Tuesday Tidbits

I keep waiting for my life to get back to “normal” after coming home from vacation.  Work has been INSANE to the point where I’m so worn out, I fall asleep about the same time Little Chick does each night.  Sometimes I think it’s before … since I wake up still sitting in the bean bag chair next to her bed.  Uff da.  I’m too old to sleep like that.

The weather has improved some.  We still have a lot of snow on the ground, but less than we did when this picture was taken a week ago, as it got up over 50°F yesterday.

The robins are back in full force.  Papa took a video … but don’t watch it if you get seasick easily.  I told him he needs to work on his video skills.  But it shows a good example of the 50+ robins that were in our trees that day.

A mass of robins

I’ve decided that having Finley is a lot like having a teenage boy.  He only wants to come home for food and to sleep.  Otherwise, he’s been running around, barking at everything that moves, and soaking up the sunshine.  (See?  Most of the snow is gone from the deck.  Yippee!)

I don’t think I mentioned that we now have one less hen than we had at the beginning of the year.

Precious, our pet chicken, finally succumbed.  She wasn’t handling this extremely cold winter very well.  All she wanted to do was sit on the nest.  Papa would pick her up a couple of times a day, take her over to the food and water and she’d eat and drink for about 5 min straight.  Then she’d go right back to the nest.  One morning he came out and found her slumped over and “sleeping” on her favorite nesting spot.  Although the Speckled Sussex breed is supposed to be cold-hardy, she never was.  In fact, we think it was a hard cold-snap that first winter we had her that blinded her in the first place.

In the good news arena, our other hens are really starting to produce.  We seem to be averaging 11-13 eggs per day!

Some of the eggs are rather small – we think those are from the smaller hens (the ones we got free).  A few from the Rhode Island Reds have made me question if they are double-yolkers, as they are huge!  But nope, just single yolked extra-large eggs.

I’ve been selling some of the eggs to co-workers for the last month.  It’s barely covered the cost of their feed, but we might be getting ahead of the game … and soon the weather will be nice enough that they can start free-ranging again and get lots of free bugs and grasses to eat!