BUGS

My grandson Owen has a great dislike of insects and his powerful child's eyesight can spot the tiniest of them. His normal response is to holler out "BUG" which is the signal for us grandparents to search it out with our failing aged eyesight. When we can't spot it, we say "where I don't see a bug"  to which he replies, "There it is.!!!"

Fern ate it !!!

Clean-up on isle 9.  "Gramma Fern needs a wipe" !!!!



Shhhh.....They can't see us in here...FERN leave my hat alone!!!

Peaches and the back 40.

The girls new pen. Made from mostly recycled materials including a very large doghouse and some fencing from my son's old dog pen. 

........Fern sees a bug....

,,,,,,it's Owen.!!  Checking out the lavish space inside the dog er... GOAT house.  Plenty of room for both girls to sleep in.

Bugs.  That was Owen's response to his first introduction to newborn quail. And the name has stuck, Wifey and I now commonly refer to them as "the bugs" to quickly identify the difference from the other chicks we are brooding on the back porch.  We have not lost a single "bug" since my last post and the cats have had to resort to eating only cat food.

Silkies.

A mixed batch of chicks from our hen's eggs.  Ten of which have already found a new home when I sold them to a neighbor.  Life on the farm is good.  Lots of fun....especially with Owen's BUG games.

THE END



Little Chicks = Big Problems

............Fresh from the shell...chicken on the right and quail on the left.
If only I knew then what I know now, I would never have bought the parents of the quail.
Who'd a thunk these tiny chicks could be so much trouble????
They are better escape artists than the great Harry Houdini.
And faster than The Road-Runner !!!

They have been escaping from my incubator either from the vent in the rear (which is now screened over) or leap from the door when we open the cabinet.  Either way means a injured chick which eventually expires.
I keep the incubator on the back porch on a stand so I can keep a close eye on it.  Sadly, so do my cats. Any chick that survives the fall and is not immediately found by me or Wifey doesn't last long.  I also keep my brood boxes on the porch.   And my dang cats figured out how to get into the one I had for the quail chicks. (second generation of the Quail box as they escaped from the first through tiny vent holes that I swore they couldn't fit through)

So now it's back to the drawing board to come up with a new solution.  (I think I need to get an ACME catalog from Wile E. Coyote).  Another problem is that regular feeders and waterers are too high for the chicks to use.  So jar lids must suffice and that means constatly filling them. Especially the water in this heat wave. 

My little quail hen has been laying an egg almost every day since we bought her, it is too bad that she has NO nesting instinct ( I was warned when I bought her that they have been bred in captivity so long that the nesting instinct was gone).  So far I have not raised a single quail chick.
But the cats are well fed.