Cheryl's SKUNK trap!

My friend Cheryl has a nice big barn where she feeds her barn cats, some tame, some mostly feral. She also seems to have a resident skunk who loves the cat food.. yum yum. So, recently, Cheryl purchased a skunk trap, one of those rather large cage contraptions where an animal can crawl in, but not out, to catch the skunk. I guess her barn gets kind of smelly, and her dogs, Labradoodles, get even more smelly. Hehehehe.
However, catching a skunk is not all that easy... here is her latest account on the skunk trap activities... (Quincy is one of the labradoodles)

OK.....So, I haven't caught a skunk yet in my skunk trap, but I have caught:

The feral cat, Geri
The yellow cat, Tiger
The gray cat, Smokey
The yellow cat again, Tiger
Quincy's head.....twice

and now.......ta da..........a Cuckoo Maran hen, Luverne!

She did make good use of her time, though, and ate all the cat food while she waited to be rescued!

Welcome Billy and Zorro!

We have new members of the petting zoo! Welcome to Billy, the black pigmy goat, and his "brother" Zorry, a tan, brown and black LaMancha goat. I am guessing on Zorro's breed, but he has the most odd looking tiny ears and my book says that LaMancha goats have little or no visible ears at all. Very weird indeed. :-) I havent found out yet why anybody would breed the external ear away from a breed of animal.. but ... there is no limit to the fancy of people I guess. LaMancha goats are a milking breed (but since Zorro is a neutered male, it hardly matters) that originates in Oregon and is supposed to be hardy and still produces under adverse conditions.
Back to Billy and Zorro.. I am not actually sure how old they are, but they sure are a funny pair. Billy, the short but fat guy, seems to be the boss, I think he is just a little more daring and bold. Zorro rather prevers retreat over confrontation, but supposedly was raised by a child and actually seemed to warm up a lot faster towards my daughter than to me! Way to go, Zorro!
The horses were very interested in teh goats and spent quite some time visiting with them while they were locked up temporarily in the dog kennel in the back pasture.
Oh, and i love the way these guys manage to scratch their backs with their horns!!! Very ingenious or "goaty" I guess!

Silly Horse Pictures

I was just thinking about sharing some of my funnier pictures I have taken of the horses over the years...

Jesse... he likes to make faces. He is good at rolling his tongue sideways and then flipping it over.. It's hard to describe and impossible to take a picture of, but it is very cool indeed. Here are just some pictures where he looks goofy.







Beau just likes me to take pictures of him while he roles.... ahhhh, feels so good.












and then there is Harley.. here, chasing TJ.














Oh, and here is another silly Harley picture.. this was taken during late morning siesta...

New Baby Chickens hatching!

We are so excited to experience the hatching of our eggs that have been incubating in our incubator for 3 weeks!!! Every time anew, it is so amazing and wonderful to see a little chick fighting its way out of the shell into the world! This time, we ordered 2 dozen fertile eggs from a breeder in Oklahoma - theses eggs are from a chicken breed that is pretty rare here in the USA. The chickens are called Appenzeller Spitzhauben and are very different looking, with a feathery top hat and black polka dots on white all over... I will write another blog about our cute Spitzhauben soon...
By chance, one of our laying hens, Welly, became broody again 2 weeks ago. A broody hen will sit on a clutch of eggs and try to hatch it, a trait that has been mostly bred out of modern chicken breeds, because a broody hen will not lay any additional eggs (besides the ones she sits on, and those don't have to be her own, she doesn't care). Chicken reproduction today relies to a very large part on incubator machines, who do the tedious job of "sitting on a clutch of eggs" instead of the mother hen.
But back to Welly: I set Welly up with a few fake eggs in a separate cage to await the hatch day of the eggs in the incubator. Then, as the eggs hatch, I have placed the chicks gently under the hen one by one... Removing all the fake eggs. Any broody hen will only accept chicks for a few days, similar to a normal spread of time it takes for a clutch of eggs to hatch.
It is SO EASY for a chicken momma to tend to her young... they can be raised entirely without a mother, that's how self sufficient they are. They instinctively know how to eat and drink, and are able to run around and explore basically from the end of their first day. You can see two curious chicks less than 24 hours old in our pictures of Welly sitting on her nest.

Thanksgiving Turkeys

Sunday we processed our two turkey "babies". We have butchered chickens before, but it was harder with the two young turkeys... I hatched them in our incubator in April. For a while i thought one of them was a female (hen), but then both turned out to be Toms (male turkeys) and i just don't have enough room for that many turkeys, and I dont think their dad, our big Bourbon Red pet turkey, would like them to hang around forever. I do want to get another female turkey, maybe next spring. Here is one of the last pictures of the two young guys.. they have been very happy i think, getting to hunt bugs in the pasture every day.

The first Blog!

Is the first Blog the hardest?
Hello, and welcome to our Spotted Horse Barnyard. Hopefully you will have as much fun at our barnyard as we do!
We have barely opened our doors, and already have a new barnuyard animal... We traded a young drake (that's a male duck") at the county fair, where she showed a lot of our 4H chickens, and received a 3 year old Peking Duck hen (that's a female duck) instead. Sally is pretty tame for a duck - she doesnt even mind being caught! She is up there in years for a duck, especially for a peking, who are the meat producing breeds of all ducks and usually only kept for a few short weeks before being processed... Not so our Sally. We wish her many happy years at our barnyard!