Good Morning!

Just popping in briefly to say I'm alive and well, but very busy working on a non-eBay editing project (one that PAYS!), so that takes up most of my morning  writing time for a while.

Sales have been AWFUL this past week.  My seed season is over and my cruelty-free feather season has not yet begun, so, except for a few ebooks and a photo, I've sold nothing.  June is my worst month.   My birds are starting to shed feathers, but I have not sorted them out yet.  Geese drop all their wing feathers over a 2-3 week period, so I prefer to wait until they are done. 

Speaking of chickens, here are 3 new additions to our poultry family.  We've had them for about a month.  My neighbor's brother didn't want them anymore so he gave them to me.  The dark one is the rooster. As you can see, he's missing his tail, but is still a pretty handsome bird, although rather wild.  He is a crossbreed but obviously has some Crested Polish ancestry.  We named him Punker.  The two hens are Carmel and Taffy, and they are tamer.  

There were four hens, but one died for unknown reasons a week after I got them, and the other went missing on the same day as the dog attack when Lady Bird got hurt.  I also lost a black Australorp rooster named Sydney on that same terrible day.  Lady Bird, BTW, is doing fine.  We have not seen those dogs around since.  If they dragged home dead chickens, hopefully their owner got the message and are not letting them run loose.  Either that, or somebody else shot them for stealing/chasing livestock -- that's reality in the country, which is why my dogs don't run loose without my supervision.

June 21, 2007:  Last week something, we suspect a neighbor's dog, got into our yard, killed two chickens, and one, Lady Bird (shown here), was missing, although I found a bunch of her feathers.  I  thought she was dead, too, but no, next morning she showed up alive -- but badly wounded.  Clearly she had been in the jaws of whatever had grabbed her, but fought hard for her life and won. 

My wife is a retired nurse and I've had a lot of experience home-doctoring animals, so together we cleaned her up, washed out the wounds with peroxide (standard procedure), applied antibiotics, and isolated her from the other chickens (who would otherwise pick on her.)

Most of the wounds were healing OK but one very deep one on her back concerned me.   By day 3 it was clear it was badly infected.  It did not seem to be healing right no matter what we did.  On day 5  I saw maggots in it.  My first reaction was disgust.  Then I remembered  stories of soldiers on the battlefield whose wounds healed better because the maggots cleaned them out.   Maybe this is God's way of helping Lady  Bird, I thought.  My wife agreed.  We decided to leave the maggots in there and I went to look up "maggots in wounds" on the Net.

Not only  were there old battlefield stories, I also learned that "larva therapy" is still used today in hospitals to treat chronic bedsores, gangrenous wounds, severe bacterial infections, etc. when standard treatments don't work. The maggots eat only the dead tissue and bacteria, and even secrete something that stimulates healing.  I was amazed!

 I found directions which said to leave them in for two days, then remove them, meanwhile wiping away the liquid stuff in the wound and keeping an eye on it.   So that's what I did.  Today I carefully took out the maggots one-by-one with a tweezers (not pleasant!)  They had gone pretty deep into the muscle where I could never have reached to clean, and they certainly did clean it out well.  We applied antibiotic  cream and a dressing, and put her back in the isolation cage for the night. 

Interestingly, Lady Bird never tried to remove the maggots, even though she could reach them with her beak and has eaten maggots in the compost pile.  Did she somehow know that these insects were helping her heal? 

Other than this wound, she's in pretty good shape -- eating, drinking, alert, active, etc.  and seems in good spirits.   This afternoon  I put her outside in a cage in the shade, so she can get some fresh air and visit other chickens through the wire.  Her best friend, a speckled red hen named Ginger, sits by her outside the cage to keep her company!  Lady Bird is not out of the woods yet, but she now has a much better chance because of "larva therapy."

For more on maggot therapy, including a gross pic of a foot being treated, go to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggot_therapy

UPDATE: June 22:  The wound looks pretty good this morning.  You can already see new healthy flesh forming.  That darned hen had managed to pull the dressing apart, but at least it kept the salve on all night while she was sleeping.  We applied more salve and a new dressing with a slightly different wrap pattern (bandaging a chicken is a challenge -- they are a hard shape to accommodate.)   I remember reading about "chicken saddles" used to protect hens from the spurs of a mating rooster, so I'm going to look that up and my wife is going to make one to put over the dressing.  Even after Lady Bird's wound closes, she's going to need some protection from other members of the flock because there are feathers missing and chickens will pick at bare spots and scabs.   For now, she's going to stay in  the "hospital cage."

June 24:  I didn't post an update yesterday (Saturday) because it was the Sabbath, but when I went down in the evening to close the coop doors, I saw that she had laid an egg -- the first one since the injury.  She had worked her way out of the chicken saddle that my wife made for her, but her wound continues to heal fine.

July 5:  Lady Bird re-joined her flock today.  She was very happy to be out of that cage and back with her friends.  The wound still has a scab on it but has filled in with new tissue so it is now level with the rest of her back.  New feathers grew in around it, so it is not visible to the other chickens to pick on.  We expect her to make a full recovery.  She has been laying an egg every day for a week now. 

Just popping in briefly -- my time today will focus on my off-ebay writing project (see earlier post) and some outdoor activity later.  Meanwhile, enjoy this pic of a rainbow I took a couple weeks ago.  It's not as bright as some rainbows we've seen around here, but still nice.

Another of Chayah's kittens found a home yesterday -- he was adopted by a very nice family from the next town.  That leaves 2 more kittens -- a male and a female -- to find homes for.  And yes, Chayah will be spayed soon. 

So far, everyone who has adopted a kitten  has also agreed to be in my photo book project, "Chayah's Kittens."  I plan to do this as an actual book -- not an ebook -- through lulu.com.   It will tell Chayah's story from the time we found her cold and starving in January 07 through the pregnancy, kittens growing up and adopted, ending with Chayah's trip to the vet and living happily ever after with me.  I'll let everyone know when it is available.  (Probably not until fall, since I'm doing another project now.)

Good morning! 

I'm up early and busy downloading a bunch of files from my new summer job -- helping develope a humane education curriculum for Jewish parochial schools!  This job actually pays me, which is a good thing, since eBay sales are very slow in summer.  I've been nogotiating this job for a while, and now we begin.  So, if I disappear from the Net for days on end, you will know what's going on...

The project is sponsored by an organization called Concern For Helping Animals in Israel (CHAI, which means "life" in Hebrew) in conjunction with a Jewish education center in Baltimore.  (I'm e-commuting from MN).   Basically, we will be adapting a set of secular lessons to include more specifically Jewish content -- that's my job, to provide the authentic Jewish content (not just Bible -- we have tons of other material from the Talmud, Midrash, folklore, oral tradition, etc.  Being Jewish is a culture, too, not just a "religion.")  

CHAI was founded in 1984 by a wonderful woman named Nina Natelson.  In Israel, they sponsor animal shelters, humane education, a low-cost spay/neuter mobile clinic, animal welfare legislation, etc.  In the USA they do mostly education and fundraising.  The project I'm working on will be a major contribution, since it will (hopefully) be used in Jewish schools across the English-speaking world.)

CHAI was involved in rescuing animals left behind when Israel pulled out of Gaza, and other animals who have been victims of war and abuse.   The Middle East seems to have less regard for animal welfare than the USA and Europe -- maybe because war hardens people in general.  Visit their website for more info.-(you have a choice of English, Hebrew or Arabic on their portal page.)

Here they are --

the cutest chicks around!

The mothers are my two Silkie hens named Frieda (the darker one) and Golda (the lighter one) who hatched out 6 eggs together last week -- and I do mean TOGETHER!  They took turns sitting on the nest, often sitting side-by-side, and are now sharing motherhood.  Here they are teaching the chicks to eat chopped-up dandelion greens -- a favorite chicken treat and nutritious, too! 

I took these pic on my hobby farm today, Father's Day, June 17,  2007, and was it pretty hard to get them, even though they are confined in a nursery area -- because those Silkies are fierce little commandos who will defend their young to the death, and they resent me pointing things such as cameras at their babies!  There are actually 6 chicks, 2 black and 4 brown, but getting even one in the pic was hard because the mothers kept putting themselves between me and the camera.  I got a few good hard pecks taking these pics -- and normally-friendly Frieda jumped at me like a rooster!   In the pic below, she's still giving me the evil eye...

 POULTRY UPDATES:

The goose egg never hatched (sigh.) But we have lots of new chicks. Shamo, the hen who was sitting on the goose egg, hatched out 5 chicks. (See previous story.)  Frieda (on the left here) and Golda (on the right below), my two Silkie hens,  hatched out 7 together. And I do mean TOGETHER!! They shared sitting on the nest and are now raising them together.

Six of their chicks are Silkies and one was an Auracana (much larger breed, from an egg that I gave to Frieda at the last minute on the day she started sitting, because I wanted another chick from Lady Bird, the hen who laid it, but who doesn't seem to want to sit on eggs.)  Silkies, as you can see, have feathers that look like hair.

I gave the big Auracana chick to Shamo by slipping it under her at night (it was only 2 days younger than her own 5 chicks) and she accepted it. I figured it was better for it to grow up with other big chickens rather than the little Silkies, who are more like bantams. (Chicks bond with their hatch brood.)

I would post some pics of the Silkie chicks, but those Silkie hens are REALLY protective.  My normally friendly birds have turned into fierce mother commandos.  As soon as I look into the cage, they ruffle their feathers and call the chicks to run under their wings.  Frieda pecks my hand -- or the camera! -- every time I put it in there.  Which doesn't make for good pics.  But I'll keep trying.   Maybe as time goes on they will realize I'm not going to hurt those chicks.  (These pics here are ones I had from before the hatch).

Good Morning from Minnesota!

We've found homes for 4 of Chayah's 7 kittens.  A nice lady and her granddaughter took a grey male tabby, and a nice man took two: an orange male and the black female.  A third person looked but didn't take any -- guess she hadn't found the right cat.  I'm keeping the one shown here.  

He's the runt of Chayah's litter.   Even now at almost 9 weeks old, he's still much smaller and scrawnier, and has a bug-eyed look that earned him the name "Bugsy."   But he's such a cutie -- likes to sleep on me and snuggles in my beard.  We have 2 grey males and one tortoise shell female left to find homes for. 

Meanwhile, Chayah is trying to teach them to hunt.  She keeps bringing various prey into the house.  How annoying!  But it does prove one thing:  She knows how to hunt well, so my theory that she was living off the land before she came to us is probably correct.

How's everything at your place today?

Here's Mama Shamo with her new chicks -- four are visible, 2 more are under her. These are about 24 hours old. This is the hen that was sitting on the goose egg, too -- which has not hatched yet, although I can hear it pecking inside. This morning Mama Shamo got up and walked away with her chicks, so the goose egg is now under one of my Silkie hens, who is also hatching out chicks. 

If it hatches, it should happen today -- at which point I hope to have my geese adopt it.  Otherwise I'll raise it.

UPDATE 6/14:  The goose egg didn't hatch.  But this hen has  her 6 chicks  and is very content.