Washingtonians

[Chickielady]

Yes the flicker is of the peckerwood family, cute little booger.
I have been sooooo busy have not been able to sit & chat.
Now I log on and have 15 messages & 27 e-mails.........

Getting more sub floor lumber on Monday, and cement & stuff to build the forms for the 2 peirs in the center of the floor.
I thought the contractor would do that as part of the contract of "The complete foundation" but apparently not.
So that is what we have to get done & cured & then up she goes.
Hope eveyone is doing well!!!

 

[Chickielady]

Bugs. They bore into wood and eat bugs and beetles.
Grubs, worms and mealworms may suffice.
Can it fly?
Cannot be turned loose?
usually the parents feed the babies when they drop out of the nest.
Save an animal does not get them before they learn to fly.

 

[KMHunter]

Quote:
Thanks Dave, I'll have to look that up. This appears to be a baby though, do you think?

Yup .. and I don't like how it is holding it's right wing - but maybe that's just the way it was sitting?

I have no idea what they might want to eat.

Ok... I just read on a website that it is best to figure out if it a nestling or a fledgling. If it can sit on your finger it is a fledgling and can be put in a bush or tree close to where it was found. If it can't grip and sit on your finger it is a nestling and it is best to put it back in the nest if you can find it. If you can't then it says to line a berry basket with soft stuff and put the baby in it and hang it from a tree near the same area. It says the parents will take care of it. It does say if it is injured to take it to a vet or contact a bird conservation group. This is the website I looked at: www.wild-bird-watching.com/Baby_Birds.html

 

[Stumpfarmer]

Quote:
Juvenile Northern Flicker, the most common large woodpecker in Western Washington.

 

[AriLovesChickens]

I haven't planned out where I'm going, but I'll probably stick mainly to the houses in the north half of Seattle. I'm actually friends with the woman in Kenmore, so I probably won't go there during the tour. (They converted a carport into a coop -it's huge). I'm a little bummed that the official Seattle Tilth spot is further south - not sure if I'll make it. There's a good chance that my toddler will be along for the ride.

 

[Stumpfarmer]

Well, my son and I got the roof finished on the Wyandotte Coop- for definitions of "finished" and "roof" which do not bear close scrutiny. That's two of the ten hours I told CL it'll take to finish it. We also got the thick concrete pavers to make a better foundation for the watering trough- hallerlake has heard at length and most tediously of the saga of the watering trough, which was a source of great annoyance last winter. *THIS* time, people are going to listen to me when I tell them it needs to be level, right? RIGHT? I used to do all the maintenance by myself, long ago, and now I am not up to it at the same time we got a Rubbermaid one: they are lovely in some ways, but hinky as heck in others, most particularly in the really bad float valve mount and the need for the whole thing to be dead level to function. Add sloping, highly erodable soil, and, well cattle and you have a recipe for annoyance; subject the whole thing to repeated hard freezes and annoyance becomes disaster. We've had one trough, up by my cousin's barn, since January, when one of the cows learned how to pull the float out of the tank entirely and the last bit of foundation was undercut by the flow.

Of course, it would help to have a bunch more watering troughs. We used to have six, but the place for two of them got turned into horse pasture and the brain trust decided that the perfect place for another one was in the lowest point in the water main (right before the sixty-foot climb up to my cousin's place) without any step-down valves on the hydrant, and now it has two settings: empty, and leaking at about five gallons a minute. And there would still only be one place where we could put a heated hose in winter: right outside my bedroom window, forty feet upslope from the nearest "bottom" and in the dead cold shade from Hallowe'en until Valentines Day. The sixth was in a pasture which now has no fence, and no reason for its own trough, given that it takes twohundred feet of hose or vinyl line from the nearest hydrant.

Watering troughs are right up there with fences on the list of ways cattle farming is much less fun than most people think.

 

[Chicken Rustler]

Quote:
Did ya make a sacrifice to the sun god???

Ja pour a stream of golden beer in a circle and step inside it, then stomp your feet and say "sunny weekend pleeze"...waving your hands in the air.
Or you can sit inside and just drink the beer and look up the forecast.

Yup, sun.

Nope just grabbed a bit of lunch and went back at it. I wouldn't do good with any of the beer ideas NO beer here

It did turn out a little nicer this afternoon but still threatining to deliver some liquid sunshine.

 

[SadieSue]

Quote:
Thanks Dave, I'll have to look that up. This appears to be a baby though, do you think?

Yup .. and I don't like how it is holding it's right wing - but maybe that's just the way it was sitting?

I have no idea what they might want to eat.

It's not looking good. When I posted he was sitting like in the photo, now he's flipped onto his back again like when I found him in the backyard. He's blinking and breathing but not much more. I brought him in because he was helpless in the yard and I didn't want any of the night predators to get him, but he may have gotten severly injured when he fell from the nest.
I don't know what is happening here. The dead chickadee I found this afternoon looked pretty small too.

 

[RustyHen]

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Me thinks I see more chickens than last time, and that cute little red single wide has occupants.

 

[Chicken Rustler]

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Will you be able to take photos of what you see to share with us? I really enjoyed the Tacoma Coop Tour a couple of weekends ago. Have a great time!

That darn thing has to be on Saturday -- when I'm hosting a BBQ. Gonna have 50 folks here. Otherwise, I'd go.

What time Maybe I can take an extended lunch and drop by !!