Been awhile! Birds in the heat.

Sorry for my lack of posts. Here's a synopsis of what has been happening at the oven usually known as the Tiny Farm.

It's been ridiculously hot here. This whole week the high is around 115 and the lows are in the low 90's. This means that the birds never get a break. The muscovies were being real troopers until today when they finally started panting and just hanging out next to the water dish in the shade all day and completely giving up on chasing me around, which seems to be their favorite thing to do. I don't know why they don't just get in the water.
The chickens are far less heat tolerant than the ducks and are really miserable. Every morning around 5:30 am (when it's a brisk 94 degrees) I give the birds some cool vegetables (lettuce, melon, cucumbers etc) to get them hydrated and cooled off. The sprinklers come on around 6:30 and get the area under their favorite bushes nice and wet. Around 9:30-10:30 when the temps get to around 105, I put frozen water bottles with no lids, in shallow pans under their bushes so they can drink the cool water or stand in it if they want to. I replace the frozen water bottles around 3 or 3:30 when the temps are about 115 and hose off the bushes they hang out under to make sure it stays damp under there for them. Once they go up to roost at night I hose their feet/roosting bar off, which they don't particularly enjoy, but I think it helps them.

The quail get their water from one regular water bottle and one that was frozen the night before so as it melts it makes nice cool water (until of course it heats up into unpleasant warm water). Instead of filling their dust bathing dish with sand, I fill it with ice a couple of times a day. Like the chickens, they stand in it and drink the cool water. I also put a few ice cubes on some heavy cotton fabric in the cages so it keeps the fabric cool as the ice melts.

As you can see keeping birds in the desert, especially the chickens and non-native quail can be a big pain, luckily it's only this much work when the temps are consistently over 110 for several days in a row. Which is hopefully less than three weeks a year. Even with the extra steps each chicken is laying an average of only one egg a week. (Interestingly, the quail are still laying around 5 each a week.) I know lots of people that don't take quite as many extra measures, but I feel like it's my resposibility to do what I can to make them comfortable since I'm responsible for bringing them to Phoenix.

I also have about 100 coturnix eggs in the incubator due to hatch around July 27th! This will be my first batch of quail eggs to hatch from my own birds, I'm interested to see what kind of hatch rate I get.

Candling the Muscovy eggs

Well, we are now on day 14 of 35 with the Muscovy eggs. After candling them, I determined that 2 of the original 15 were infertile and 2 had died early on, so now we're down to 11. Tonight I candled one and could see a little embryo moving around, but unfortunately could not get a picture to turn out. Maybe next time I candle I'll test out the video function on my camera. I did get a picture on day 10 of a viable egg, this vaguely shows the spiderweb of blood vessels that form early on in development (The faint red lines near the top of the egg).

Day 10

It's interesting that different poultry take different amounts of time to hatch. You would think that ducks are ducks and it would all be the same, but all other ducks only take 28 days to hatch and Muscovy ducks take 25% longer at 35 days. Compared with a quail's 16 days, that's an eternity (also seems like eternity for those of us that watch the incubators.)

DUCKS! Muscovy ducks for the tiny farm.

I've been missing my khaki campbells ever since I had to rehome them. The noise was just too much; all the neighbors could hear them. With 10 hens this year I'm anticipating a couple of flies in the chicken area, so it was obvious that I had to have some muscovy ducks. (They can eat hundreds of flies a day and don't quack.) Money is really really tight around here so I didn't think it was going to happen, but then through the magic of craig's list and two five dollar bills, I got these two!



They were sold to me as females that are about 4 or 5 months old. The ducks don't have names yet but I bet they will by the end of the weekend. Maybe Daphne and Delilah? We'll see.

They were bred from a white female and a very nice black drake who likes to be pet. Hopefully the friendliness got passed to these two. When I was a (very young) kid I thought that people with lots of freckles were the child of one black parent and one white one so they came out spotted, apparently in ducks that really is how it works!

I am so happy to have ducks again, I think a dozen is a great number of birds to have so we'll stop here for now....