Since our poultry dispatching day (Monday) there is now more ‘perching’ space in the poultry stall and as such, new pecking orders are being established and new places are being claimed. We have three long perches at three different heights and a stand alone perching platform. In general, the higher the bird in the pecking order, the higher the perch they will choose to sleep on. In many cases, pecking order is determined by age and certainly amongst our birds, most of the older ones claim the top perch and what’s more, they claim it early in the evenings.
These birds are four of the 15 Queenie Baby chicks and they have now started to claim the top of the perching platform. We have been encouraging them by lifting them up from the lower perches which actually are virtually on the floor.
The warmth generated when birds perch together like this is incredible. Most birds huddle up to at least one other bird at night although not always.
We picked up our lamb today: really pleased with the weights form our Badgerface/ Beltex crosses: 16.2kg and 18.2kg. The pure Badgerface used to give us 12/13kg.
And in other news, after 48 hours of no rain, we are amazed and totally delighted with how much drier the land is. There are still some very squelchy bits but walking down to the cows was a much drier experience. No rain is forecast for the next week or so, so fingers crossed this situation continues.