ve gone out into the henhouse nursery on Sunday. However, the turkey chick is two weeks younger than the others, and the predicted low on Sunday night was -4o C, so I held off on putting them outside until today (it was only a one-night cold snap). So watch next week for a video of them in the newly-rebuilt nursery, where they’ll spend the next three weeks before I start letting them out in the daytime to mix with the adult hens.
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