Greenstorm's Journal

It was supposed to get very cold last night, so I caught most of the muscovies and put them in the quail sed in deep straw; I plan on putting heat in there whenever it's going to drop below -20C. They're fairly tropical birds and they don't have all the fancy mods that true ducks and geese do, to keep their feet warm. In the past I've had muscovies that froze their feet, which was... bad.

This morning Chocolate the muscovy came out for water (I water everyone before work) and I scooped her up and put her in with everyone else. I'm not sure where she sleeps, but although it seems like it must be safe I think she'll be happier with other muscovies. I hope she doesn't hold it against me that I picked her up just because she lets me get close. We'll see.

It feels warm out. The thermometer reads -15C, but maybe the lack of wind is helping. It's almost foggy and I suspect the moisture helps too. In a couple days we're supposed to be up to -6C over a couple nights, that will be a nice respite and should let me pry some of the water dishes off the ice as it softens.

Samhain is over but the veil still feels so thin right now. I go about my daily business and there is just a near presence of death, not necessarily a foreboding, just that I feel it around me even with the worst of the killing cold done for now.

I do what I can to stave it off for the animals, that's what I'm here for, and then to sort seeds for new life in spring.

I'm trying to sort out my animal situation.

Animals take a lot of constant work, unlike the garden which requires bursts of seasonal work. To some extent that constant work is important for me since it gets me up and moving every day. To some extent it's a problem, because it makes vacations etc difficult. To a large extent it can be ameliorated with infrastructure where more $ = more freedom. For instance the difference between hauling water from indoors, hauling water from the spigot on the side of the house, short-hosing water from a field standpipe right next to the pig field, and having an heated or geothermal automatic waterer is a tremendous gradient from a ton of daily work to a once-daily stroll. Likewise feed has a work gradient from shoveling off the truck and hauling daily through tractoring to the location and finally tractoring to automatic feeders.

I had hoped to be in a different place with infrastructure finances by now, but between my 2019 job loss and shift and the chimney/roof repairs and the covid/abattoir situation I am not. So it's time to make some decisions.

I love geese. I'm at 28 right now - white chinese, brown chinese, roman, pilgrim, embden, and saddleback. They're low-care except for winter water, and keeping them inside in the cold of winter and then in breeding pens is probably going to make my spring a lot better. When they were free-ranging in spring there were significant poop issues on my driveway. I'm happy to increase my goose population (highest ever was 44 and that's an ok summer number, as would be a slightly higher number). I'd like to add a couple brown chinese females, several classic roman geese (non-poof-headed), maybe one saddleback pair or trio, and eventually either cottom patch or shetland (shetland probably aren't genetically viable anymore and are thus a functionally dead breed, which is sad because I love them). They are almost all rare, they're great lawnmowers, I find them super rewarding. I think it's fair to cap myself at 1-2 males and 3-4 females of any of the breeds that aren't vanishingly rare, with a cap of maybe 3 males and 6 females of roman, saddleback, or shetland (hahahaha, that would be the largest or second-largest shetland flock in north america but I can dream) and only 2 very rare breeds in that case. I'm not concerned about having too many geese, really, except insofar as I have housing for them. They will always be worth the feed bill for me and a bunch of people seem to like the meat so I seem to be able to sell them ok.

Ducks are very hardy, good layers, and ornamental. They're entertaining. They smell weird. They mess up water. In winter they eat a lot, and they're expensive to slaughter. They make a really great size bird for me personally to eat, unlike a goose which is so huge. I'm involved in Anconas, which are a newly created breed, cayugas which are basically living jewels, the snowblower duck line which is excellent farm utility, and pekins which I want to incorporate into the snowblower line for size but hopefully retain some of the great laying/brooding qualities. So I do want to keep ducks, they can hang out with the geese in winter outside of breeding season, but I don't want to overwinter more than two dozen-ish. I can sell ducklings pretty well in spring if I hatch them out, and probably hatching eggs. Selling whole ducks for food is less worth it between abattoir costs and how small they are; adding some size to the line might help.

Chickens make chicken eggs, which I like scrambled or fried or mostly boiled (duck and goose are too rich for me when cooked that way, though I think I could get used to duck soy eggs). They also make chicken, which isn't super replaceable by other meats for a bunch of things. They're good at turning over the litter in ways ducks and geese don't, and they likewise turn the top inch of soil pretty well in a garden while de-bugging and removing weeds. I'm settled mostly into hardy breeds (chanteclers and americaunas) and the longer I keep breeding here the better I'll be. Keeping a couple chickens is great. Keeping a bunch of chickens is a pain, this despite the hatching eggs and chicks selling pretty well. A dozen or eighteen chickens with two to three roosters, replacing about half every year? That sounds about right. I'll keep playing with my chantecler/americauna mix with a bit of whatever will bulk them out a bit.

Dogs keep everyone safe, they stay.

Cats are not completely aligned animals, they catch some vermin which is good but I'm allergic to them which is bad. However, I have these cats and they live here now. I manage them by controlling access to parts of the house and I should probably get a hepa air filter.

All of the above need minimal alteration/infrastructure changes except maybe more goose houses. Now for the difficulties.

Pigs. Oof. I started pigs as tillers for the garden and they're fantastic like that. Like chickens they'll eat anything. Ossabaw pork is unrivaled and can't be bought. Lard for soap is a lot of fun. I really believe in this breed and it's vanishingly rare and getting rarer by the day with the way feed costs are going. They require the most outside inputs in terms of feed and I was going to say butchering help, but that's not entirely true. They require more labour from me for butchering because there's no one who can do them justice, who works on regular pigs. Handling 3' of backfat and a 2" loin eye instead of 7/8" backfat and a 4" loin is just... folks who butcher commercially run on muscle memory for grocery store cuts, and my pigs are nowhere near that even a little. Also castrating them is really, really emotionally difficult; there's a shot in europe you can give boars that essentially functions like castration and I wish that would hurry up and be approved here. Breeding is less controllable: with birds you remove the eggs and you don't get babies, sometimes you even need to put them in an incubator to make babies. With pigs it's super difficult to keep a boar separated from the females when they're in heat, both of them will go through most fencing, and then a boar can't be kept alone so he needs a companion, and she needs a companion, so that's at least four pigs if you're separating the boar. Pigs can be artificially inseminated but Ossabaws can't since there's no frozen semen for them. So anyhow, I really, really want to keep pigs on the landscape but they're a tremendous amount of work. I need to reduce the numbers I have and keep them low. I wish so much there was a vet within a couple hours that would castrate for me and/or that shot would be approved (I just looked this up and Improvest* was I think approved and starting pilot trials in 2010, it was in a 2016 piece of legislation that's now defunct, but I can't find it in modern legislation, gotta look into this more so this is super promising, it reduces boar taint and keeps girls from getting pregnant, this may let me keep pigs! Yay!). I also need to keep extending my fencing if I want to keep pigs and extend my gardens, but I guess that's true anyhow (I'm lookin' at you, deer/moose).

Muscovy ducks are not entirely practical here, but they are lovely. They're sweet animals, they make beautiful sounds, they're beautiful. Their feet will frostbite in ambient conditions in winter so they need to be confined either with electric heat or with deep-bedded compost. They make a completely different meat to other waterfowl, basically a clone for beef, they lay sporadically but prolifically when they lay, and they are good incubators. Locally there is a disease (?) which kills them when they are young and go out on the land, so they need to be kept indoors when young until they're a considerable age. So, these are an optional pet-slash-incubator, and they require an indoor either heated or deep-bedded composting space

Costurnix quail are weird in the practical/impractical scale. They lay like champs, year round, tremendous volumes of eggs by body weight. The eggs are annoying for practical purposes but really great in salad dressings, tartares, etc. A couple in a greenhouse are tremendous helps in reducing pests. They make lovely noises. They take up almost no space. They're fiddly to eat, have short lifespans, and need to be kept in groups with many more females than males so they're not the most practical meat animal. They need to be kept enclosed at all times since they have no sense. Their infrastructure is out of scale with everyone else's so they really need their own setup, though I'm having some success sharing a completely enclosed space with chickens. I'd love to have a couple in each greenhouse all summer, which requires the greenhouse be sealed, but it's hard for me to have animals for the summer and get rid of them over winter. Along with muscovies these are definitely on the luxury list. Unlike muscovies these are one-more-different-thing, since the muscovies can go in with chickens/ducks in a deep bedding situation, but also unlike muscovies they can be set up with significantly easy auto-feeders and auto-waterers.


Ok, those are the animals. Now what increases my capacity?

-Pig immunocastration shot. Look into this.
-Automatic feeders. Easy to make for birds, harder for pigs. Might be worth it to buy one in for pigs. Have to figure out how to keep them from being buried by deep bedding for the birds (deep bedding rises the floor by 2' slowly over the course of the winter). I should make the bird ones anyhow.
-Hand-filled automatic waterers. Easy for chickens or quail. Hard for waterfowl in winter (55-gallon-drum with a hole cut on the side?) but easy in summer, and not really a thing for pigs unless I built a tank that filled their bowl via float valve and somehow couldn't be destroyed.
-More livestock houses. Working on it one at a time.
-More rotational pastures. Working on one or two added per year.
-Standpipe by the barn. $$$. This might happen in the future but won't happen now.
-Tractor. See standpipe issues above.
-Plumbed-in automatic waterer. I should probably actually cost this out but it would make chores into basically floating on air and so I suspect it's nor affordable.

Ok, gonna let that marinate for a bit.

At this time last year I got my first muscovy "ducks" (which are not actually ducks in the same way coastal redcedars are "thuja" and not "cedrus" or rose of sharon isn't a rose- their common name is a legacy of our tendency to reuse colonial names instead of using new names for new species). There were five of them, all female: Lilac, Silver, Cream, Chocolate, and Chocolate II. Later in the year my family brought me up a drake from the coast ("Drake") and the little flock was completed.

We can discuss how I name my animals some other time.

The muscovies overwintered in a little shed I modified out of a lean-to. The girls had relatively rough feathers; they hadn't had water to bathe in where they came from, just drinking water. Bathing encourages their waterproofing gland and makes them sleek and weather resistant. I didn't let them out because I wasn't certain they'd stay, but I did give them a very small outdoor yard that had a tub of water to bathe in. They bathed a lot, and pooped a lot, to the point where I needed to chip ice-shit mixture away from their tub to empty it.

In the spring Chocolate started sitting on a nest of eggs even before the snow was gone. She hatched 6 adorable ducklings and mothered them well. Lilac and Chocolate II hatched, and Chocolate II stole the babies, taking care of a total of 18 little ones. They were also adorable. As the weather warmed the Silver and Cream also sat but with less success and I lost some ducklings both to an unknown issue (narrowed down to niacin deficiency from too much foraging, heat stroke, or mushroom poisoning) and to the evacuation.

Tiny yellow/black fluffballs grew up into truly lovely birds faster than I could imagine. Muscovies are very quiet birds. They make a little hissing or trilling sound depending on sex, fly around some, and congregate in little groups to chat and look at the sky. Often they'd be perching on my deck railing when I looked out in the morning, and even still the youngest little girl will fly up to my railing to hang out.

Thing is, none of the birds I have can live well in the same sex ratio in which they're born. I ended up with very roughly 18 male muscovies to 8 females hatched this year. Once those eggs hatched the fate of most of those males was set. If I wanted to continue keeping muscovies - and I love them and would be very sad to be without them - either I or someone else would have to kill some. When I raised rats I carefully placed all my babies in pet homes. There are not pet homes for male birds. And... I was not going to ship my babies off to be confused and terrified before they were killed.

I had a taste of what was coming in the summer. Lilac had a prolapse: that's where the poop/urine/egg tract (it's all one hole in birds) inverts and there are parts hanging out the body that really should be inside. I hate it when this happens to any animal. There's a really high chance for infection if it's not dealt with quickly and it just hits my creeping horror buttons. We caught her, tried to re-insert the organ, but there was too much damage and things wouldn't line up right. Tucker helped me; we calmed her, held her down, and chopped off her head with an axe. When she had finished bleeding and twitching I plucked her, gutted her, cut her up, and put her in the freezer.

I don't remember if that was before or after I caught everyone and put them in a rigged-up trailer to evacuate them in the face of our wildfires. We drove for hours, then they had to be caught in the trailer and transferred to a small enclosure. The enclosure had a pool and plenty of straw so they were happy there until they had to be shepherded back into the trailer and hauled back.

Work was busy and the birds were still growing so I left well enough alone.

At some point they molted, growing new feathers to keep them warm over winter and it turned out Chocolate II was actually Lilac II.

When snow started to fall in October I realised just how much muscovies forage. Once the ground was covered my feed bill quadrupled. I started going through a full bag of feed a day, which I supplemented with corn to add carbs/heat/fat to help the birds prepare for the winter. When I went away for a week I left my petsitter with a pile of feed bags over a meter high so they wouldn't run out.

The males were starting to come into sexual maturity. They were tusseling over food, but more worryingly they were starting to mate. Open pools of water act as an aphrodesiac for birds so when I filled my kiddie pools every evening mating would start. Because I had double as many males as females, and because they mated on water, the females would be in the pools for a long time with their heads pushed under water over and over. Over-mating can also increase the chance of prolapse. It was time.

Josh came over last weekend. There was a bunch of stuff that needed doing in addition to the birds and we both did all that first: clean the chimney, assemble the snowblower, get straw. On the night before butcher I filled the pools many times so the muscovies could all play their game of diving into the pool, flapping their wings in a shower of sparkling water, and running out and away as fast as they could. They traded dives like kids waiting their turn on a slide. The next morning their feathers were frosted on the tips.

There were more muscovies to butcher than I had time and energy and choosing which ones would go on this first day was difficult. I kept some specifically in to choose among to breed later and some just because I liked them (Chocolate's first 3 boys, Friendly the black muscovy who eats out of my hand, and a gorgeous chocolate drake) and some were just harder to catch so they didn't make this round. We carried them to the large kill cone set up between two aspen trees at the far end of the yard, tucked them in there, and I held their feet while Josh cut off their heads. After the first one ravens began to circle. Some dogs were making a ruckus down the road and Avallu moved from one corner of the property to another to protect us. He didn't complain that the enticing blood smells made his job harder. Thea was locked inside so she wouldn't get her puppy curiosity and enthusiasm in the way.

Some I stroked their heads and I cried a little. Some were businesslike. When the head was cut off blood came in twin streams from the stump of the neck and stained the base of the trees an astonishingly red colour against brown leaves and the little bit of snow on the ground. When the heads landed on the ground they blinked and the beaks opened and closed; the bodies in the cones convulsed a bit and then eventually stilled. They were placed side by side in the snow until it was done.

None of this was easy. Not easy, either, was the following ten hours of wrestling with scalding and plucking and gutting and finally letting the carcasses freeze outside once they were gutted.

It won't be easy to cut up the carcasses, to slide breasts into the sous vide and then sear them, to confit or render down the bodies for stock. My feelings are sadness and some sort of resigned awe, or perhaps awe-struck resignation. Every human is made out of dead things: dead animals and dead plants that grew out of dead animals at some point in our past. That's a fundamental truth. There is meaning in putting my hand on the taut reality of that truth and feeling it thrum.

But honestly, more than anything, I love my animals. They are a self-contained society of alien beauty and behaviours. They enrich the world by their presence. If I am going to allow them to breed, if I am going to let their generations progress into the future with each one slightly more suited to my land as I gently steer their evolution, then some will also need to die. My choice is to be the person who kills them.

And so I have.