Ok, so. We had to feed the colt off of corn, beet pulp, straw, sweet feed, grass hay when we could occasionally find a few bales to buy. Not ideal, and you can tell. Like I said, though, we finally have some leads on good quality alfalfa, and some first cutting grass hay. We have decided to go ahead and have the colt castrated before we put him in the same pasture as Butters. We have been warned that stallions sometimes view minis as mares for them to protect and do to them what stallions do to mares.... err, leapfrog.. sorta. We don't want to put Butters through that, so we still have them seperate. Other than being underweight, he is doing well. Super sweet horse, he follows us(but especially me, hee hee) around and he loves getting hugs and scratchies. Butters is a bit jealous, but he is doing alright. A bit grumpy with me, and he hangs out with his butt towards us just pouting. LOL his weight is fine, but then donkeys can get fat on air. Straw, a hand full of sweet feed, beet pulp, and the occasional flake of grass hay keeps him in fine condition.
We have had some tragedies with our birds lately(outside birds, the parrots are all fine). We lost Turkey Bird to those horrible roaming dogs who also took Dandy/Stalker and many other of our birds. Fish and Game wasn't able to help us, and we are having to take other actions as suggested by them. We are not thrilled but have to do what we have to do. We also have locked up most of our birds now and are locking up more and more as time goes on. Mr. Bug also has been working more and more on fencing.
Turkey Bird was snatched off of her nest in the middle of the night when we were out enjoying spending a pleasant evening by a fire. I wont describe how it happened or how close we were to her when it happened. It was heartbreaking. Hubbs tried looking for her nest for quite a while but had no luck and his flashlight was dying. We gave up on trying to save her eggs and, heartbroken, we sat back by the fire in silence. Then I heard it: a frog that just didn't sound quite like a frog. !! A short time later, it came again. A baby bird!! Mr. Bug got back to searching again, this time with a determined little voice screaming to help him find the nest. Success! The flashlight beam danced on a pile of eggs and one tiny little dark chick. Hubbs shouted for me to help him, as TB had made her nest on a very steep hill/cliff overlooking the creek and he didn't know how to get them up to the house. I grabbed a box, lined it with a towel, and rushed down as close as I could safely get. He scooped up the little baby and carefully crawled up the slope and handed him off to me in exchange for the box that he would use to transport the eggs in.
The nest had 16 eggs in it: 14 good, intact turkey eggs, 1 crushed and rotten turkey egg, and 1 hatched out chicken egg. One. Our little homing beacon chick was a chicken! This is so significant. We would not have found the nest without that little chick screaming about being alone. Chickens hatch out a full week before turkeys do, and the chick had hatched literally that very day. We named the chick Hero, a name fully deserved, since there are 13 happy and healthy turkey chicks in the brooder with her now that would not be alive if she hadn't hatched out and screamed about being alone. What an emotional roller coaster that was, but literally every single one of the turkey eggs we took from her nest hatched. We sadly lost one chick shortly after moving them to the brooder, he got squished by the others.
They are now a couple of weeks old and growing bigger and bigger. We are still quite sad about the loss of TB, but her legacy lives on in 13 baby turkeys and one very special chicken.
We have gotten closer to having indoor running water, and today I was able to bathe *inside* the house for the first time that wasn't a sponge bath type deal. Lmao, but wow was that wonderful. We still have pipes to replace and have to hook up the water to the tap(and decide if we are going to try and run a water heater off the sorta iffy electric in the mobile home, or if we will just deal with cold water until we build our first house), but we finally seem to have gotten the septic system working properly(knock on wood).
The pellets we stocked up on for Freedom are not her favorite(she HATES them), but we are getting by. I have to bribe her basically in order to get her to eat them, but mostly she throws them on the floor and yells at me for something better.
Alex turned 18 in April, and he is doing great. We now feed him a mix of pellets and seed, and that seems to suit him better than just pellets. Himawari Flatbird is sassy as ever. Her little cere is turning brown, which makes us nervous. I genuinely don't know if she would be able to pass an egg. We have cut back her light, no shadowy places, plenty of water and calcium. It is impossible to only touch her head considering her disability..
My mom is having some health issues... she has exertion angina and has been diagnosed with a blockage in the artery that feeds her heart. On the 15th she will be having a procedure done to clear the blockage, and they will put a stint in. My brother is driving down from Chicago to stay with her when she has the procedure done. He is going to take as many precautions as he possibly can while on the road, even down to borrowing his girlfriend's niece's potty training toilet so as to be able to skip rest stop bathrooms. LOL I gotta laugh, because I'm so fricking worried I'd be sobbing if not laughing. What absolutely horrible timing this is. Tho there really is no "good" time for something like this. But the world is so scary and chaotic right now. There were looters only a block and a half from my father in law's house! Not peaceful protesters, people actually doing looting! Our country is so sick and troubled right now, and thanks to the virus we cannot even hug one another for support! We did curbside pickup of a pizza the other day(my first time leaving the property since the first case in our state was announced), and the people right ahead of us were hacking and coughing uncontrollably. I pray with all my heart that they just had a cold.
Ay yi yi, I try to avoid such topics, but it seems like whatever I do there is just awful news everywhere all around. It is so, so much to deal with. At least we have our birds to lean on for support, even if they do scream for snacks at the top of their lungs when I have a headache and poop on freshly cleaned floors. I'll take a bird poop cleanup day any day over the utter crazyness going on in the world. At least bird poop cleanup is straightforward and predictable. Sigh, I'll try to be around on here more often. It does help to talk about birds instead of disease and civil unrest.
I hope you guys are all doing well.
. If you can get a closer picture of the chest feathers I can probably tell you if it’s male or female lol. I have 2 roosters that have the same deal....be useful and don’t attack the hands that feed you - you get to stay. Parrots and chickens at my house all love pumpkins and squash of any variety - makes this season so much fun! I have a few pumpkins out in the garden that I’ll have to bring in one day soon. You’ll have to take pics of Freedom with the pumpkin!
And another of the new birds figured out how to escape their cage, so they are now Hima's new friend(different cage, but we keep the cages near each other. Hima likes her and spends her cage time as close to Hiccup as she can get. She likes to cuss at her lmao. Budgie cussin' is the cutest... "SQUACKSQUACKSQUACKSQUACKSQUACK*flapflapflapflap*! *fluff and shake* ta-deep! 
And when the food bucket shows up he forgets entirely that he is supposed to be mad at me. 
Photo's are really appreciated here,yanno?? (hint hint lol)
