This is Ting Ting. Ting Ting is a stubborn hardheaded brat at times….like when it comes to leaving her resting mat alone.
She apparently found this very comfy! The mat wasn’t so happy and took a week to flatten back out :).
Testing complete!
Good news…it held temperature! So I carefully marked x and o and a number or letter on the eggs I’ve been saving and loaded them in.
Meet hopefully a future flock of mostly ducks!
27 blue runner eggs (left side), 2 Sermama chicken eggs in middle, and 15 duck eggs from a mixed flock of buff and roeuns.
Stay tuned, I will be candling them in a few days!
Just got done setting up a new incubator. It has been a long time since I hatched anything, although when I did I did hundreds between ducks and quail!
I’ll be putting blue runner duck eggs, one tiny serama chicken egg (that’s all they’ve given me so far) , and filling the rest of the space with buff/Rouen mixed eggs. 28 days of waiting ahead of me!
But for now, I watch the temperature attempt to stabilize itself….
After months of only 1 small rex litter…we finally got 2 litters! Both moms delivered 9 babies. One is a first timer and one is a first timer fir me (second for her). So far so good!
Baby rabbits are hard to take pictures of because as soon as you disturb the nest they pop up and start looking for mom…but I promise they are all in the picture.
It will be a few days before I can pull them to check colors..so for now they just get daily welfare checks (while mom is distracted with a tidbit or two).
I raised cortunix quail several years ago and impulsively bought a bunch of young chicks from a fellow vendor at a farmer’s market. So cute! So small!
I already had a brooder setup, using a watering trough plus cover plus light. Puppy pads were bedding because the first few days I like to make sure they don’t eat the bedding. Chick sized feeders, quail sized waterers (shallow and narrow so they can’t drown). They were quickly snuggled into their spot, shown the water and food, and seemed happy for a couple of days…
….and then they started dying off. Day 3-5 I lost almost half the group. No particular reason! I started asking around and apparently that’s the norm now? Seems they don’t transition to feed and once the yolk sac is gone, so are they. I do NOT remember that from all the babies I raised! I hatched out almost a hundred and didn’t lose that much…so it appears the lines are weaker now.
And the SMELL. OMG. I thought the ducks were bad as babies…but these were worse. Yes, it’s possible. Ducks smelled like wet feed, these smelled like rotting feed. And the FEATHER DUST…my allergies said no more. They were dustier than all the chickens and ducks combined. Below is a picture of the mess from two days…and not that many birds for the area. Ugh.
Found out the breeder I got mine from had lost a bunch due to power outages from a storm…half jokingly offered to sell back the ones I had left. They accepted and a day later…I’m done with quail. Experiment over.
Unless I can find a line that doesn’t have 40-50% chick mortality, and raise outside on wire bottoms, they are not worth it for me…chalk this one up to experience! A disappointing one…but last I checked they were happily being used as breeders so it worked out.
So all those videos claiming how easy quail are? They leave the hard stuff out. You’ve been warned!
This time it’s the geese! Usually it’s a goat’s head looking for snacks. Today was the geese checking things out.
Three more cute Happy Holiday messages featuring bunnies!
First up is a young grey dutch (didn’t look at the gender yet). I was taking pictures with it and a littermate (below) because by themselves they weren’t very cooperative. Out of all the individual pictures, this is the only nice one…I happened to catch it right when it was checking out the sound of a goose sneaking up behind me so I got a nice side profile. Good bunny!
Next we have the aforementioned littermate with the grey Dutch above. They both decided that the feather boa was a good hiding spot and buried their noses down in it long enough for me to get a picture! This is one of the cute ages for sure.
Last but not least we have a Harlequin Dutch doe that I’m keeping to be one of my harli breeders. She’s very laid back…when I rested the stocking on her for the picture she hunkered down and decided it was a good place for a nap. She (and the other two Dutch above) totally ignored the jingle bells while I was trying to take their picture, which worked out well.
Well, that’s it for the good Christmas/ Holiday rabbit pictures! Maybe soon I’ll do an outtake post :). Hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday, whichever one you celebrate!
I had to make it rhyme, right?
The weather was nice and the lighting was good so I decided to set up a little studio outside and try and get one good holiday rabbit picture to send out. I ended up with a couple of cooperative subjects (kinda) so I decided to post the results on the blog!
This is Cyndi Hopper. She’s a young black otter Rex I got from one of my several Rex breeder friends, Georgia’s Farm and Rabbitry is how she’s listed on Facebook. I snapped this picture right before she decided to taste test the feather boa…but not to worry, I was faster than she was. She didn’t care for the bow and would not even let me put it on her for a second!
Next up we have Scarlet. She is one of the Rex babies I had to hand raise and force feed off mom (write up on that coming soon). They’re a sweet bunch, although you wouldn’t know it from the side eye I’m getting in this picture! Scarlet kept grabbing the jingle balls and throwing them around or nosing them off the table…hilarious to watch!
Last up for this post is Anabelle. She’s another of the hand raised Rex babies and the only REW (Red Eyed White) in the litter. In this picture I wanted to put her tail first in the stocking for a cute “rabbit head popping out of stocking” picture, but she was having none of that! Instead we went with “rabbit investigating stocking and then backing out” image. Next time I might toss some treat of some type in the stocking and have more time to get an even cuter picture !
*No rabbits were harmed in the making of these pictures and everyone got one on one cuddles after their photo sessions*
Please note all pictures are copyright Susan L. Marsh and not for distribution. Thank you!
Look at this cute frog! Just chilling on a metal pipe….
But wait ..that’s not a pipe! That’s a cattle panel fence piece! I’m not sure how long this guy (or girl) has been past the tadpole stage but it can’t be far behind….so cute!
BTW, the title is poking fun at all the ads I’ve seen lately…although I was amazed when I saw this little teeny tiny frog.
https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/herbicide-carryover
This is something I heard about a few years go and stsrted seeing crop up in forums more and more recently.
Imagine you carefully prepared your garden…brought in good soil (or were lucky enough to already have some)…added a few bags of manure…raked it all out …set up your planting areas…lovingly planted the seeds you spent hours researching…
Yipee! Baby plants! You dote over them. You take pictures and share them online for the world to see.
And then…at only a few inches tall your baby plants start to get curly leaves when they should be straight. Then they turn yellow! Next thing you know…they fall over and die.
What happened? Too much water? Not enough water? Wrong light? Someone dumped a bucket of straight urine on the whole thing? Blaming the cat? The dog? You know it wasn’t the goats or there’d be nothing left…
Turns out certain herbicides don’t just disappear after killing the undesirable plants in hay crops. And many of the plants for food happen to share the same family as the undesirable one. So, the chemical manages to pass through the cow, goat, horse, sheep, rabbit, etc digestive tract and stays in the manure.
Then when you hopped along and bought the store bagged manure…it was waiting. And destroyed your garden. Fun part? Everywhere you added manure will be useless this planting season and maybe a couple unless you want to grow hay in that spot.
And it’s not just store bought manure. Any manure can have this, even your own animals unless you don’t feed hay. The only way to know for sure the manure is clean is make your own hay for the ruminates…and that will take space and time. You can try to find manure from a ruminant raiser who feeds hay without herbicide in it, but it’s still a gamble.
I asked at a feed store if their hay had been grown with grazon… they had no idea and didn’t seem interested in finding out even after I explained why. As a small animal raising person, feed stores are my only way to get hay. This tells me how hard it would be to find “clean” hay unless you can store a semi trailer or more and go directly to a farmer.
The only way to slow this is to go the regulatory route and demand that anyone using these chemicals much clearly mark the bales so the end user knows its there…and then force commercial manure sellers to clearly label that their manure may have the chemicals in it and list the symptoms that will show if it is affecting plants.