Fall is coming!

This picture is from June. We don't have tall green grass like this anymore. The leaves are starting to turn colors on some of the stressed trees and I came into heat last week so I know that fall is coming. I wasn't quite ready to come into heat so I made sure that everyone knew it. I used my best "heat voice" to tell the girls to stay out of my way and to let the boys know to get ready for me. The farmer says I will be the only one getting bred this fall. Gloria is too old to breed anymore. She had a great set of triplets this year so it's time to end on a very high note. The other girls, Prim and Daisy, aren't yet a year old so they get to hang out until next fall before the get to go courting in the buck pen. Figaro is a wether which means he doesn't have an opinion on any of this whole breeding mess. That just leaves me as the available one. I don't mind it much. Being bred means I get extra food during the winter and lots of grain on the milk stand come next spring and summer.

The farmer has disgraced the goat barn by housing a group of smelly meat chickens in one of the pens. They weren't so bad at first but now they are 8 weeks old and very messy and there's 10 roosters in the pen! At first there was only one rooster. It was a Polish/Toulban/Frizzle cross rooster that the farmer got from her neighbor. It was supposed to be a hen and was supposed to live with two other chicks that came with it. Unfortunately the two chicks got loose from the hutch they were in and disappeared, leaving just the one. Then the one chick turned into a rooster. The farmer tried to put him out with the older laying chickens but they didn't like him one bit so they pecked all his top-knot feathers out and all the feathers off his tail. He was sad and bald and spent a lot of time in the corner of the chicken pen trying to hide from the big birds. The farmer took him out and put him in the hutch to live by himself. When the meat chicks arrived he was allowed to live with them as long as he didn't try to pick any fights. No fights have broken out but this rooster has taught the 9 meat roosters how to crow so the barn is a cacophony of noisy crowing. The Polish rooster has a normal sounding crow. It's loud and clear. The meat roosters, on the other hand, sound like they are getting strangled when they crow. One good crow followed by nine strangle crows is getting kind of annoying. Oh well, the farmer assures us that all of the meat chickens will be gone on September 15 when the chicken processing equipment rental is available. Depending on how the Polish rooster acts in the next few weeks will decide if he is included on the meat bird list on the 15th. He better stay on the straight and narrow if I were him!