July 26, 2010 – My Little Country

If you haven’t read my post: Super Fantastic Cat Alarm, well, go there first.

If you have, here is a picture of my little alarm cat, Garfield. Also known as Garf, Garfunkel, The Orange Marauder, and now, El Garfo (my kids made that up). This is a cat who has adopted my husband as his own kind and incessantly circles his ankles, crying for food. Doesn’t matter if there’s food in the dish or not, he wants FRESH food, for crying out loud. He also torments my husband in the bathroom, where my poor hubby is just trying to enjoy his ‘morning constitutional’ and Garfield is consistently scratching the door until he is let in. He also follows him into the bathroom for shower time, where he will patiently wait until Jason is out of the shower, whereupon he cries until Jason gives in and gives him more food. He also doesn’t like Jason typing on his laptop, and will jump into his lap and try to sabotage anything Jason is doing.

But, with a face like that, how could you get mad? Well, you really can’t. No matter how much you want to get mad, you just can’t get upset looking at a squooshy little face and tiny ears. Please excuse his ‘cat boogers’ in his nose…I guess it’s time for ‘mommy’ to wash the cat’s face.

So here is the result of letting my crazy Cochin hen set her own eggs. As you can see, the results went really well! 3 out of 4 eggs hatched. The ‘dad’ is a Silkie and the ‘bio mom’ is ???, though I think that for the 2 little white hens it is a bantam Cochin mother. These pics are from June, but now, the little guys are all feathered out and interestingly enough, they all have ‘ear muffs’, and a mohawk. I’ll have to grab some new pics soon. Another interesting thing is that while my brooder raised chicks all contracted coccidia, these guys did not. So there ya’ go…probably better to let Mother Nature ‘do her thing’ rather than depend on an incubator.

Another funny thing is that this hen, I thought for sure, would be dead about a year ago. We rescued her from a really bad situation. Her butt was LITERALLY ripped off…she is missing a lot of her tail. I am sure a dog got a good hold of her at some point. Anyway, when I first got her, she was so thin and ugly, I gave the poor thing a bath. She was absolutely filthy, and had huge gaps in her skin. I have no idea how long she had suffered along with that, but after her bath, she did nothing but get better. So, as you can see, she made it another year and did a great job raising these babies for me.

If you have never been around a mother hen and chicks, it is so neat to watch them interact. You can really see in the first few photos she is teaching them to peck the ground. The chicks are only a few days old in these pics. She makes a very soft clucking sound over and over and the chicks immediately stop what they’re doing and do whatever mom is doing. I wonder…would my kids respond to clucking???