Today was spent ‘flood-proofing’ our poultry area which as mentioned yesterday, received the brunt of the water that ran off our fields and garden. We have dug a channel by the edge of the lawn by the stables all the way down to the gateway into the poultry area and then continued it in the poultry area itself all the way to the compost heap and ditch between us and John and Sonya’s land. We half began it yesterday whilst it was raining in order to work out if the water would indeed take that path. Most of it did so we are now hopeful that next time we have a downpour we may NOT have quite such a soggy poultry area. Nor indeed a soggy stable as some of the water had run down straight under the stable door!!! Because pictures of channels and ditches are NOT that exciting, the photo is of our youngest Indian Game chicks. These are four of five that we have hatched from our own eggs. We hope to keep at least one of the females (and it looks as though three of the five are girls.. fingers crossed). Sadly though, the only reason we can keep a girl is because their dad, our ONLY cockerel drowned a few weeks ago. He drowned in the duck bath and this was despite having a piece of wood floating in it for the purpose of acting as a raft in case a ‘non-duck’ fell in. We think that because he was such a heavy bird (IGs are) his waterlogged feathers just made him too weighty to climb out. We felt hideously guilty and now have an old plastic bread basket in there as well to act as a bigger raft… just in case!!!
BUT back to our young IGs: with these five and our unrelated eight (hatched from some postal eggs) we should be able to keep two cockerels from the later and the aforementioned female from the former and then sell the rest in breeding pairs or trios!!! It will be exciting to see how all this works out!!!