Fragile environs of the chicken coop

We have some really dumb chicks on this farm. The yellow, fluffy, chirpy kind.
The Farmer picked them up the other day at Rooney’s. They came in cardboard boxes, where they sat on a bed of straw and chirped at the scene they spied through airholes.
It took a good day to prepare the chicken coop. First, leave-behinds from the previous tenants had to be cleared away. Next, clean straw was laid out on the floor of the coop. Over this, a circular enclosure that closely resembles a bottomless kiddy pool was installed. This chick pen is divided into three sections with boards. Each third has its own heat lamp, strategically hung over the compartment at exactly the right height so as not to set fire to the hay or scorch the chicks.
Aside – as I’m writing this column, on a Saturday afternoon, my attention is occasionally drawn out the window. I am easily distracted. I can hear the ewes calling to their lambs in the front field. They don’t always “baa”, you know. Sometimes, as though they are drinking water, they gargle. Many times they sound human. I often think I’m going to look out there and see Jim Carrey sitting amongst them, mimicking their call. Misty, the Belgian, is nose-to-nose with a new lamb through the fence. Precious. A convoy of kittens is making its way out of the stable for the first time.
One of the ewes – one that had to be shorn after birth in order to facilitate feeding – has discovered she is skinny enough to shimmy her way under the fence to the next pasture, where I am hoping the cows will protect her and the lamb that followed her from coyotes. She is calling as if to say she can’t remember how to get back through to the other side of the fence, where everyone is heading for shelter and it’s getting dark...I can see I’m going to have to go out there and shove her back through again.
Back to my chicks.
Blankets are stretched across the chicken coop windows, cracks in the wall, and over the door. The slightest draft will prompt the chicks to pile on top of each other under the heat lamp, smothering the ones on the bottom of the heap.
The water feeders are placed up on a brick so that the chicks have to reach for a drink. If the water is left on the ground, the chicks will fall asleep in it while they are drinking, and drown. I swear they all have narcolepsy. I keep finding them face down in the feed, sound asleep.
We go in twice a day, opening the door carefully and closing it softly behind us, so as not to startle our feathered friends, who are prone to heart attacks. We stir up the chicks with our fingers, uncovering the ones being smothered by their siblings. So far; so good. The Farmer has attained the optimum balance of heat, air, water, food, space. The chicks are happy. But man, are they high maintenance.

Clubber and the hobbledy-horse

When you work side-by-side with the Farmer, you have to learn to speak his language. He has been farming solo for so long that he isn’t used to giving verbal instructions about what it is that he needs done. As a university professor and writer of research papers, he is quite capable of high-level communication. As am I. But on the farm, you often find yourself taking time off from perfect grammar and syntax. “Go see the seven sisters and get that thing out of their pen, then come through the big door and bring it to me. But be sure to hook the door when you close it or that jackass will be in there lickety-split.” I paused. I was a little unsure of the exact meaning behind his request, but we had gone out to the barn to put a naughty ewe in a head gate, and I had seen one in the area with the last batch of ewe-lambs, whom the Farmer referred to as the seven sisters. So I was pretty confident that was what he wanted. I wasn’t sure which big door I was supposed to go through either, but I knew that Donkey (often referred to as the jackass due to his mischievous nature) enjoyed the sweetfeed that was stored in the centre of the main barn. So I deduced that I was to go through the big door there to bring the head gate around to the lambing pen. I fed this clever deduction back to the Farmer for confirmation: “You want me to go into the ewe-lamb area, get the head gate, bring it through the main barn door to the lambing pen and be sure to latch the door behind me so Donkey doesn’t get the sweet feed. Yes?” The Farmer just looked at me. “Well, we haven’t got all day, darlin’.” He’s so cute when he smiles. His eyes crinkle up and with that big moustache he looks like Magnum P.I. When the Farmer came in one day and said “you’ve got a couple out there all hobbled up,” I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the lambs or the ewes and whether they had themselves tangled in baler twine again or something else and why was he telling me instead of rescuing them himself, anyway? I figured it would be simpler to go out and look. The Farmer had already disappeared into the basement to get something. I heard the feeble cry of newborns as I approached the barn. The Farmer had put the two new moms and their babes in neighbouring pens. I called and watched as two little creatures hobbled out from under their year-old mothers on club feet. Oh. Now what do we do? Just then the Farmer reappeared. “They will probably straighten out on their own. Or we could splint them. We’ll just have to watch to make sure they are getting enough milk.” They seemed to be doing fine. Although one had a sunken tummy. The Farmer milked colostrum from the mothers, fed the babies by mouth syringe and I went back to the house to research club feet on the Internet. Apparently club feet are often a result of a condition called oligo-hydramnios in the mother, which is characterized by a deficiency of amniotic fluid. The lamb can be given corrective “footwear”, just as with human club-foot babies. I worried that splints would hurt the lambs’ little legs, and make it difficult for them to lie down, stand up and tuck under their mothers to nurse. I prayed their legs would straighten out on their own. Within the first week, the bigger of the two lambs had straightened out his legs. I had already named him Clubber, but it has taken on a new meaning now. He is strong and bullish, stealing milk from all the unsuspecting mothers in the pasture. My little hobbledy-horse, on the other hand, is taking a bit longer. In her third week of life now, she is out in the pasture with her mother and thriving, but she still walks with one hoof turned under. When she sees me coming with the bottle, she cries and hobbles over to me as fast as she can. I hold the bottle up high so that she is forced to stand on straight legs and tippy-hoof to reach it. I think she will be just fine.

Mass confusion

We are getting an average of four new lambs a day at the high point of our lambing season. We must have over forty newborns by now. I think we are more than halfway through. I’ll be happy when we’re finished; it’s mass confusion in that lambing pen.
The order of the day now is shuffling sheep. We move the older lambs and their mothers out to the big kindergarten pen, and then finally out to pasture. The newest lambs get put in individual pens where they don’t have to compete and they can easily find their mother.
I haven’t had to bottle-feed much this year. I think that is largely due to the warmer weather. The lambs aren’t fighting the cold so they have more energy to get up and look for milk. Spring lambing is definitely the way to go. It beats winter lambing any day. Translation: sorry Rambo and Rambi – you are getting locked up from September to December again this year.
The other day I came home from work to find the Farmer on the new roof of my porch, where he was laying shingles.
“Hey – two of your lambs escaped,” he remarked, rather nonchalantly I thought.
Funny how the animals are always “mine” when they misbehave. I donned farm boots and ran out to the barnyard, in the direction of the bleating. Sure enough, two little lambs were being chased around the water trough and hay feeders by Donkey and Misty. Several ewes were in hot pursuit.
I got in between the chasers and the chasees and herded the sheep into the barn. I pushed open the door to the lambing pen and watched as two lambs and four ewes jostled their way in. Then I let myself in and surveyed the group, which was now quiet. The lambs that had been running sniffed one hind end after another until they found mothers who would let them nurse. The other two ewes went straight for the feeders to nibble on green hay laced with molasses sweet feed.
“Hey – you don’t belong in here!” I declared, tapping their fat sides with my shepherdess hook. I opened the door and pushed them out. They bleated obscenities at me in passing.
I shored up the door so that no one else could escape, and let myself back out into the main barn. Just then, a snuffling and knickering in the corner caught my attention.
One of the more mature ewes had retreated to the darkest corner of the barn before giving birth to triplets. She was busily cleaning two of the babies with her tongue, darting from one to the other. Sadly, I noticed a third baby still in its birth sack on the ground. With gloved hands I pulled at the sack to free it but it had likely been born dead. The mother had already cleared its breathing passages. She had probably sensed that it was a still birth, and moved on to the live ones. But she kept returning to her third lamb, and licked and knickered at it in an attempt to rouse it back to life. I decided to barricade the little family in the corner with a fence for privacy. I put hay and water in there, and left them for an hour.
Eventually she followed me as I moved her two live lambs into the lambing pen. You can’t tell me that sheep don’t understand loss. The ewe knickered a farewell to her stillborn lamb and looked me right in the eye as I led her away from the birth site and into the pen with her two healthy babies.
Tomorrow we will leave the door to the large pen open, to allow the biggest lambs and their mothers to graze in the front field. The Farmer has already moved the cows out to the second field. They had to duck under the electric fence to get in there. How he convinced Big Betty to do that, I’ll never know. The man has secret powers.
All in all, things are looking pretty good by May 1 on the Fisher Farm.
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Spring lambing has sprung!

Twenty-six and counting. That’s how many lambs have been born in the last two weeks on the Fisher farm. Most have been born in the lambing area, where we had the obviously expectant ewes segregated from the rest of the herd. Some were born out in the pasture, however. Apparently we aren’t very good at telling who is pregnant and who is not. Upon discovering the new lambs in the field, I had to wrap them in a blanket and walk slowly backward to the barn, occasionally unwrapping them so they would bleat and the ewe would follow. I’m getting pretty good at this. It’s in the ewe’s best interest to follow me; if she doesn’t I might have to get the Farmer to strap her to the ATV and bring her in from the pasture. I tell the ewes this and they seem to understand me.
We lost a few lambs in the beginning - strange how the complications and fatalities always seem to happen at the beginning of lambing season. With multiple births you usually end up with at least one lamb with no instinct to thrive and no sense of where the milk is at. Then you have the idiot mother who lies down on her own lamb. That is frustrating. I go through stages of wanting to quit the whole sheep business altogether when that happens. I wake in the middle of the night, anxious to go and check on my lambs.
I’m so glad we decided to lock up the rams until December this year, because spring lambing on the whole is far easier than winter lambing. Next step: keep the rams away from my lambs next winter, so we don’t end up with teen mothers with no maternal instinct next spring.
Our second group of Cree houseguests included a few young boys who were on their spring goose break with their grandparents. The farm was like summer camp to them. The Farmer took the youngest one, Deshawn, out to the barn to help clean up a new lamb. The little guy was taking in all the mess and noise of the farm scene like a trooper until the horse quietly snuck up on him and peeked over his shoulder to see what was going on. From then on Deshawn eyed all the farm animals with suspicion, but it didn’t stop him from enjoying his visit.
We were hoping that our guests would fare better on their hunt this spring than they did last fall. When they were here in November, the sun was shining and the geese were flying high. They got just two geese to bring home with them to Waskaganish.
This year, the first group of hunters bagged 79 geese over a week’s time. The second group got close to 60 in three days of hunting. 40 of those geese were shot in one day. It took close to six hours to pluck all of them. I did not partake in the plucking festivities. The Farmer did, however. He said I missed all of the good storytelling by not joining in.
When the plucking was done, the tired and hungry group staggered into the kitchen, covered in clouds of fluff. I am still finding little tufts of feathers in corners and under furniture. I did my part – I cooked and cleaned and I tended the sheep. Apparently I would not pass muster as a Cree woman, however, because I do not know how to pluck a goose – and I do not wish to be taught.
If you are a farmer with an overabundance of troublesome geese on your property, let me know and I will send some of my Cree friends your way. But I will not be plucking them. www.dianafisher1@gmail.com.

How to entertain houseguests on the farm

I was just leaving the house for work when I heard the patio door slide open. The Farmer stuck his head in and quietly said, “You’ve got two lambs on the ground. But no mother.”
The Farmer was due to hit the road for a business trip. I quickly mixed up a bottle of milk replacer, grabbed my Farmwife hat and headed out to the barn.
I glanced at the sheep grazing in the field. Most of them were ewe lambs, just a year old themselves. One of them had just given birth to twins. And apparently she had wandered out to pasture shortly thereafter, leaving her babies to fend for themselves. How rude.
I found the lambs in the barn, where their mother – or someone – had licked them clean and left them.
I shared the bottle between the two lambs, and put them back where I had found them in case their mother decided to reunite with her new little family. Then I had to go to work.
All day I worried about those lambs. We had had houseguests - Cree clients from James Bay – staying with us all week, and I worried that one of them would try to find the runaway ewe herself. I wondered if I had warned Sarah sufficiently about the Donkey, the sheepdog and the electric fence. By 2pm, I was ready to go home.
Bob, my boss, decided to stop in on his way out of town, so that he could spend some time with our guests before they left for home. He was in for an unexpected evening.
At the farm, I quickly changed into barn clothes. Sarah followed me out to the barn to see what was going on. The lambs were right where I had left them. The sheep were still out in the field. I scooped the twins up into my arms and headed out to pasture. Bob caught up with us, wearing the clothes he had worn to the office and a pair of muddy rubber boots. I figured he might as well get the full effect of the farm experience. I handed him a lamb.
“Will you find the mother?” Sarah asked, worriedly.
“I hope so,” I responded.
I had seen young ewes disown their newborns before. But they are normally in lambing pens when this happens so it is easier to make the identification.
We tried placing the lambs in the middle of the herd, in the hope that their cries would attract their mother. All they attracted was the horse. I was afraid she would try to stomp the noisy little creatures, as she had last year. But she just sniffed them so hard, one little lamb ear went right up her nose and made her sneeze. I guess the novelty has worn off.
Never one to trust a horse, Bob scooped up his lamb and turned back toward the barn.
I decided to give the lambs another bottle of milk and put them in a lambing pen with the door open. Hopefully their bleating would eventually attract their mother.
As the sun began to slip down below the tree line, the herd wandered back to shelter. The lambs bleated and just one ewe replied with her own knickering. I snuck up behind her, straddled her fluffly little body and checked under her tail. Sure enough, she was a mess. Reaching below, I found her tiny udder in the midst of muddy wool tags. Milk flowed easily from the teats. I had found her.
The little ewe lamb was so small, I could easily lift her up and over the gate. I put her in the pen with her lambs. I also put a self-feeding bottle in there, just in case.
By then all 5 of our Cree guests were in the barn, watching the proceedings. I finished feeding the other ewes-in-waiting, and noticed that one of them had her head stuck in the feeder. We tried to pull her out but eventually Bob had to get the hacksaw and cut the feeder wire. A few minutes later, another sheep got stuck and Bob had to turn her over and pull her out. It was quite an eventful evening.
I was kind of proud of myself, but I was especially proud of Bob. When I had asked him to come and help me entertain our Cree houseguests, I didn’t expect him to pitch in and play farmer.

cartoon by my daughter, Milena Hrebacka

Misty's Perfume Drives Donkey Crazy

I had to spend my birthday driving 6 hours to Val D’Or for a business trip, so I made up for it the following night by singing karaoke with family at Lock 17. Needless to say, I was pretty pooped the following morning.
Donkey foiled my plans for a sleep-in. Apparently he felt like celebrating the beautiful sunny morning by chasing pregnant sheep all over the field, tackling them and biting their ears ‘til they bleated for mercy.
I got up to see what all the ruckus was about, and ten minutes later I was out in the pasture in my yoga pants, lumberjack shirt and rubber boots, chasing Donkey with one of the Farmer’s golf tee posts. I never caught up to the beast, but it was good exercise.
The horse decided the sheep-chasing game looked fun, and decided to join Donkey in the pursuit.
Suddenly Donkey caught a whiff of Misty’s special perfume, and stopped cold in his tracks. He sidled up beside her, and gave her a quick nip on the neck (must be where she dabs her cologne). She whipped her head around and nipped him back. Then she stood stock still, patiently waiting. Donkey looked at me. Then he looked up at Misty’s hind end. Waaay up. At 17 and a half hands, she is a bit tall for a wee animal like Donkey to mount. He tried anyway. And promptly fell off. He’s been fixed, but I highly doubt he would be successful in creating little Donkey-Belgians even if he was fertile. He just isn’t tall enough (and I’m not sure if that is even possible). But he was certainly willing to try.
I went back into the house and marked the date on the calendar. In 21 days, I will check to see if Misty is once again wearing the perfume that makes Donkey a little crazy. Well, crazier than usual. We have a tentative date booked to get Misty bred. We thought that might be a reasonable solution to filling the empty stall where Ashley used to be. And it will give Misty a new life experience.
The Farmer says it will save him having to come up with a birthday gift for me next year. I might just go out into the stable one day next spring and see a foal curled up on the hay.
Our ewes are ready to lamb any day now. Some of them are beginning to resemble barrels on stilts. Their bellies are so big; I wouldn’t be surprised to see quadruplets appear. I must stock up on self-feeding bottles and milk replacer, in case some of the moms are not able to feed for one reason or another. But our hay was pretty good this year – what little we had of it. The milk should be fairly nutritious and plentiful as a result.
The sheep were able to head down to the pasture early this year. Our unseasonably warm spring has brought fresh, irresistible shoots of green grass. They are nibbling it down faster than it can grow, and starting to crane their necks through the fence to the yard. Twice already I have woken up to find Donkey and Misty grazing on the front lawn. Houdini and friend have apparently discovered that if they push together on the sliding barn door with their noses, it will eventually slide open. Must remember to put a bungee cord on that door or I won’t have a garden this summer.
I’ll be happy when this spring fever is over and everyone is calm and reasonable again.