Camilla Update

Here is Camilla in her makeshift home. She is getting much stronger and staying awake for longer periods of time. She's still not drinking which concerns me, but she is eating, so I've been mixing lots of water into her food. I also spooned some into her beak today, but neither of us like doing that. I've been feeding her every 2-3 hours a small amount of banana, baby food, yogurt, honey, water and sometimes a little of her regular food. I also gave her some egg today. I left the lid off long enough to change her water and she had flown to the top of the box. That is when I really knew she was feeling better.



She looks really bad in this picture, but it's mostly the angle. She is still fluffed up and ruffled, but she was preening today to get everything back in place. Our neighbor came over to help me check the incision and it looked great.



Tomorrow I will move her out next to her friends, so they can see each other. I'm hoping she doesn't lose her spot in the pecking order while she is away. I've seen how horrible they can be to a new bird, and being weak and small she wouldn't do well. If it weren't for diet restrictions, I think she is well enough to go back with the others. Aaron hardly removed any feathers, so her incision is completely covered. Hopefully tomorrow will be the tipping point and she will be just about back to normal!

Chanterelles

Our friend took us out chanterelle hunting for the first time on Saturday. We were supposed to go truffle hunting Saturday morning, and I had been looking forward to it since June, but we needed to attend to Camilla. They didn't have much luck we found out later, so we didn't miss out. But chanterelle hunting was excellent! We were sworn to secrecy on the location, because it is a good spot. We got over 4.5 pounds in about an hour.
Here is Aaron cleaning the mushrooms with a dry toothbrush:





I think they are gorgeous. We also found some white chanterelles, they look very similar but tend to be meatier than the yellows. I had a great time hunting for them, I can't believe it took me so long to try it!


Tonight I chopped them up.


Sauteed them in butter with shallots, added a little cream, white wine, salt and pepper. Then put it on pasta with Parmesan, it was delicious!

Alive and Mostly Well

Camilla seems to be doing alright. I was worried when I first woke up because she refused water, but I could hear that her throat was dry when she talked. I finally thought to put a brighter light on her, that did the trick, she was still sleepy from it being dim. She also ate a little bit of mashed banana with water. Only small frequent meals for a few days until she heals.

Camilla

Our poor baby became sick the day after I posted about her last week. Her crop became impacted. I discovered this the day I needed to leave town and was so worried about her the whole time I was gone. She was worse when I got back. We spent most of Saturday working with her, giving her oil, massaging her crop. I broke down and called a vet, but it was going to be $50-200 to fix her. After doing a lot of internet research I decided we needed to operate ourselves. She was not going to get better on her own, and I didn't want to operate with her any weaker. There were a lot of success stories, so I was encouraged. We enlisted a neighbor to help, who gladly did. She was a life saver. I gathered all of the supplies and we put a sock on her head (she was out in 4 seconds, chickens are so funny they fall asleep instantly in the dark) and wrapped her in a towel.




Aaron cut away some of her breast feathers and made an incision. We then moved the skin to the side and made another incision into her crop. It was amazing how much straw she had packed in there! Aaron picked it all out, it smelled awful. Camilla only moved twice in the whole procedure, she just laid there and was so good. We used super glue to suture her crop and regular sutures for her skin.




Good thoughts for our little one! She is resting in a dark box in our back room for the next week or so. On a soft food and antibiotic diet. If she makes it through tonight and doesn't get an infection, we'll be in the clear. She is so tiny and fragile, I hope she makes it. I just hope she stops her bad straw eating habit! I raked all the straw out of the coop and replaced it with pine shavings. Then the other chickens started eating it like they were ravenous. Argh! I quickly kicked them out, raked that up and Aaron shop vac'ed the rest up. We aren't going through this again! I don't know what I'll use for bedding, it's nice to be able to clean up most of the poop a few times a week by removing it.



What an exhausting ordeal. I think this may be why most people just cull their chickens when they get sick...

Coop Tour!

Well...the coop is not finished, but it's pretty darn close, and I have a feeling there will be lots of little adjustments and additions here and there for a long time. So without further adieu let me take you on a coop tour. This picture was taken on July 10th. In the background you can see an empty space behind our neighbor's house. That empty space used to be a garage, and that is where the majority of our building supplies came from. Our neighbors were constantly bringing over useful pieces and letting us dig through their waste piles, it was very good timing for us both! Aaron dug out a 4 x 8 foot outline for the coop, although we ended up shifting it out a few feet as per our landlord's request. I'm glad we did, it gives a wider pathway behind the coop.


Let me preface this tour by saying that this whole thing came out of Aaron's head. Sure we looked at pictures and got ideas. But no where could we find complete measurements. And we were working with recycled materials, which required even more thought and planning. He made it up as he went, and did a fantastic job.


I'm going to skip over a lot of construction here and get to the goods. Starting to look like a coop!



Putting on the roof. This panel obviously came from a frat. We got it from an apartment dumpster and Aaron pulled three of them hinged together out over his head at the same time. This picture doesn't really show how large that wood is, or how heavy it was!


The tin roof is on, the tin was from the neighbor's garage. I think it's charming. And it makes me want to call it the Chicken Shack.



Okay fast forward to present day. This is the inside of the roost and nest box area. They sleep on those two bars and will lay eggs in the nest boxes to the right. The door opens completely for easy cleaning.



Here is a closer view. I painted the boxes black because they like dark areas while they lay. All paint was free and rescued from the garbage minus the blue which we had leftover from painting beehives.


With the door closed and latched.


If there is ever a security breach we can still lock them up tight while they sleep with this door. Otherwise we leave it open and when they wake up they can go downstairs for breakfast until I let them out into the run.


The nest boxes are set outside of the main area to add space. There is a door that opens from the outside for easy egg collection.


This is the view from the run. I want to add some more trim to the top to finish the look and we need to devise something for getting in and out of the run. Dealing with that roll of wire is a pain.



Aaron thought and thought about how he wanted to do the chicken door. He finally came up with this system. A pulley allows the inset door to slide up and down.


We lock the door open by looping the rope over a pin.


When we want to close them in, we pull on the rope to release it from the pin then allow the door to close. The pin is pushed in, locking the door and a piece of wood goes over the pin to keep raccoons from figuring out how to open the door. Genius!


Here is a side view. The front isn't done yet, we are still waiting on the right piece of plywood.


My favorite feature has to be the flower box. I can't wait to get it planted earlier next year and have nice flowers in it. They are a little scrappy this year.


Ta da! This end is pretty much finished, and definitely the cutest side. I can't wait to get all of the little details finished! I want to make a sign and Aaron wants to put gutters on it. It may be a while before it's all done, but for now I'm satisfied. I love our little coop!


I was keeping very careful track of how much we spent on this - until it got hectic at the end and I was running to the store constantly to pick things up the day before the chickens arrived. We mainly bought hardware, we had a lot of screws and wood from dorm loft kits, but that ran out. We also had to buy the hardware cloth to cover the walls. Most of the trim is from the neighbor's and also from a set of Ikea bed slats found in the garbage. A friend gave us the flower box. The window was from Habitat - $3, and the people door was free from next door. Like I said, I lost track, but I'm pretty sure we kept it under $200. Making this with all new materials would have been so expensive, I am so thankful for all of the free materials that we got.

Spoiled Chickens

The chickens have quickly become pets and we are both having such a fun time with them. I find myself wanting to go out to the backyard to see what they are up to and finding treats for them to eat. Lately they've been getting cabbage butterfly caterpillars everyday. Those things are relentless on my cabbage and broccoli. Those white butterflies with the black spot that you see flying around, are the devil. I pick off the caterpillars (I don't know where they are all coming from!)



And the chickens run over excitedly. It's very satisfying to feed a garden pest to a predator. I was feeding slugs, but read somewhere that slugs, snails and earthworms can all give parasitic worms to your chickens, so I don't intentionally feed those to them anymore. I did put a large snail in one day, they didn't seem to know what to do with it. Camilla - more on her below, in her curiosity pecked off one of its eyestalks and that was it. I found the one-eyed snail in the coop later that day.



We've also been blocking off half of the yard and an hour or so before chicken bedtime (they put themselves to sleep as the sun goes down) and letting them run around.
Here is Glinda getting her first taste of freedom.



And then picking the flowers off of my bean plants




They had a blast digging around in one of the garden spaces. I wish they weren't so destructive, it was nice picking beans and having them hang out and talk to me.


This is Camilla, our favorite chicken. She is a banty light brahma, and is as big as she is going to get. Somewhere around 2 pounds. She has this deep little voice and is always the first to greet us and come over to us. For this she is constantly being given special treats on the sly. We didn't name her after Prince Charles' girlfriend.


We named her after this character. Does anyone recognize her?



Maybe this will ring some bells. Camilla is Gonzo's love interest, if you remember he always had a flock of chickens following him around. I just found this on the internet: "Gonzo loves Camilla, but sometimes he chases after other chickens, because he's not always sure which chicken is which. After all, "they all look the same." However, Camilla can be identified by her blue eyelids." These action figures were made by a company called Palisades, which made almost every Muppet character into a figurine. Unfortunately this company went out of business and now a Camilla figurine is spendy!


And then I found this:



Camilla's house! Called Camilla's Place...hmm we might have just found the name for our coop! Speaking of the coop, it will be unveiled shortly, I know you all have been waiting patiently...

Mites!

We try to use as few chemicals as possible in our hives, while still doing our best to maintain health and numbers. We have a screened bottom board that is too small for bees to fit through, but it does allow varroa mites that fall off the bees to pass through. Normally these mites would just crawl back up and onto the bees. But we keep a sticky paper below the screen to capture these mites. It also allows us to count how many mites are coming off the bees. We have a chart we use to determine if our numbers are normal or too high that factors in the size of the hive and the time of year with a 24 hour count. I don't always use the chart because I check them enough to know what's good and what's not just by looking.
This is a fresh sticky paper I put in a week ago. The lines are formed from the frames - the debris falls where the frames are not, in between them.


After a few weeks the paper is really full of stuff - wax, pollen, bee parts.
You can see those nasty little mites here: They are the mini crab looking things.



Our neighbor just had two hives up and vanish recently. By the time he found them their honey had been completely robbed and not a single bee was in the hive. I'm not completely sure why this happens, but I think every beekeeper has a story like this. It's probably just a matter of time, but that is another reason why we got the second hive, you can keep everyone going easier when you have another hive to borrow from. Spring will tell how our hives did over the winter, but hopefully we have done everything we can to ensure their survival.