Birds and Berries

This week, we were bird and berry oriented. First off last week, we started losing young chicks. They have been in our small plastic coop for a week, and there was still two older birds (by a couple of weeks) that stayed in there with them. We thought it might be good to have older birds show the new girls "the ropes".
When the first bird died overnight, we thought it had been crushed by the mob. The chicks slept in a huge pile, because they are goofy. We figured this bird was just the unlucky one on the bottom. The next two days, we lost a bird a night, and we began to worry we had a virus in the birds. Tuesday, Big Man found a fourth bird on it's back, and it's breathing was labored, eyes closed. He was going to put the bird down, but decided to wait until he cleaned the coop. On a hunch, he forced a little water down the bird's throat while he was cleaning the coop, and the bird tried to stand up a short time later. Big Man took the bird to the big bird water bowl and let it drink for a few minutes, and left it next to the bowl while he worked, and the bird tried to climb up and get more water.
He took the bird into the garage, and put it in the new hatch cage, turned on the heat lamp and fixed a water nipple for her. By the end of the evening, the bird had started drinking on it's own, and even began to eat. The next morning we found a hole in the back of her head, and being a retired detective, pieced together that the older birds were picking on the younger girls. They were evicted from the coop, and we have not lost another bird. So, live and learn.

Her name is "Lazarus" now

And since we have twenty new birds on the way to laying status, we added some sleeping roosts to the hen house.

And we let the little birds out to start free ranging. They are good for endless hours of watching them chase bugs.

And we had a bigger bird visit us this week. Every morning Big Man can hear a gobbler come off the roost, this morning he was in the front yard.

And our last bird related post, we ran out of wing sauce last week. So we made another gallon of sauce, canned up and ready for the next few weeks.

And another canning related item, we made a new thing. Rhubarb orange marmalade. We added two pounds of chopped rhubarb to our orange marmalade recipe, and it really turned out well.

Marmalade on the left, sauce on the right

For the berry part of the week, or blueberry bushes started turning ripe, and we are still getting strawberries too.

Big blueberries

And the cherry trees all turned ripe this week. We picked a small bucket of cherries from our tree in the back yard, just piddling around one day. We decided to try using them for our pancakes on Saturday. Fresh from the tree to the griddle, there's just no living like country living.

Then after breakfast, we got serious about picking cherries. We picked thirty pounds of cherries, sweet red, black heart and sour cherries. We spent Sunday pitting the cherries. Cupcake says "The Outlaw" would love the pickings. It's a shame he's batshit crazy, he and the Big Man have more in common than not.
We ended the week with wings.
Look for cherry pie pics next week.

K&K