Théo and the chickens des Sauches

[ManueB]

I think this is the reason. He noticed he was locked in and panicked. He had no interest anymore in butchering a hen anymore because he was trapped.

I had a fox in the run two years ago. He killed one hen who got out through the auto-pop-door. The chickens sounded the alarm (stil in the coop). When I arrived the fox panicked and just tried to get out where he couldn’t. Two chicks went to the run while the fox was there. But he had no interest in them.

I can believe he would leave his prey hearing a human coming. Saving his skin would come before hunger.
But before that, when we were inside the house ? I will never know what happened exactly !

I will try to post some pictures now, as it seems the connection is better in the morning and during the day than in the evening. Today we have beautiful warm weather like hasn't been the case for a longer time than we are used to, and wont be in a while, so the chickens really enjoyed the sun. I have to admit it's very calming watching them lying around, and taking pictures of chickens dust and sunbathing and just enjoying themselves. I didn't get much done up to now .

 

[Molpet]

I can believe he would leave his prey hearing a human coming. Saving his skin would come before hunger.
But before that, when we were inside the house ? I will never know what happened exactly

Maybe when he went to shut the door, the fox seen him and hid. When the fox realized no person he started after the chickens.

 

[RoyalChick]

I think this is the reason. He noticed he was locked in and panicked. He had no interest anymore in butchering a hen anymore because he was trapped.

I had a fox in the run two years ago. He killed one hen who got out through the auto-pop-door. The chickens sounded the alarm (stil in the coop). When I arrived the fox panicked and just tried to get out where he couldn’t. Two chicks went to the run while the fox was there. But he had no interest in them.

I think this could be the explanation. Foxes grab prey and run - he knew he couldn't run.

 

[lightm]

What you describe is one of my worst nightmares. Every time I lock them in at night I worry I have locked a raccoon in with them!
I hope Piou-Piou makes a full and fast recovery.
Hey-ho. Tomorrow is another year.

I guess there is advantage of a small coop.

 

[lightm]

I never thought of that possibility. It's actually changing my mind about cameras in the coop which I was totally opposed to !
Congratulations for your spirit nomination . It's well deserved even though you are also an excellent friend.

It might not show on the picture but it was definitely adult size. Not sure if our red foxes are smaller than the grey foxes in the US but my partner said it was around 8 or 9 kg. But there are definitely foxes around, we have just been very lucky that there had not been any attack before.
*****
Piou-piou's update is mostly reassuring. This morning we took her inside to assess how she was doing, try to feed her and keep her warm as it was -2.
We saw that she wasn't stumbling anymore although she didn't move a lot, and that the deep wound had made a normal looking scab that didn't seem infected. Throughout the morning she didn't want to eat anything even though we tried all her favourite foods, she refused sunflower seeds, walnuts, mackerel and scrambled egg, until we found something she was keen to eat - whole grain rice.
Then in the afternoon we took her out. Nougat pecked her hard on her wound and Kara attacked her, so she didn't want to stay with the other chickens ; she went in the garden, then laid an egg in the old barn, and stayed with Annette for a good while. She seemed almost well, but her mobility is still impaired and after two hours she was very tired. We put her at three 30 in the crate in the coop and she went to sleep.

We are both relieved . Happy new year !

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She spent a lot of time preening and plucking out feathers. I hope she doesn't pluck at the scabs like she did on her wound last year.
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On other news...
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Piou-piou has really gone through a lot. A little tough chicken.

And Merle the devil... cute looking though.

 

[lightm]

could be worse
View attachment 3717797
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/planet-earth-three-episode-5-human

I better get Planet Earth III !!!!

 

[Perris]

I better get Planet Earth III !!!!

It's another brilliant series from the bbc nature department. The episode on 'Human' focuses on the wildlife that's adapted to live in our environment, with all its ups and downs, from the pavement ants that consume tens of thousands of discarded hot dogs per annum on Broadway in New York, to cobras that move slower among people who revere them, so they don't frighten and attack each other, in Bengal. That rhino is a regular in a town in Nepal.

 

[ManueB]

Our turn to get a month worth of rain in a day. No picture because it was just raining too much and only the younger pullets came out.
It was a tough day for Théo. He went cautiously inside the woodshed, but he didn't want to stay inside, and he was too scared of Gaston to go in the coop with Piou-piou. So he sheltered under our outdoor table and he was quickly soaked. I tried to coax him inside the coop but nothing could decide him. Then I tried to catch him and it didn't work. I ended up catching him by his tail which must have hurt him and I put him on the roost next to Piou-piou toward midday and he didn't move at all until roost time. I fed him and gave him something to drink on the roost before it was time to sleep because obviously he would rather starve than come down and risk Gaston's wrath.

Tonight Nougat fell from the roost again. I think she had a kershuffle with Kara, which has been going on for a week now. They both want to sleep at the same place next to Gaston. She was so shocked after falling that she didn't want to go back in the roost. She ended up sleeping in the nest again.

Hoping my partner makes it home safe. Because he was working driving the bus all week exceptionally, they let him have a small van to switch and finish the trip, as the last part is really in the mountain and usually there are only two or three people. That smaller van is safer and has real snow tires which the big bus doesn't, so i'm not too worried.

 

[ManueB]

Random ramblings post !

I'll do a chicken post later today, but before I will finally write something about my aunt, Marie-Mad, who was my deceased uncle Bernard's wife. I have been wanting to write about her for a while, because she is one of the most wonderful person in my family and the type of person that is like a shining light to anyone who meets her. She is kind, listens to people, really tries to understand them even when she doesn't agree and thinks about doing things right in many aspects of everyday life. Whereas my uncle was controversial, and could be as annoying as he was sincere and passionate, I don't think anyone who meets Marie-mad can not love her.

First, I have to speak a bit about her father Lucien because it explains a lot about her. He was half belgian and came from a poor rural family who farmed land that did not belong to them. He was extremely ambitious and intelligent, so he got himself a higher education and managed to get introduced in cultural diplomatic circles. He went on to make a career as a french high school principal in various countries : Athens, Tokyo, Moscow, Istanbul...taking his wife and two daughters along with him. They had a multicultural and multilingual childhood. But, while I knew him as a very well cultivated, curious and lively old man, he was extremely hard and demanding as a father in his upbringing. Both his daughters became brilliant students, leaving him to go study in France as soon as possible.
Marie-mad became a very good friend of my mum as they were doing the same classics studies, and my mum introduced her to her older brother.

While they were very different, it is no suprise it clicked between them, because they were very complementary, and I think they shared the same vision for justice and wanting to act to change things in whatever way they could. She was also rather independent and when my uncle went to work abroad, first she followed him but when they had kids she stayed in France with them and they got used to living together for some months and separated for others.
She quit working when her children were small but when they grew up she got invested in various associations. She did a lot of language and literacy teaching ; mostly among older women from Maghreb, through cooking workshops. She learnt some algerian herself, and a lot of great recipes from many different countries. She also did some end of life assistance visiting. Then she began helping refugees to write their application request for asylum. First she worked with translators for middle east populations. But after a few years she took to studying hard to get russian back, which she had learned as a child, and she was able to interact directly with all russian speaking migrants. There was an affluence of arrivals with the wars in Chechnia in the town she lived in with my uncle, Lyon, so she did that for a long time and it became almost a full time job.
When my uncle died she went on for another year or two, and she stopped. It was very hard for her.
She went back to literacy cooking workshops but she also found herself on the late a new passion for physical geography and especially geomorphology. For the last years she has been travelling all around France for geological discovery trips and spends most of her time reading and attending conferences about that.

It sounds like a life of roses, but one thing that probably made her the thoughtful person she has become is that she lost unexpectedly a few important people. Her mother passed young, around 45, and so did her younger sister, who was a doctor and died of stomach cancer after a few years of pain. Then, my elder aunt died very fast of brain cancer : they had grown very fond of one another because they had children the same age and had spent all their holidays together for years. And finally my uncle died in Tchad, most abruptly and ironically of dehydration on a humanitarian mission to build water wells.

A nice thing she told me at Christmas is that when her own dad Lucien retired and began growing older, he completely changed and became adorable with his daughters, as he actually was with other people. So she found her dad again.

I really love my aunt and I have always felt a strong bond with her. I visited her several times after my uncle died because the national library school is close to where she lived, and I had to attend conferences and trainings for work. A few months after my uncle died, I did my first long distance race, the mythical "Saintélyon" which is a night race in December from Saint-Etienne to Lyon where my aunt lived. So I had arranged to spend two days at her home because I was doing a seminar in the middle of the week after in Lyon. My race was great, but she had anticipated what I hadn't thought about, that I would be sore to the point of not being able to get up the next day, so she had made me a bed on her sofa in the living room which was right next to the kitchen and she brought me lunch and dinner on a tray. Then the day after she took me for a small very slow walk in the parc and told me all about the time my uncle had attempted a 100 km race out of the blue and was mad because he did not finish . Wonderful memory.

My aunt is one of the few members of my family who came to spend a few days with us to see how we live, and she got my partner hooked on physical geography and they went for excruciatingly slow hikes staring at the ground. She's also the one who dug up old photos of my grandma as a child feeding hens in Algeria.

I've been much too long already so I won't go on and on but I will just finish by saying I was once again very happy to see her at Christmas, and this was the point when my mood switched from horrible, to I have to see the good in small things even though the world is crumbling .

A picture of us two when she came here in August 2021, on one of those slow educational geophysical hikes.

 

[Molpet]

Random ramblings post !

I'll do a chicken post later today, but before I will finally write something about my aunt, Marie-Mad, who was my deceased uncle Bernard's wife. I have been wanting to write about her for a while, because she is one of the most wonderful person in my family and the type of person that is like a shining light to anyone who meets her. She is kind, listens to people, really tries to understand them even when she doesn't agree and thinks about doing things right in many aspects of everyday life. Whereas my uncle was controversial, and could be as annoying as he was sincere and passionate, I don't think anyone who meets Marie-mad can not love her.

First, I have to speak a bit about her father Lucien because it explains a lot about her. He was half belgian and came from a poor rural family who farmed land that did not belong to them. He was extremely ambitious and intelligent, so he got himself a higher education and managed to get introduced in cultural diplomatic circles. He went on to make a career as a french high school principal in various countries : Athens, Tokyo, Moscow, Istanbul...taking his wife and two daughters along with him. They had a multicultural and multilingual childhood. But, while I knew him as a very well cultivated, curious and lively old man, he was extremely hard and demanding as a father in his upbringing. Both his daughters became brilliant students, leaving him to go study in France as soon as possible.
Marie-mad became a very good friend of my mum as they were doing the same classics studies, and my mum introduced her to her older brother.

While they were very different, it is no suprise it clicked between them, because they were very complementary, and I think they shared the same vision for justice and wanting to act to change things in whatever way they could. She was also rather independent and when my uncle went to work abroad, first she followed him but when they had kids she stayed in France with them and they got used to living together for some months and separated for others.
She quit working when her children were small but when they grew up she got invested in various associations. She did a lot of language and literacy teaching ; mostly among older women from Maghreb, through cooking workshops. She learnt some algerian herself, and a lot of great recipes from many different countries. She also did some end of life assistance visiting. Then she began helping refugees to write their application request for asylum. First she worked with translators for middle east populations. But after a few years she took to studying hard to get russian back, which she had learned as a child, and she was able to interact directly with all russian speaking migrants. There was an affluence of arrivals with the wars in Chechnia in the town she lived in with my uncle, Lyon, so she did that for a long time and it became almost a full time job.
When my uncle died she went on for another year or two, and she stopped. It was very hard for her.
She went back to literacy cooking workshops but she also found herself on the late a new passion for physical geography and especially geomorphology. For the last years she has been travelling all around France for geological discovery trips and spends most of her time reading and attending conferences about that.

It sounds like a life of roses, but one thing that probably made her the thoughtful person she has become is that she lost unexpectedly a few important people. Her mother passed young, around 45, and so did her younger sister, who was a doctor and died of stomach cancer after a few years of pain. Then, my elder aunt died very fast of brain cancer : they had grown very fond of one another because they had children the same age and had spent all their holidays together for years. And finally my uncle died in Tchad, most abruptly and ironically of dehydration on a humanitarian mission to build water wells.

A nice thing she told me at Christmas is that when her own dad Lucien retired and began growing older, he completely changed and became adorable with his daughters, as he actually was with other people. So she found her dad again.

I really love my aunt and I have always felt a strong bond with her. I visited her several times after my uncle died because the national library school is close to where she lived, and I had to attend conferences and trainings for work. A few months after my uncle died, I did my first long distance race, the mythical "Saintélyon" which is a night race in December from Saint-Etienne to Lyon where my aunt lived. So I had arranged to spend two days at her home because I was doing a seminar in the middle of the week after in Lyon. My race was great, but she had anticipated what I hadn't thought about, that I would be sore to the point of not being able to get up the next day, so she had made me a bed on her sofa in the living room which was right next to the kitchen and she brought me lunch and dinner on a tray. Then the day after she took me for a small very slow walk in the parc and told me all about the time my uncle had attempted a 100 km race out of the blue and was mad because he did not finish . Wonderful memory.

My aunt is one of the few members of my family who came to spend a few days with us to see how we live, and she got my partner hooked on physical geography and they went for excruciatingly slow hikes staring at the ground. She's also the one who dug up old photos of my grandma as a child feeding hens in Algeria.

I've been much too long already so I won't go on and on but I will just finish by saying I was once again very happy to see her at Christmas, and this was the point when my mood switched from horrible, to I have to see the good in small things even though the world is crumbling .

A picture of us two when she came here in August 2021, on one of those slow educational geophysical hikes.
View attachment 3720395

I enjoyed reading about her.
I am glad she brighten your mood.