Great photography and beautiful birds!!! We have missed you on this thread and will be happy when you are back home! Safe travels!Hello all you No. CA people. Just a quickie (can't read the posts from the last almost five months).
I fly home on Sunday, hopefully I'll have time to at least wander out to see my birds when I get home. I'm hoping DH didn't have too much trouble in my absence. If you can believe it, he was missing all the hatching while I was gone and set some eggs with emailed instructions from me. He actually hatched out nine chicks in one of the styrobators all by himself.
I look forward to catching up with everyone.
I'll try to post a few pictures from my travels. In NZ I got to visit a gannet colony, absolutely fell in love with pukeko (they consider them a pest, I'd bring home a breeding pair in a heartbeat) and was amazed by the black swans. Think about going to a public park and being mobbed by geese for bread, now replace those geese with black swans! I stood in one spot by a public lake and counted 200+ of them. All I could think about is how much they cost to buy a pair in the States, yikes!
Oh heck, here's a couple now.
Gannet
Black Swan
Pukeko
Oh, and here's a Red-Legged Partridge I took in the back garden of where I've been living in the UK.
In case you can't tell, I did mostly bird photography while I was gone!
Deb
She looked fine in the morning and then about mid-day I saw her in the corner of the coop. I thought that she was in line for a nest box. (I have a crazy CL mix broody in one box who is very protective and the other chickens won't go near her.) She looked zoned out like they do sometimes when they lay an egg but when I touched her she didn't run away like she normally would. I checked on her a little while later and she was in a nest box but not very responsive. So, I prepared a place in a container in the garage for her. (Space is limited with the chicks that I've hatched in the past 2 weeks.) When I went out to get her, she had passed away in the nest box. She had some yellow/white discharge below her vent but, before death had no nasal discharge, breathing problems, etc. I have to admit that I cried and I was not even that attached to her. I didn't even cry when we lost our first chicken a few months ago. It was just a bad day yesterday with all kinds of little things going wrong. Her death was just the culmination of my bad day. She is bagged, in the frig, and will be headed to Davis later this morning. Would someone please tell me how to do the postage? The last time I sent a bird in, Cheryl did the postage for me.
