Maternity Unit

Behind the scenes of all these descriptions of routine normality, we have 2 exciting little dramas going on. The first is the broody hen, the 2nd is the rabbit nest. Both are nail-biting, wait and see stories and neither are yet very photogenic.

The broody hen featured in the previous post. She is, like all our hens, a Sussex Ponte, a modern utility hybrid designed by one of the big commercial hatcheries to produce 300 eggs a year with no health issues and with almost all the tendency to go broody bred out of her. An egg laying machine. This is probably why so far, in any attempts this year by any of them to go broody, the hen has generally got bored after a few days and gone back to the girl's gang, abandoning her eggs to go cold. Not, it seems, this time. This girl went broody on the 30th Sept and is still sitting tight an a clutch of 10 eggs, brooding them like a pro. Well, the best sort of 'pro' she can be in the circumstances, her being a bit thick and silly with it.

She gets off the eggs once each day to go eat, drink and scratch a bit in the run before hopping back into the nest box BUT does not always get into the correct box. This happens particularly when one of the other hens decides to lay her egg while Miss Broody is out, so she is sitting on the clutch when Miss B comes back. She can occasionally be found brooding an empty nest next door to a little stack of 10 eggs and on one occasion was sitting in the end box with her neck craned round the divider, looking at the clutch and presumably wondering how to shuffle her feet to draw them round into her compartment. Dad has to keep a close and regular eye and correct her little mistakes lest the eggs chill but so far we think we are OK.

If that's true then we might be seeing some eggs 'pipping' on around the 21st, just in time for a visit from Niece Madeleine who is over for a visit on Monday 22nd. If that happens, we then have all the excitement of learning how to keep tiny chicks alive in October and November. We are hoping Miss Broody will become Miss Excellent, Caring Mother or we will have to be messing about with heat lamps and the like. Wish us luck.

In the Rabbit Nest story we have a lot less information. Rabbits are notorious for destroying the nest and babies if you disturb them so that, having discovered the nest back on the 7th Oct, we have basically built a roof over the area with corrugated and then retreated to watch and wait, while increasing the 'meusli' feeds to almost ad-lib status in case Padfoot should need the extra energy in order to feed milk to the kittens. We just see the grown up rabbits bouncing around in their run and periodically Padfoot sloping off to the compost heap where the nest is and we HOPE she is doing that attentive mother thing rabbits do of un-burying their nest and the babies, getting into the nest to feed them and the re-burying the fur-ball with the babies inside back under a plug of grass and compost.

We have no way of knowing if this is what IS going on. The rabbits may be just retreating to the hay of the compost after eating their extra rations of food to sleep it off just because it's nice and dry under the corrugated. The nest may be ancient history by now. All we can do is wait, but Dad says his nerves are shredded from watching the young cats prowling around, he imagines catching a whiff of milky baby rabbits and warm nest hay and thinking evil thoughts. When they do prowl, Dad thinks he sees the rabbits getting anxious, milling in the nest area, rebuffing curious cat noses by punting them with their own noses but they might just be saying 'hello'. It's a nervous time. Dad has now decided that next weekend, when the bunnies should be 2 weeks old and no longer pink, naked, blind and too vulnerable to being killed by Padfoot, Mum and Dad will lift the lid, have a proper explore to see if there is an active nest and, if there is, rescue it, the babies and Padfoot into the Maternity Unit in the calf house, warm, dry, rat proof and protected from cats.

Wish us luck on that one, too. We'll give you more info on all this when things happen.

Deefs