Eggs (week ending 1/15): 54
Eggs (week ending 1/22): 46
Eggs (year to date): 159

And most of them have been frozen. Northeast Ohio has been in a temperature lockdown for a good period of time now, the thermometer registering above freezing only a couple of times in the last few weeks. Still... I tell myself that I could still live in Wyoming. I mostly grew up there, and survived a good share of interesting weather. I've seen snow in September... and in June. I've seen a ten day period where the temperature did not get above zero degrees Fahrenheit. I saw an April blizzard that closed the town I lived in for three days. Compare that to the winter of 02 here in Ohio, where is snowed on thanksgiving and the ground was covered completely until spring, hey... I can do this on my head. Ask me again if we get another winter like '78, where the Ohio River froze over.

Because of the cold, I've kind of minimized the extent of my Saturday Projects. That's when I do a lot of work in the barnyard on the coop or building goat gates, etc. - the weekend warrior of chooks and goats. So there's not a lot of progress to report.

Still, a couple of things. First of all, on the 15th I let the silkie/cochin crosses out. They were about 10 weeks old, about a third of the size of the rest of the flock, and I figured they could handle themselves. So far they have. In fact, they seem to be more willing to come out of the coop and into the cold than the others. It's either reckless youth or their feathered feet.

Also, Biscuit has disappeared. He/she/it was last seen about a week ago, sounding a little hoarse when meowing for foot. It either succumbed to what made it hoarse, made tracks out of there, or was snatched up by an opportunistic predator. I think it was probably the first, maybe the last. I don't think Biscuit ran away because it was perfectly happy with the goats.

I'm hesitant to write it off, though. For a time, Cleopatra would disappear in the summer and then turn up right around Halloween. She did this like clockwork for a couple of years, until we started feeding her in the barn (which she seems to like more than being fed at the house - she no longer wanders, and we see her every day). Considering youth and inexperience in Biscuit's case, however, I'm not going to get my hopes up.

There may be a redesign coming in The Accidental Farmer's future. A couple of reasons for this. First, I've been thinking about moving the main page from Blogspot to my ISP's web server (so it can all fall under the auspices of my main site). Second, I'm taking a class in HTML, and part of our grade is given for creating a personal web site. Well, I have two, and one of them was just redesigned, so... we'll see what happens.

51 Eggs (as of 1/8)
8 Eggs (on 1/1)
59 Eggs This Year

A busy week in eggland, or whatever you want to call it. Saturday we took the three does to a relative's house to get bred. This includes Clover, who, though she spent time with an obliging buck, failed to get pregnant. Clover and Ebbie are with one buck, and Ellie is with the other. Given the propensity of the family line of one of these goats (Ebbie, I think) to have triplets and the others to twin, we could have a total of twelve goats by summer. Hmmm.

While we were at the relative's house, my daughter asked if we could bring one of their kittens home. They have several cats that live in and around their goat barns, and the place was crawling with them when we visited last time. I thought about it in the time since, and thought it might be a good idea to get another cat to become barn cat in training since Cleo is getting up there in years (although, it was later pointed out by my wife, who was less than happy about the idea of having another barn cat, that Cleo was not as old as I thought... oh well).

Long story short, I told my daughter okay if I could name it (I had a name in mind), and I spotted a little grey ball of fluff that I thought would suit, so I strongly suggested that one. So we brought home Biscuit.

(Biscuit is named after this joke: George W. is in Austin, Texas, where he runs into John Kerry. He asks the Senator what he's doing in Texas, and the Senator says, "Well, Theresa and I have decided to move here. What's more, Theresa is in the family way, so I'm proud to say that our child will be a Texan!" To which W replies, "Now hold on there, Senator. Just because an old momma cat gets into the oven to have her kittens, doesn't mean they're biscuits.")

Now Biscuit was born in the stall of the buck that is currently tying to impregnate Ellie. So while that doesn't make him/er (haven't figured that out yet - wife thinks its a she, previous owners think its a he - no matter, Biscuit will never reproduce, pending a future appointment with the vet) a goat, it does mean that it is used to living around goats. In fact, Biscuit rather likes goats, and one of the wethers, Lewis, has taken a fancy to Biscuit, too, and they have been seen nuzzling.

I think this worked out well because:

1) Cleo is afraid of the goats. In fact, she's afraid of the chickens, too. In fact in fact, she's afraid of Biscuit, who is one-third her size. But as I said, Biscuit likes the goats (yesterday I found her sleeping under the hay in the goats' feed pan). It also likes the chickens, and trots out to where they are. The chickens, however, haven't figured out whether they like the kitten or not. They haven't attacker Biscuit yet, but some have flapped at it, and there have been some feints at pecking. The funny sight is watching Biscuit go to hang with the chickens, and the chickens walk away, preferring to avoid him/er. Then Biscuit follows them, and they walk away again... and again... and again...

2) This also means that the cat knows its place. We fed Biscuit right away, but we have had no problem with it coming to the door and scratching to get in like Cleo did in the early days (letting Cleo in was not an option - I'm allergic to cats). Because of his/er birthplace, Biscuit has thought that her/is place is with the goats.

3) Hopefully this also means that Biscuit has had some early mousing experience, too. We've seen Cleo with mice, but she is also a bit of a wanderer - for a couple of years running she would simply vanish over the summer and not return until the end of October. If Biscuit has good mouse-killing skills, it'll be nice to have a cat that wants to stay in the barn, near the goats (and chickens if they work that whole thing out).

My daughter and I also tried to do an autopsy on the eggs that got too cold to hatch during the Broody Wyandotte Experiment. The mistake I made was waiting to do it (hey, I was busy with other things).

For what it's worth, I now know without uncertainty what a rotten egg smells like. I also know what they sound like when you tap their shells, what they look like inside (vomitous green), how hard the rotten membrane is to break, and how truly putrid a rotten egg is when it is opened. Of the eight eggs, I only got three open before my daughter and I were so repulsed that we called off the autopsy. We did find an unfinished chick in one of the three eggs, though. This brings a whole new meaning to things like the expression "he's a bad egg." Never again.

Speaking of eggs, my wife reports that we're getting an increased number of eggs with meat spots in them. She read in that this could be a hereditary problem. We haven't had much of a problem with them before, and I'm wondering if it might be related to my changing their diet for the winter by adding more carbs (in the form of cracked corn)- so they can produce more body heat. I don't know. This is something I'm going to have to research.

Also, the new McMurray Hatchery catalog came over the weekend. Spent time checking out the flock stock. My wife has already put in a request for meat birds. It may be time to start looking at the inventory of scrap lumber and planning that chicken tractor...

I have always wondered why the news and entertainment media ran their year end reports and summaries and lists starting in the month of December. Like the month didn't count. The wisdom of this was borne out in a rather macabre sort of way with the earthquake/tsunami that hit the Pacific rim's Ring of Fire on Christmas day - probably the biggest news story of the year, and one that didn't make any of the year-end lists that were already compiled before the year's end.

So anyway, here's a look at some trivial numbers that was for me the year in chickens:

General Population
Number of chickens I started with: 2
Number of chickens I have now: 17
Most chickens at any one time: 24
Chickens raised as meat birds: 9
Current number of layers: 10
Current number of roosters: 2
Current number of pullets: 5

Chicks
Chickens raised from chicks: 27
Chicks lost: 1
Chick mortality rate: < 4%

Chickens Lost
Mysterious disappearances: 1
Predator attack: 2
Culled: 3

Eggs
Total eggs in 2004: 1363
Best Egg Month: September (229)
Worst Egg Month: March (1)
Average Eggs/Month: 114
Best Egg Week: September 5 - 11 (65)
Average Eggs/Week: 26

Producers
January - March: Ross
March - Present: New Hampshire, Production Red, Rhode Island Red
August - Present: White Plymouth Rock, Rhode Island Red, Red Sex Link, Silver Laced Wyandotte
Future: Silkie x Cochin

And just because I can, here are a couple of spiffy charts I created to make things look official and graphical. You can see the difference a few birds makes; the first group of four Reds started laying in April (around week 16); the nine pullets I bought as chicks in late February started laying in August (around week 31).

One more little farmland incident before I sign off. In the coop gathering eggs on Sunday, I heard what sounded like the brief sound of tires screeching. We live on a fairly well-used state road, so that's not unusual. What was unusual was that it sounded like it came from the nursery where the Silkie x Cochins are.

So I stopped and looked at them for a moment, puzzled. And one of the two white ones stretched out its neck and made the same exact sound. Then he did it one more time for good measure. Eight weeks and the little cuss was trying to crow. I thought Rocky (the second string roo, a RIR) had a pathetic crow (he sounds like a party horn).

Well, this little fella can only grow up. Hopefully his crow will grow up with him and not sound like an impending collision.