Another uneventful day.

I just realized that I didn't post a single picture of our chickens (and half-our goats) this month, so here's a quick update.

CHICKENS 

Chickens are happy as usual. As the fowl proverb goes, No events are the best events, so today's uneventful morning was the best morning ever, just like yesterday's ...

"I'm so thrilled! This morning is so uneventful!"
(May 31, 2016)

Morning thrill from another angle.
(May 31, 2016)

I think we need a reminder that these chickens actually work, and full time! Here is a papparazzi snapshot from a few weeks ago.

"Just ended my shift, see ya tomorrow!"

And here's today's harvest!

Hello, we're future sunnysideups and omelettes. (May 31, 2016)

That's it about work.

Our chickens rarely have direct interaction with goats, but when they do, it's very exciting. For the goats, especially.

And so the baby goats messed up everything and then went home
for a good night sleep.

GOATS

Goats are, well, happy as usual!

Natchan on a sunny morning two days ago.

More Natchan on a sunny morning. 

"Hello!"

And here are the triplets.

The triplets are now over two months old and have switched to grass diet, although they still crave for mum's milk, which the mum is rarely willing to give them.
Last time, of the three siblings only the girl had a name, Momo-chan. Now the two boys have names too! Aito-kun (the one with horns) and Akio-kun (without horns).

And finally, a fail-proof way how to become a goat's best friend.

(Hint: Repeat action in the video at least once a day. 

ALWAYS have the right leaves or grass.

After two weeks, goats will be emotionally bonded to you.)

***** The end of quick update *****

It's a girl! And two boys!

On March 23, Natchan the Goat gave birth to a girl and two boys!

Here's the new family four days later:

Natchan the Mom with her children. (2016/3/27)

4 days old baby goats are pretty much like toddlers rather than "babies." 

The one with red ribbon is the girl !

Mom goes out, we go out!

Pretending to be eating grass, like Mom does!

Natchan and her new family will stay in their home for a few more weeks. They plan to come back to our farm in mid-April. (Navigating three small, ultra playful baby goats to the farm along a road where cars may pass is not an easy task. It requires some logistics, and the goats must also grow a bit bigger and be able to walk faster and in a straight line. Right now they just totter in funny drunken ways and jump around without much control of where they fall or what they bump into.)

Mom mom mom more milk mom mom!

Okay, here you go.

These days the siblings mostly sleep, and when they don't sleep, they eat (Account by Mrs. Yagishita). Aah, I'm so envious of their busy schedule.

Royal visit and fluffy bottoms

A few days ago, Natchan the Goat paid us a surprise visit. What an honor!

Natchan with a huge  balloon belly. 

As is often the case with goats, the purpose of her visit was not clear. It seems that Natchan just felt like going out for a walk on this fine spring day, and her caretaker-in-chief, Mrs. Yagishita, had no choice but to follow.

Once at the farm, Natchan briefly remembered that she used to have a Kingdom before. But the grass in her Kingdom has been decimated by the chickens, so Natchan quickly turned her focus to the grass around the power plant. To chickens' great relief, Natchan forgot about her Kingdom instantly.

Absorbed in grass inspection, Natchan didn't notice that her caretaker-in-chief had already left.

When she finally did notice, she rushed to catch up.

Wait! 

Waaaait!
(Caretaker-in-chief is yellow circled.)

That was the end of Natchan's visit.

So it's time to go back to chickens. Here are some close up pics from yesterday.

How do you like my eye shadows?

What? No treats today?!

Elegant curves, chicken version.

As the old saying goes, "Fluffy like chicken bottom." 

And finally a group photo:

Everyone cluck cheese!
(2016/3/18)

(Chickens are not so good in saying cheese. )

Alternative perching options

Chickens like perching.

These are our chickens 10 months ago. As soon as they learned to fly, they started exploring their perching options.

12-days old chickens exploring their perching options.

A perch is for chickens what a bed and a sofa is for humans. It's not absolutely necessary for survival, but it makes life much, much more enjoyable.

Unfortunately our farm has only one proper perch - the one inside the coop. That perch is chickens' bed at night and their sofa during the day. From the chickens' perspective, however, having just one combined bed-sofa perch is terribly inconvenient - to reach a perch during the day, when they are mostly out in the run, they have to walk all the way back to the coop.

As always, chickens proved resourceful in identifying alternative perching options. Here's a collection of them, as spotted in the past ten days.

Alternative perch No. 1: Gate

The gate-perch is a bit shaky but it does fulfill the minimum Perch Requirements.

Alternative perch No. 2: Goat's royal seat.

Goats (quite like chickens) like high places. Natchan the Goat had her personal pedestal, on top of which she would stand, enjoy the view and feel like a queen.
Now that Natchan is not here, sometimes a chicken jumps up on the goat's pedestal, looks around and tries to feel like a queen. But something doesn't feel right. No wonder, it's the goat's royal seat. It's too flat for a true chicken perch. But better than nothing.

Alternative perch No. 3: Roof (of a low structure)

In the back of the picture, you can see a low wooden structure with a chicken on top of it. We expected that chickens would notice the perching potential of this roof at some point, and indeed they did. It actually took them longer than we thought.

Alternative perch No. 4: Absolutely mistaken choice


Chickens sometimes go too far in their inventiveness.

One day we worked in the coop until late afternoon, with the door between the coop and the storage room open. Slowly, chickens started to gather in the coop, jumping up the perch and getting ready to sleep, which mainly involves who-gets-the-best-sleeping-spot fight. Then one chicken discovered The Door.

"I got the best spot!" (top right)

The hen was seriously determined to sleep on her new perch, so we had to politely help her off. We apologized for inconvenience, but I think she was angry with us for taking that perfect spot away from her. Some perches are simply too good to be true.

The Destroyer Chicken

The Destroyer Chicken of our flock is the same as the Explorer Chicken. We call her Christine because she used to be a great explorer like Christopher Columbus, which caused us a lot of trouble but we still found Christine's adventures unique and inspiring. Not any more. Now she turned into a real Destroyer Chicken.

Christine in the act of destruction.

The thing is that we are trying to revive grass in chickens' old run so that chickens can move back there from the current run (chickens are supposed to use the two runs in turns so they don't run out of grass).

In order to speed up the recovery, we went to great pains to till the soil and plant seeds of clover and wheat varieties, which we know are chickens' favorites.
We had put hours of work into this, so we expected that now in March - when days are warmer and weeds are waking up after winter delirium - the first signs of green carpet would soon appear in the old run too. But it still looks like this:

Not very spring-like uh?

It's true that chickens had thoroughly wiped out all vegetation in the four months they had used this run. But still. We've put so much work in tilling and sowing the seeds. I've kept watering the whole damn plot. Where are the plants???

Then I found out: 

Christine was taking care of a large portion of them. She cold-bloodedly sabotaged our work. There is nothing inspiring about that.

She has been evicted multiple times but keeps returning to the forbidden area.

She's after these small sprouts that come out of the seeds that we had planted.

The whole plot should be full of them by now, something like this:

This is what it looks like these days in the back of the farm (a No-Chicken Area).

When caught in the middle of her sprout eating session, Christine makes her poker face and clucks: "What's up dude?" (Okay, I don't know if they have the word "dude" in Chickenspeak.)
She can't seem to understand that the fact that she can fly over the closed gate doesn't mean she should.

By now I gave up and decided not to invest any more time into the grass cultivation, other than occasional watering, and leave it to Mother Nature, and keep evicting Christine from the forbidden area every time I find her there (several times a day.) The only lucky circumstance for Christine is that although she can inflict considerable damage, she alone can't eat up everything. She's able to slow down the recovery process but not thwart it.

So we decided to take it easy. Lucky you, Christine.

Occupied by chickens

There was a temporary rearrangement of animal powers on our farm.

There used to be two independent states on the farm: the Goat Kingdom and the Chicken Republic. 

Chicken Republic was more populated and had larger area, but the Goat Kingdom was greener and had more natural resources.

The news is that now, temporarily, the Goat Kingdom, abandoned by its Queen, has become part of the Chicken Republic. 

What happened is that it was decided that Natchan the Goat will not be coming to graze at the farm for a while - maybe until March. The reason is that there's little grass anyway and Natchan with big belly wouldn't walk or graze much. Natchan is all right, having good time at her home, where she gets a grazing time out of the shed every morning and evening. She will be back at the farm after her babies are born.

In the meantime, Natchan gave permission to the chickens to take care of her kingdom. Chickens are working hard to fulfill their duty.

So these days, the whole farm is occupied by lovely chickens. Don't expect any cute mammal, please.

OH, there is one! Recently spotted near the farm.

Although this one won't let you rub her neck, like Natchan the Goat would. 

I'd rather wait for Natchan to come back, and enjoy the chicken takeover in the meantime.