New Critters
This year saw the coming and going of several new critters at our farm.
Animal presents were a strong theme this year, Nisey gave Daniel a lovely ginger kitten for his birthday. Miss Rosie is very loved and very tolerant and loves Molly dog and Oscar cat. Lachlan got a lovely green budgie in a huge cage for his birthday in July, he was named Harry Potter and has a terrible temper, luckily he is cute and makes a nice noise!
The largest of our accquisitions are two 20 year old shetland ponies. "Viscount and Comanche" Whoever thought shetland ponies would be called large! They are well behaved for the most part and do a good job mowing. Much better then the sheep last year. The boys are having some lessons and are really enjoying it all.
The loudest additions were 2 bantam/silky chicks that turned into roosters which grew extremely impressive vocal cords which unfortunately after much persuasion from Catherine were severed. We also got a whole bunch of different breeds of chicks that are hens - mainly bantams, very cute. Noah loves spending time in the chook pen with them - actually all the boys love the chook pen, poor chooks.
Early in the year we inherited a half grown peking duck - Jemima Puddleduck. She was lonely so we thought we would get a couple of ducklings. Of course they both grew to be huge Muscovy drakes Dee Dee and Lightning, they are very placid and just wander around the paddock. We also got a female muscovy, Lucky, from friends. But she could fly and must have got sick of the boys and left home, followed not long after by Jemima. So now the boys are lonely, one day we will get some more girls.
We also inherited 2 meat chooks - the funniest lokking things I have ever seen, certainly not bred to live out of a cage. Jeff and the boys butchered them and we cooked one - it was good but we haven't worked up to eating the second one. Daniel loved the butchering, he just wanted to "pull their guts out and cook them", Lachlan was a little upset, but facinated as well. Not something we are in a hurry to repeat, hopefully we don't inherit any more bizarre critters.
