First there were 2 Goslings....

First time on public view and, here, 'photo-bombed' by one of
the male Guinea Fowl 

As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, we are suddenly goat-less again for the first time since early January. We shipped Nanny Óg and the new kid (Henry Óg) home this morning to their new abode in Sligo in my trailer. K-Dub and I had been hard at work in the blue sky, sweaty heat (OK it's only 21ºC but this IS Roscommon) of Saturday, creating a third paddock at the Sligo rebuild house while being eaten alive by mozzies. Luckily for me, anyway, K-Dub is like Lizzie in being a very attractive target for these bitey b**tards, so he was the one being eaten. They don't seem to find me palatable. But then, it WAS his fence.

Only days old here. 

The holding over there includes a nice big and smooth but slightly sloping 2 acre (?) field. The field, though, has been left to go to ruin dominated by huge tussocks of rushes and thickets of bramble and 'sally' willows. The tussocks trap water and the whole field can get very boggy - way too boggy to risk driving the yellow 'JCB' tractor onto it.

This green stuff is grass, children and we eat it.

Never mind - Carolyn is an experienced and cunning improver of grassland and knows that by using combinations of grazing by the mini horses and goats, brush cutting and loppering, the field will soon be brought back into good heart. Razing the rush tussocks to the ground helps water run off and allows grass to recover faster than the rushes by growing up through and between their clumsy root pads. The horses and goats WILL eat the fresh green rush regrowth. We know this works - we have no more rushes on either our front lawn or the East Field after we 'borrowed' the mini horses and the field in this village where the horses were up till recently was also a rush-bog a few years back, when Carolyn's squad moved in.

Baby pears, or an excuse to photograph those
glorious blue skies?

The secret is to divide the field into paddocks so that you can concentrate all your grazing into one small area at a time preventing anyone from being choosy and just eating the sweetest grasses. When the field has been 'hammered' down to the 'clay', you take all the animals off to rest the paddock and let the grass leap into action. Several cycles of this and you have a good field and continuing to rotate the grazing by this 'mob-grazing' system keeps it that way. Hence K-Dub and I sweating and beating off mozzies in the sun.

That (lovely) straying dog, our most frequent visitor, again

Meanwhile the humans in this saga seem to be pinging about all over the place also. Liz went down to Silverwood-land to see the First Holy Communion (and party etc) for youngest niece 'R'. I must admit I cried off this one on grounds of livestock, newly hatched geese and not being Catholic (OK, maybe not that last one) so Liz went down to spend the night and would return on Monday in Mum-in-Law's car (with M-i-L, obviously) so that she could spend a couple of days here catching up with the farm and the various animals. Last time she was up we had the lamb bottle-feeding incident. We were to remember this yesterday evening. There may be a pattern forming.

Bobby the Dog. His brother, Shep, is just as gorgeous.

During this break Charlotte came home from college for the Summer and hence all the goat-moves. Charlotte is our go-to animal wrangler and we know she can usually help if we are doing anything live-stock. She wanted to gather up the goats to bring them home (where she now is, of course) so that she can try out some goat-milking, and we knew we could 'borrow' her to grab my ewes one by one while I trimmed off the last fuzzy edges of my shearing. Everyone's a winner!

Early Purple (?) Orchid

Ah but the livestock "incident" I mentioned. Sad to say we synchronised a bad event with this visit by Mum-in-Law. I had gone out to lock down the poultry for the evening and found one of the goslings looking like a casualty. He had either taken a bad clout (peck?) from an adult bird or been trampled underfoot. He was lying on his back in the dirt on the coop floor with his legs twitching and his head trying to get upright. He was stuck like that, as if a tortoise had been flipped over. Adult geese are massive strong beasts compared to the few-ounces fragile balls of fluff goslings and they can be very clumsy with their feet set so far back on their bodies. It was not looking good.

Some first fox gloves

We rescued the gosling to the sickbay via a warm-up cuddle down Mum's "front" while the 'electric hen' warm-plate warmed up. The brooder box is in the same room as Mum was to be sleeping but she said she could cope with his little pathetic cheeping so we all retired to bed quite hopeful. The little guy was still alive in the morning but although he could sit upright and squirm back up the right way if he toppled, he could not walk. Gander George was all over him when we tried to re-introduce him but that was no good to us if he couldn't move about with the family. Back into the brooder box then, with the little chap, hoping that maybe he was only bruised and might recover over the next days.

One of our big red showy poppies. 

Sadly no. He went downhill mid morning and died while Charlotte and I were doing our goat-taxi run. Ah well. You don't win them all. The other gosling seems to be thriving and is out and about in the orchard today with anything from 1-4 adults depending on who wants to stay near the remaining eggs. Sorry, Mum - we will try to arrange a visit soon where livestock does not die at you!

Black Feather's Day 31.

Hunting for Guinea Fowl eggs. 

Monday the 12th May and day 31 for the Black Feather goose incubation, so we are hovering around all expectantly and keep poking our noses into the girl's private bedroom to see if we can see or hear any evidence of fluffy gosling heads poking up from between the sitter's pristine white feathers. If solid and consistent sitting is anything to go by then Black Feather should be an A1 brooder - she has stuck to the job with first rate professionalism for the whole period, only coming off the eggs for her 'allowed' 20-30 minutes each day to eat, bathe in the big pond and presumably to do her toilet. As I type this, though, at 14:30 on the first likely day we have no movement so far, but that would be normal. These things go at their own pace and the poultry-man must go by the 'watched pot never boils' school of patience.

Guinea Fowl nest with 16 eggs

Sadly, we have a tragic event to include today, the 'loss' of our Guinea Fowl cock-bird Henry, he of the frequent hanging about in the lane and on the verge  keeping watch while the hen bird (Min) laid her daily egg in the bushes. My top photo shows Liz at the nest site which we eventually found. It was with a grim inevitability that we found Henry's sorry, flattened body on the tarmac on Friday afternoon. We quickly checked that Min was 'home' and realised that we might have the same noisy grieving process from Min as we have recently described for the rescue Guinea 'Blondie'. This is a definite failure on our part but would be part of keeping your birds completely free range. We could only have prevented it by caging the Guineas in some kind of tall-sided aviary and that is not how we do things here - we would sooner not keep birds, but it is still an unhappy 'first' for us a bird killed on the road.

Guinea Fowl eggs.

Mercifully (for us and for her!) Min does not seem to be suffering the loss as much as Blondie did hers, so we are not getting long periods of loud, strident, carrying, heart-rending, 'Buckwheat buckwheat' calls; we just get a short burst morning and another in the evening. We put this down to the Guineas having been well integrated into our flock as a whole, so Min is nothing like as lonely as Blondie and in between the calling she hangs out with the hens moving about with them, feeding, sheltering from showers and so on. Also Mercifully, she has completely given up on the nest across the lane and does not go out of the gate any more, not even to look for Henry. This observation had Mentor Anne asking "so who was leading who astray, then?"

Setting the Guinea eggs in the incubator.

We decided that we might as well gather up the eggs from Min's possible nest and see if we might hatch any; we'd keep Henry's DNA going even if we'd lost Henry himself. A quick rummage through the hedge had Liz discovering Min's little stash among the ground elder and snowberry close by the abandoned cottage opposite us; 16 eggs down in a neat mossy bowl. Charlotte of the mini-horses has leant us her incubator for the 28 days and the eggs are now sitting in this being turned twice a day.

Incubator

Anne and Simon have managed to hatch Guinea eggs before but under a broody bantam, they are notoriously hard-shelled and you can have problems at the end with the little 'keets' unable to escape the eggs. G-Day 28 will be Friday 6th June, the day after, all being well, we collect our pigs. I have to smile. We were never going to get into all this - hand rearing, brooder boxes, Infra Red lights, incubators. We were just going to keep a few hens for the eggs, and if anyone went broody than that was a bonus. Now we suddenly have an incubator set, the Hubbards in their brood box* and a feeling that this poultry 'thang' has crept up on us and is taking over!

Scrubbed up for M's Communion 'do'

Back on the 'humans' though for our main event yesterday, a visit down to the Silverwoods for the First Holy Communion of No. 2 nephew, M who is now 8. For my non-Irish readers, this is major Rite of Passage - almost all Irish school children will have their First Holy Communion aged around 8 and then, still organised by the school, their Confirmation at age around 12. The event becomes a big Family Event with all the relations and friends gathering, suited and booted, new outfits, bouncy castles, outings and restaurant meals. Lately, this being modern 'austerity' Ireland, there has been some controversy around the amount of money being spent on these 'do's (the little girls' dresses can be as elabourate and expensive as wedding dresses and some families go a bit mad with stretched limos hired to get to the church and so on). There are questions asked about why this is still part of school life (Despite appearances to the contrary the Catholic church is NOT an 'established' church in Ireland, there is officially NO established church) and why there are even Government grants available to help you pay for the bouncy castle and the dress if you if you have fallen on hard times, lest your child feel excluded from the bulk of society.

Family catering. Liz is on the flapjack job.

I have to quickly say here that the Silverwoods do no such excessive thing, there are no stretched limos prowling their streets and they do not avail themselves of government aid but Mr S. says it is still "a bit like paying for a wedding" - they do have to budget for it. Be all that as it may, it was a lovely day for everyone and we did little M proud, He looked superbly dapper and handsome in his light sandstone linen suit, the church service was dignified and genuine (this class of 20-odd boys slotted in to a normal 12 o'clock Mass well attended by the normal parishioners). We adjourned to a small local hall for the 'party' which had a hot food caterer but baking done by family and friends, there was a puppet show and magician for the little ones and a bit of a 'disco' with no end of balloons flying about to burn off some party calories. Some of the grown ups sneaked off into the kitchen area and set up a laptop to watch the Liverpool game, this being the final day of the footie season and crucial to decide whether the Silverwoods' beloved 'Pool' might pip Man City to top spot in the Premiership. (No such luck). Thank you all the Silverwoods for inviting us down. It was a pleasure to be part of it all and we thoroughly enjoyed the day and the superb spread of food. Thank you, too, Charlotte, for 'dog-sitting' to give us a bit of extra time at the event.

Sheep's Liver and garlic about to become paté

Probably enough for this one. Just a quick Kitchen note - Liz gave a try to a recipe idea you may not have thought of. Liver paté with whiskey is common enough but we have a bottle of home made Cassis knocking about. This makes for an interesting paté with a novel sweet twang. Beautiful on your toast or on a bagel. Signing off now, must go check on that Black Feather goose again. I will let you know as soon as we have news.

12 day old Hubbards get to walk on the grass. 

*These guys actually had a little look at the outside world today as we had some lovely warm sunshine. We snuck them down in the cat basket and let them have a scratch of the good green grass and a little sun on their backs. They are well feathered on the wings but still only 12 days old, though, so not really allowed out yet and we rounded them all back up to their box before they got a chance to get cold.