Washingtonians

[Chickielady]

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Advertise & rent out some pasture to goats or sheep?
Or go to the goat/sheep rescue places & get a few, free as far as I know.

 

[Kaneke]

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I will have some later this summer.

Edited to add--I'll be adding new roos to some of my breeds and therefore, will be needing to re-home several, older roosters. Older as in 2 years or so. None of my mine are mean in any way. They are all very friendly. The closest thing I have to Ameracauna right now is a one year old Spangled Russian Orloff roo with too much white. Other than that I might some blue/wheaten am roos to choose from this fall--depending on how these new eggs go....

and I will probably need to rehome my roo pretty soon ---

Easter Egger, not Ameraucana ... but since he has a 3-row pea comb, will probably pass along some blue egg genes
(originally from Privett hatchery, sold at Del's so has had his vaccinations)

basically a black and white mottled, BUT, he has hackle and saddle feathers coming in, teal edged with gold
tail feathers are part black, part teal

almost like a reversed splash -- black with white lacings, but also some mottling, and still some juvenile brown wild type feathering, though he is shedding these .....

hatched about Feb 27 or 28 ... so a little over 3 months old
crow is mostly a rusty squeak
not yet mature, but comb and wattles are red so it may not be long

clean faced but several of his companions, all from the same batch, are well muffed and bearded

does some chest bumping with "the girls" but pleasant, though a little shy, with humans

 

[Chickielady]

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Here it is a good chance it is a snake.

I have already re-home 3' to 4' black snake and a gardener snake. I did see a baby snake and let it be.

Not on this side of the mountain: garter snakes only eat pinkies, and anything bigger than a gartersnake is rare to endangered (Rubber Boa) and/or a preferential snake and frog eater (Yellow Bellied Racer). Eastern Washington has a few more big snakes- northern population Pacific Rattlesnake, King Snakes (which are also endangered these days) and bigger subspecies of YBRs for three, but in suburban areas and on the wetside a lack of mice is an indication you have rats, according to the Orkin Man as well as my friends in small-mammal zoology.

Western Washington is way short of herps.

We have scads of racers & gopher snakes..my chickens catch them and eat them down like spaghetti, that is after they fight over it & run all over with them.
We also have tons of Sally-manders..cute little gooey brown ones and a few black ones.
We also have alot of peepers, the frog variety, the kind that stick on your windows to get the bugs attracted by household lights, cute little frogs.

 

[Chickielady]

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I wish I could go..I love swine.

I made cases of my own while in CA, we have a small vineyard of Pinot & white grapes that produced a fantastic wine.
TONS of new swineries popping up daily, wine tasting everywhere, Mexicans moving into the county by the busload...Just about all the wild land put to vineyards now, bad for the deer & other creatures, and really bad for the aquafer.....usually very little rainfall in NorCal (Lake County, east of Napa & Sonoma) but they are getting monsooned STILL now!!

 

[Chickielady]

Almost got 1/2 the duplex insulated & paneled inside, the nest boxes done on that side, the Buckeyes will be put in there tomorrow!!

The other side is for the Javas..and boy will I be glad they are finally in a big coop of their own instead of a 'hallway' between 2 other coops.
Nankins will go in the 'hallway' coop as they are a much smaller bird.

 

[Stumpfarmer]

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Advertise & rent out some pasture to goats or sheep?
Or go to the goat/sheep rescue places & get a few, free as far as I know.

It's not pasture per se: it's my yard, and large numbers of unsupervised quadrupeds would eat what I'd rather have left uneaten. I've been whacking away at it off and on but the west yard alone is bigger than most lots (75' X 65') and hand cutting it is pretty slow.

The goat/sheep rescue places I found have a requirement for home visits and personal recommendations and a high placement fee, so: not so much free, and more work than I have time for.

Everything that starts with "go to" is automatically much more difficult for me, anyway. I don't drive, have never had a driver's license: part of the grabbag of bad wiring that is me makes it a safer world when I'm on the bus. My husband is not up to a lot of extra anything, my kids drive me when they can but they work a lot and have serious SOs to spend time with, and I have a hired hand seven hours a week: driving me around means other stuff doesn't get done. It's a slow leak in my budget, energy levels, and productivity, much worse lately since I'm not now easily able to take the bus to Lacey or downtown and then walk around to run errands without paying for it with pain levels that don't let me sleep that night or move around the next day, not to mention the looming disaster of having a low blood sugar event.

Poo: whine, whine, whine. Getting old is not for sissies, et'c and so on. I'm bummed right now because I thought I'd have all the doors done by end of business today so I could put the wire on the hoop house tomorrow, plus Ian buries Sylvia's eggs in the grass and I stepped on one when I moved the chicken tractor. Which compared to RFF's incubator tragedy is a heap of nothing.

 

[Ogress]

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I think only male cougars spray to mark territory, females spray to mark dens, but I could be wrong. They're not the agressive markers that bobcats are unless they're in a state of overpopulation.

I meant to say, about Ogress' orchard: the only time I see bear sign here is when the orchard is in fruit, and one reason we keep the cattle in the orchard in September and October is to keep the windfalls from drawing bears. In Missoula, there's an ordinance against letting fruit lie on the ground, and a volunteer fruit-picking unit to see it doesn't happen: there are wildlife corridors (including Rattlesnake Creek Canyon, which is on my list of "get out of the car and stretch your legs" recommendations for long-distance travellers, about three miles north of I-90, and a beautiful place with about two miles of flat trail before the climbing starts) that don't get interrupted until the middle of Glacier NF and they get black bears in town every year, and grizzlies every once in a while.

My rule about predator threat assessment is assume you do have coyotes and raccoons (I saw both when I lived on Beacon Hill in Seattle) as well as some sort of avian predator. Assume you might have bears and cougars. But fence against your neighbor's dogs and don't be too trusting of your own. Remember that cat doors are an open invitation to anything the same size or smaller than your cat, and some of those are the things that carry rabies (skunks, possums, and small raccoons most commonly, but a friend in Oregon ended up with a mink in his house, and those things are nuts). There are always mice, and if you don't see them it's because there's something eating them, probably rats. And you can't exterminate everything that's a threat to your animals, so you need to build and manage against them instead.

Right on sister!!!!!!!!

And take note all:
Cats LOVE to squirt IN your car!
You will NEVER get the stink out.
had one "do" my roomate's car, and FOREVER it REEKED so bad he could never ride with the windows up..the squirt had run down the windsheild & in the defroster, all through the seats..ALWAYS roll your windows up before dinner.
And check for chipmunks, squirrels, mice & rats in your generator before you turn it on..they like freezers washers & dryers & car that are sitting for more than 24 hrs, too!!

Eeven though the bear and the bear trackers were around our property, I think it was a bobcat that took the hen. I talked to my neighbors and they said their dogs were in all day as they had cement poured and did not want the dogs stepping in it (they are lost outside now

, and they have been calling them for 2 hours!) Also, the compost pile has not been disturbed except for chickens scratching it. It looks like that is where the hens were when the attack happened. Can a bobcat carry off a hen? I think it got out where a big fir tree butts up to the fence as I found more feathes there today, not by the fallen trees as I had expected. Our fruit never gets a chance to hit the ground, the bears always eat it before it is ripe! I've seen bears in my backyard various times July (red beauty plums, then blueberries, green gage plums and apples) through October, and I've seen them crossing the street as early as April. The neighborhood website is full of pictures of bears. We've fenced half our property with 6' chainlink and I have attached chicken wire to the bootom and buried it before I realized how useless the crud is. Now we do weekly perimeter patrols and block of new holes (there always are some) with big rocks, the heaviest Alex can lift. We put perimeter electric fencing in to contain our dogs,so I don't think I can run another line around to keep animals out, and I can't collar the ones that are not welcome in the yard. I'veput those night eyes blinky things around my property for the predators to laugh at. I don't know if they help - I guess I will find out when the fruit starts to ripen, though even most of that was taken during the day.

We are all required to keep minimum 30 feet of wildlife bcorridor between us and our neighbors on all sides so animals can move from the watershed to the valley below. Where we are at, there is a much wider buffer, and the least number of private properties for an animal to cross as there is the watershed, 4 private properties with the property left wild (all on 3 acres or more), a10 acre undeveloped lot, street, my property with its surronding wildlife corridors, 5 acre greenbelt attached to a 45 acre wilderness preserve wich bordes the South For of the Snoqualmie. Some days it seems as though we are on an elk superhighway!

 

[Chickielady]

http://www.jefferslivestock.com/images/label/0029020.htm
TONS of every vitamin, makes 256 gallons, and costs $2.79
The rooster booster does not have any vitamin D, or alot of the other vitamins.
Avian charge has the most vitamins of all, and costs just a bit more than broiler mx.

 

[SadieSue]

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Thank you - I'm going to have to juggle a couple of events on my calendar, but I need to be there! Please keep me updated either on FB or by PM here. Anything special I need to bring besides my big chicks and $?

 

[Chickielady]

Yes sir, when I was at Ogress' mountain top fortress, she had elk turds all over her front patio..about 15 feet from her front door!!!