Badger Galore
Staying ‘Up Over’ for a while.
Murder mystery.
So...sometime during last night something got into the 'chook' pen and attacked the hens. We heard no commotion at all.This morning Will discovered 'Freak' lying outside the pen missing it's head and the lid over the nesting boxes was hanging off.
I took this picture of 'Freak' yesterday to show how much they had grown.Inside the 'chook' pen Will found Quilla dead with a nasty head wound and Long-Mu is missing. Hecate has been attacked and has been in shock all day but does not appear to have any major wounds. Odin also has a small wound on his head but everyone else seems untouched.We don't know if it was a quoll or a fox.We saw a fox the other day, just over the hill, by 'Foxwater'. It looked like the young one that we saw a while ago down on Garth Lane one night.When quolls attack they do only eat the chicken's heads though and the fact that 'Freak' was missing it's head and Quilla's head was a mess suggests it was a quoll.
A spotted tailed quoll.
Long - Mu has vanished though, like Isis did a few weeks ago. We did find some of Long - Mu's feathers but that's it. Will says a quoll would take a hen away but it is more likely that a fox would do that. Dave next door says that he has never seen quolls up here but Will said he has seen a quoll here when he lived here before and his hens were attacked in the old pen.
We have fixed the nesting box lid and I have been round the entire pen and secured any small gaps that there were. I have raised the entrance ladder by a foot and as an extra precaution have closed the whole thing off with another piece of netting. I doubt anything will get in tonight should the culprit return to the scene of the crime.
The rest of the hens have been wandering around as normal and seemed largely unaffected until it came to sunset when they were all very reluctant to go back into the new pen.
As it stands tonight only three were brave enough to return to roost in the new pen where the attack happened. Ten of them are roosting in the old pen which just goes to show that they are not as daft as they seem if they remember that it is still there and Yudhisthira is roosting in Roxy's shed.
After my modifications I doubt anything will get into the new pen tonight.
We buried Freak and Quilla tonight in the moonlight. It is all very sad and unsettling.
Pictures from the Crime Scene...
New plans.
So...we have been very busy of late.We have been discussing ways to move forward with our building. We have set the foundations for the bathroom tower but building with cob is a slow process and uses up lots of earth. To actually dig up the earth ourselves and wheelbarrow it to the site adds more time to the process. It would be much quicker to get someone with a 'bobcat' to pile some earth up for us but that 'someone' is very busy rebuilding their own house at the moment. (Can you believe that they are fitting their kitchen in this weekend? It is quite incredible how they have rebuilt their home after the fire in October.)After the intense heat of the Summer the garden suffered and quite a few fruit trees and berry plants withered and died through lack of water. I suggested to Will that we leave the tower for now and we build something higher up the slope, above the garden, from which we can collect water off the roof and use it to water the berries and fruit trees.The idea was a kind of Summerhouse which we could use as guest accommodation for visitors.So...the idea is that the building will be circular to mirror the garden beds and will have a diameter of 6 metres. It will be a wood frame built mainly from cypress trees from the property and the posts will be set upon metal stirrups set in concrete to prevent damage from termites.We have been given lots of large windows which will be perfect for it, and we also have a pile of louvred windows to add for ventilation. Between the windows and louvred sections we will build with straw bales which apart from the rendering will allow us to build quickly. We are going to have double doors at the front and above these, as you enter, will be a clerestory gallery for the bed, leaving the ground floor for living space.The front of the building will be 5 metres high and the circular roof will slope down to 3 metres at the back.We are still thinking of it as primarily guest accommodation and a water collector but it could easily become our standby home should our present house collapse.Things are moving on quickly. Yesterday we measured out the site and set pegs to mark where the posts will go. Today we bought cement and 9 metal stirrups and then cut 6 cypress trees for the main posts. (We still need 3 more.)It's getting exciting!