The Honest Courtesan

Now that the weather is slowly getting warmer and drier, we’ll soon be able to start working on the stable again; Jae’s patron had the rest of the materials shipped here, but it has rained nearly every weekend (and he isn’t available on weekdays).  But worse come to worst, July and August are generally dry here, so we’ll be able to get it done then if not before (I think perhaps two more dry weekends of good work can probably accomplish it).  That means it’ll be all done before the autumn; which is the next time it’ll really be needed; right now there’s very little hay in the barn, so the animals have plenty of room to shelter in there when it rains.  But as summer goes on it will fill up with hay, which means Shiloh won’t be able to shelter there because of her bad reaction to hay dust.  I think they’ll like the stable; as you can see, they already prefer to be in that part of the paddock when they aren’t doing something important somewhere else.

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On Saturday, the weather helped me to accomplish with relative ease a task I thought was going to be rather difficult: putting the sapphire gems into the nursery in place of the pullets.  I let the pullets out, and blocked the poultry door so the others couldn’t get in until I was ready.  Then all I had to do was wait for one of the cloudbursts we had all day Saturday; I removed the block, let the hens come in from the rain, then re-blocked the entrance so they couldn’t get away.  Five minutes later, it was done.  The other adult hens seem uninterested in attacking the pullets, so I’m going to keep it this way for a week before letting the smallest of the sapphires out.  If that goes well, I’ll let the second one out a week later, then the largest (who seems to be the main culprit) three weeks hence.  If she behaves herself, well and fine; if not, she’s going down the road immediately because the few small brown eggs she lays aren’t worth her pecking the new pullets to death.  You can see in this picture that the one with the worst wounds is now almost healed; her feathers are regrowing nicely, and by the time I let the bad egg out again (sorry about that) it should be difficut to tell which it was.  So if I see more blood, I’ll know it’s a fresh attack and we’ll be back down to eight chickens until next spring.

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Years ago, I worked out a system to stop older hens from pecking pullets to death, and it worked fine up until this year.  The sapphire gems I got last year have proven to be more aggressive than any other hens I’ve ever had; they simply wouldn’t stop viciously going after the pullets, despite my precautions.  Nor was it limited to only one of the pullets; all three have been bloodied, but after an especially-vicious attack last week I was forced to put the little ones back into the nursery in order to protect them.  If you want to see, enlarge the picture and look at the back of the middle one’s neck; it was originally much uglier, because this is after several days of my putting antibiotic salve on the wound.  The one on the right has a less serious wound atop her head, and the one which looks unharmed was severely pecked in her anal area when she tried to escape by going into a gap in the wall that had no other way out.  Next week, I plan to let them out and put the blues into the cage for several weeks, then let those out one at a time to see if the behavior resumes (and cull the offenders if it does; I can’t have hens that try to kill every new arrival).  I don’t plan to buy any more of the breed in the future, and if you keep chickens my advice is you don’t, either.  They’re attractive, healthy birds, but the small brown eggs they lay aren’t worth this kind of trouble when I could have some nice white leghorns or Rhode Island reds.

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Spring has finally arrived, albeit a month late, and I think the animals are even happier about it than I am.  I’ve never even seen Jonathan sunbathing like this; usually the only time he lies flat like that is when he’s taking a dust bath in the summer, and at those times he’s rolling back and forth rather than lying still.  You can see that his wool is a frightful mess from all the mud; he’s been combing it by circling cedar trees which keeping his head down, so the branches pull out all the loose, dirty wool, but on Saturday he just wanted to enjoy the sun.  I saw practically every pet doing something similar at some point that day; even the chickens seemed to be enjoying it.  It still tends to be pretty rainy here in May and June, but warm spring rains are not at all the same thing as frigid rain alternating with hail and snow; here’s hoping that by the next time we see either of those sorts of precipitation, the bathhouse is snugly sealed up so it’s not quite such a hassle as it was this winter.

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Jae’s patron has been offering to build a stable for her pony for quite some time now; the barn is just too large for the animals’ body heat to warm it adequately, and Shiloh actually has a kind of allergy to hay dust, so a hay barn isn’t a healthy environment for her.  Since the temporary shelter got ripped up in a windstorm a few weeks ago, the plan had to be moved from theory to reality.  I told them I was happy to provide the space as long as it was big enough for Jonathan and Cicero too, so last Wednesday a shipment of lumber and other supplies arrived, and on Friday and Saturday we dodged rain (and even a little hail) to get the frame started.  After getting the foundation blocks in place, I mostly assisted with the framing and spreading those wood chips around; there was some miscommunication about size, so we stopped when we mostly ran out of lumber, and will finish framing in the near future.  It’ll be nice to have something more solid for the pony and llama, and I’m really tired of having to clean up the shop from Cicero staying there at night.  I think he approves; if you look closely at the picture below, you’ll be able to see where he parked himself to watch us working.

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