More birds than bees...

This morning I observed a female cardinal methodically shredding the leaves off one of my tomato plants. I've always liked cardinals, with thier fierce parenting and beautiful colors, and distinctive territorial yelling, but an encounter couple weeks ago has left me sour. I came across a male cardinal lying in the sand on the road in front of the Sanctuary. He seemed to have an injured wing, but when I reached for him he glared so balefully I almost chickened out. It's just a little bird, I coached myself, and picked him up, trying to hold him securely without squeezing his injury. I figured I would try to take him to the wildlife care folks in the morning. Then he bit me. That beak, that pretty, stubby orange beak? It's a wicked, sharp, steely pincer, and it was clamped deep in the web between my thumb and forefinger. I wasn't able to pull free--I had to literally pry him off me.
I took another two steps before he struck again, this time unerringly grabbing hold of a scar on my thumb. When I was 15, I reached for a paintbrush and instead impaled my thumb through and through on an Exact-o blade; somehow, when the resulting wound was stitched up, some bit of nerve or tendon was sewn right into the scar. It's a bit sensitive. Mr. Bitey McRedbird smacked down on that scar like an Inquistion priest with pliers. When I got him off--and it was not easy to do that calmly--I dropped him. He scarpered into the brush, where I tried, but couldn't nab him again.
So I have a new respect for cardinals, and their pretty, wicked orange beaks, and this one was going to town with savage precision on my tomato vines. So on my morning scrounge for something edible in the yard (9 marble sized potatoes, a handful of sweet potato greens, some basil, 6 hot peppers, and two eggs--breakfast!) I checked it out. there was nothing but bare stem where the bird had been, but on the leaves below, I found the tell-tale bug apples, the amazingly large scat of the tomato hornworm. One might even say fewmets: when those caterpillars get going they get gigantic. Some of those poops were bigger than my sadly stunted potato harvest. I picked off a few more, all I could find, and fed them to the chickens. Audrey, second generation Sanctuary survivor chicken, is the only one who gets the concept of me throwing her bugs, and she was busy laying my breakfast egg at the time, so I had to coach Ghostface and Port; Binky just watched me with his steely orange gaze, but I'm not fooled: I remember when he was a poop-bound little runt, built like a bundle of twigs, that I had to secretly handfeed so he'd get anything to eat at all. I think this is why he still loves me.)

Over the weekend, we got the news that one of the eggs we traded for the two Black Stars is hatching. It was Audrey's egg, so it will be the third generation Survivor chicken. I just really, really hope it's a hen....
Yesterday the smaller of the new hens refused to stand up and leave the coop. When I went in to get her, her buddy aggressively defended her: it's no good, getting seriously attacked by a big chicken. She took a couple divots out of my calf. Jordan says it's my own fault for chicken wrangling with no clothes on, but it was early in the morning. Too early to get dressed. Anyway, now I know how I got that oddly square black bruise behind my knee last week, since Yang freshened it up for me. I'm so grateful for Jordan's animal training now. He was able to determine that though the leg seemed injured, it wasn't fractured. Her foot was properly warm, and had good strong grip. We theorize that she fell off the perch in a scuffle--these two haven't integrated yet, and no small wonder if this is how Yang treats friendly overtures, like rescues--and maybe banged herself on the rebar the feeder hangs from. We set her up in one of the cages for a little R&R, and when I put some food down she got pretty excited about it, always a good sign--a chicken that won't eat is at death's door. Last night we put Yang in with her for company, and when I checked on them this morning, they were chumbling comfortably to each other and moving about. Ying stood up on both feet and hobbled a few steps.
I know people who would have rushed the bird to a vet and sunk whatever funds were necessary into x-rays, drugs, even surgery. I know a woman whose chicken was savaged by a dog; she spent $600, and the bird died anyway. And this was not a rich woman, by any means. I know someone who is unemployed and near eviction, with no savings, who spent more than her month's rent (borrowed money) on an 8-year old rat with cancer. Frankly, Jordan and I won't do that. We will of course take common sense, good husbandry steps to diagnose and treat anything we can, with whatever means are at our disposal. Not unlike we do for ourselves! We love our chickens, and take good care of them, but our resources are limited, and honestly, I've had a lot of chickens come and go in my life. They don't live forever. Accidents happen, illness happens--though very rarely, if the animal is well cared for. There are possums, foxes, hawks, stray dogs, hurricanes. Once a board fell on a hen (Jade, a black sex-link) breaking her neck and pinning her to the ground. It took me most of a day to find her, and she was still alive until I lifted the board and she moved her head--very sad.
On the other hand, chickens are tough. I've seen them recover from dog attacks, being savaged by a rooster, and bronchitis. Given a chance to rest, eat, and drink, protected from infection, they can pull through pretty sever injuries. At any rate, Ying is looking much improved today and I think she will make a full recovery...and we still have enough money in the bank to pay the mortgage, so the rest of our residents will not become homeless. Win/win.

Summer Solstice

There hasn't been much news from the hive. It's hot, and rainy; the jungle gets deeper and greener every day, and the bees zoom out of the hive every morning on a mission to accomplish the day's foraging before the afternoon thunderstorm. In the mornings you can watch them take off, zigzagging like sparks from a bonfire, up and over the trees, then...where? Once the rain starts, they congregate at the hive entrance; they seem dozy and cranky, like kids stuck inside too long.
Dragonflies and hummingbirds are all over the back yard these days, and some of the gladiolas I transplanted a couple months ago are blooming. There are tomatoes, surprisingly late in the year, on the Homestead vines--an indeterminate variety developed to survive Florida's summer--and at long last, the chili peppers are starting to look enthusiastic. While I was away last week the red potatoes gave up the ghost, finally, so I'll dig them up tomorrow and see what we accomplished. The sweet potatoes and calabasas are starting to look happy, too; I planted two varieties of calabasa this year, so we might get some interesting crosses.
Outside, it's a rainforest. For a change we're getting regular afternoon rains, this summer--that's how it used to be every summer, until maybe six or seven years ago. The forest is responding, every branch sprouting with resurrection fern, moss on all the stones--moss everywhere--everything, lushly green. Even when it's not raining, there's a steady patter of water droplets from the canopy.
The chickens spend their afternoons on the front porch, venturing out into the fields once the rain lets up. Their crops are perpetually stuffed full of grass seed,toadlings, grasshoppers, beetles, worms, leafhoppers, and mole crickets--they almost can't be bothered to come to the back door for kitchen scraps. We have two new additions, named (rather unfortunately) Ying and Yang; they're a breed called Black Star,which is a RIR/Barred Rock cross. They're huge, peaceable, handsome black hens, and they are still getting used to things around here. They were accustomed to living with a family full of active children, and here, obviously, they are much more left to themselves. The younger RIRs, which we refer to as "the mediums" (because we have three sub-flocks at the moment: bitty, medium, and grown), have aligned themselves with the big new ladies, while Binky seems taken aback by their sheer size, and can't decide whether they are beautiful additions to his flock or some kind of threat.
The "bitty" flock consists of the three Old English Bantams we adopted a few months ago; sadly there are two roos and one hen. The hen is prone to choosing a bit of high ground from which to watch her two husbands facing off, which they do a couple times a day in a display of incredibly cute, miniature ferocity. The three of them are amazingly perfectly camouflaged in our forest--brassy brown as a fallen leaf and greenish black as a shadow--they can disappear in a blink. They're so teeny, Binky doesn't seem to even register their presence.
There isn't much else to talk about for now. We're in the summer holding pattern of long, long, hot, really hot, rainy days; it's the time of year when--not unlike the bees--the people, dogs, and cats all crowd inside and watch the jungle grow; when I most leave the Sanctuary to itself, to the mosquitoes, the humidity, and the occasional snake, and only open the windows at night sometimes to hear the frogs going crazy down in the swamp.