My, The Birds Are BIG This Year

 Saw something out in the front yard yesterday morning...

I kinda thought the bird seed block was disappearing awfully fast.

Crunch, crunch, crunch...

This little buck was a LOUD chewer, and stood there and stared at us like, 'Yeah, whatta ya gonna do about it?' 

Just before this he'd been stripping the little marble-sized apples off my tree, and helpfully removing the lower branches. By the time he was done, he left us four small chunks of the bird block on the ground.

Oh, and don't mind the screen door. One of our Howling Nevada Windstorms kinda destroyed it, we're on the hunt for a new, much sturdier one.

 

 

Year 17 of Chickam!

On top of the nine hatchery chicks we got in mid-May, here are the chick hatched from eggs from our flock!

 

In order of hatch, here they are--and lets just say that Mjolnir, our buff Orpington rooster, is WELL represented here:

Lemon Zest (mom: Luna), egg #6. We got so many blondies this year, we food color-spotted some of them. Lemon Zest got green head/chest spots, and is clean legged.

 Jay Jay (mom: Brick), egg #6. Green head/chest spots, feathered feet/shanks. 

Ishkabibble (mom: Bobo), egg # 4. Reddish-blond with a dark stripe down the back of her head and neck, heavily feathered feet & shanks. She was an assisted hatch , mostly I think due to the oblong shape of her egg--she couldn't rotate to unzip. Her name is fake Yiddish, and originally meant 'Don't worry', then changed to 'Should I worry?' then 'You should worry', and these days basically means, 'What, me worry?'.

 Mace Wungdu (mom: Brick), egg #7. Blond with feathers legs & feet, red head and neck spots. 

Yeti (mom: Takoyaki), egg # 2. The only non-blond in the hatch, she is grey with a tan face, clean legged. 

Sunshine (mom: Luna), egg #5. Blond, clean legged, with green spots on her wings ONLY.

Ick (mom: Arson), egg #13. Blond, clean legged, blue spots on her wings ONLY. Ick as another assisted hatch. She had twisted herself up in the inner membrane of the egg, then pooped all over herself and required a major cleaning job. She comes by her name honestly.

Sorry to say that Ick died suddenly a few days after this, a victim of the chicken owner's catch-all term, 'Failure To Thrive', which basically means 'Who knows What The Hell Happened?!' She never progressed--when the other chicks had full wing feathers, she had none, and in a single day went downhill and passed, despite handfeedings every 30 minutes.

Mother Nature does that, sometimes... 

 

That's it for this year! 

 

INCOMING!

LOCKDOWN DAY!

The 10 Chickam eggs got their final turn last night at 11PM, and today got moved to the bottom of the incubator in preparation for hatching. Larger eggs to the back, smaller eggs out in front.

 

This is the first hatch for our new Vevor incubator...although not really a fair test for it, for reasons I'll get into further down (because it's not Chickam without some kind of damn drama). But this is when we raise the humidity to 65% (from 50%), and open the incubator five times a day for about a minute, to get fresh air in there. No longer turning the eggs signals the chicks to rotate into hatching position, then they pip the aircell inside, THEN they'll pip.

One of the eggs, #4 (on left, in front), peeped at me when I moved it. That's Bobo's egg, she's a tiny black bantam Cochin. Our bantam eggs have always hatched early, sometimes as early as the first day of lockdown! I checked carefully both visually and by feel, and nobody's pipped yet.

We had a 4 hour power outage last night, a repeat of ANOTHER 4-5 hour outage at around day 7. Just like for the first one, I placed a hot water bottle in the incubator and was able to keep the temperature at an acceptable 99.7 to 100.5 degrees...but it shot the humidity ALL to shit, spiking it at 80-90% (eggs at that stage want 50%!). I had to keep opening the incubator every 15 minutes to vent it off.

Of the two big girls who had gone broody, Gretchen refused to sit on test eggs, but Sticky did--so we held her in reserve in case the power didn't come back on before our bedtime. Sticky being a 1 year old, zero-experience mom, I didn't want to put all our eggs in one basket (sorry) by giving them to her unless we had no other choice.

I'm not sure what effect those two events had on the hatching eggs, if any.  If the humidity is too high for too long, water fills the air cell...and when the chicks pip into it for air to breathe, they drown. There's no way for me to tell if water has filled the air cells, and nothing we can do about it, anyway. So we just cross our fingers and hope.

I'm not going to move the camera off the chicks until one of the eggs starts actually unzipping--eggs can pip up to 24 hours before they start to unzip. Watch or follow the Chickam account on BlueSky for updates:

Chickam on BlueSky

Watch the chicks now at the link below, eggs are due to hatch this Saturday & Sunday, May 31st and June 1st!

Chickam! 

There's a kid-friendly chat feature there (anyone NOT keeping things kid-friendly will get banned, no second chances), and as always you can submit a name for the chicks--one per person please--we'll pick names out of a hat as chicks hatch. 

Chickam Eggs For 2025 Candled!

For those who don't know, on the 10th day of incubation we candle (shine a bright light) through the eggs to check for embryos--and weed out any duds.

So far I'm cautiously optimistic that the 5 hour power outage we suffered on the 2nd day of incubation hasn't affected our eggs. We really won't know until hatch day, May 31st - June 1st. 

 

But here's what we have!

Out of 15 eggs set, we have 10 with embryos, another one is an unknown because of a shell to dark to definitively see through (it stays in anyway), and 4 duds that never developed (eggs from Boudica - gold laced Wyandotte, Arson - Light Brahma mix, and two that were possibly from Gretchen - lavender splash Orpington).

 

Here's the 2025 Chickam roster of 11 eggs, with mamas listed if we know them. Turns out camping in the coop for two days obsessively watching eggs fall out of hen asses paid off!

 

1 - Peanut (Americaunas, dark shell, so unsure if viable)

2 - Takoyaki (Giant Cochin/Americanas mix, hatched 2024)

4 -  Bobo (tiny black bantam Cochin'd'Uccle mix)

5, 6 - Luna (silver-gray bantam Cochin mix)

7, 8 - Brick (gray/lemon bantam Cochin mix)

9, 10 - Large White eggs - Apricot? (Danish Brown Leghorn)

13, 15 - Arson (Light Brahma mix)

 

We're disappointed that Gretchen and Sticky weren't mamas this year...but in exchange they have BOTH gone broody and stand a great chance of being recruited to be Chickam mom this year!

For dads we have: Mjolnir the buff Orpington, Eggroll the blue laced red Wyandotte, and Bacon, a bantam Belgian D'anvers. I'm betting Bacon will be daddy for the bantam hens--the big girls are too optimistic of a climb for him. And the big boys have trouble locating the...um...needed area to sucessfully 'daddy' for the bantam hens.

But they've surprised us in the past!

 

 Next stop is hatch day!

When we go live, you'll see the livestream to click on here:  Chickam 2025 Live Stream

 

 

Morehens Disease, But With Dignity...And Rationalization

Our Chickam eggs are in the incubator, and due to hatch May 31st, +/- a day or so. Tonight I'll candle the eggs to see how many embryos we have...or ANY, given the 5 hour power outage we had two days into incubation (because it just isn't Chickam without some kind of damned drama).

But to our suprise, one of our local feed stores got in a batch of heritage breeds...most of which are are on the Endangered List. Yes, some American chicken breeds are in danger of extinction, check out this dismayingly long list: Livestock Conservancy Conservation Priority List.

 

So I'm rationalizing today's chick purchase as 'doing our part to save the breed'.

It's not because they are SO cute and fluffy. It's not.

Well, okay, maybe.

 

Anyway, here's today's Morehens Disease outbreak. The feed store had helpful one-page info  sheets. These chicks hatched 5/14, so are 5 days old today (no names yet, I'll update when we name them). And yes, the prices wouldn't normally be this outrageous. Production breed chicks go for $2 to $4 each...but thanks to these being special breeds...and $10 a dozen egg prices driving the demand for backyard chickens...oh, well. Hopefully all these are hens.

 

I may run a livestream on these guys starting tomorrow (the 20th)...and as two of our larger breed hens have gone broody, they might get a mama starting on the 24th, the plan being to add our hatched chicks to the group under her on the 31st. I've never tried that before, so if things go south with her rejecting the new chicks, mama would get bounced back out to the barnyard.

 

Supernova, a drama llama Mottled Java, Critically Endangered:

 

Mayhem (the larger chick) and Havoc (the smaller one), Russian Orloffs, Threatented: We got two, because Orloffs are seriously awesome! The smaller one is struggling a bit, so is getting round the clock assistance in the form of icky Nutri-Drench drops (what the heck do I need with sleep, anyway?):

  

 

Moose, a Salmon Faverolle, Watch:

Favs are also famously awesome clowns--even more so than any other chicken. Check this out: Peaches Is Loud 

 

 

 

Favs are feather footed, fluffy headed...and have 5 toes. They look like an AI generated chicken with all those toes, and ours hasn't yet quite worked out what to do with hers.

And because we can't lay off the ridiculously fat, fluffy eating machine breeds, THREE Orpingtons.

Rainbow, a Blue English Orpington:

 

Zigzag, a Jubilee Orpington:

 

Doughnut, a Chocolate Orpington:

Hard to see in the pics, but if you look them up online, they honest to Pete are the color of milk chocolate!

That's it.

For now.

But next week the feed store is getting some Prairie Bluebells. 

Update, 5/26

...and I have pretty much zero self-control.

So today the kid and I picked up a gray Prairie Bluebell chick, her name is Enzyme! They lay blue eggs! This one yelled a LOT during picture time, and is giving me some quality stink eye. But she does have lovely gray eyes, BTW:

 

 And a Bielefelder chick, named Huntress. She came with the leg band--a good thing because she looks a lot like the Orloffs:

 

 

Both of these girls are a new breed to us, and neither is an endangered breed. I was after a brown Prairie Bluebell, because I love that Creole coloring--but all they had was gray. But the Bielefelder has that Creole coloring, so I got it after all!

 

See how I rationalized that second chick?
 

Yikes...

Looking back at my posting history here, I see a sharp dropoff during the time my heart issue started making itself known...

...and then really took center stage. And while I was posting some on Twitter and later on BlueSky, my energy level had been sliding for so long that at that point, it was less than nothing. I only made two posts here in 2024--both for Chickam.

So I'll try to do better...and that means I'm going to backpost a few things here. So if you follow me on BlueSky (I've left Twitter, and no, I'll never call it that) you'll see 'new blog post' pop up now and then, for stuff that happened in the last year.

BTW, the bill for my TAVR heart surgery was four pages long and came to $176,436.22...with the little valve clocking in at $120,000 all by its lonesome. This did not include a seperate bill for $900 in blood work. But my surgeon, his team, and the nursing staff at the hospital were all freakin' awesome.

Healthcare in America, kids!

IT HAS BEGUN!

In prepping for our annual Chickam webcast, I run the incubator and associated equipment for at least a week. This year was no different, and everything had been purring along beautifully...

...until three days before I was due to set the eggs in the incubator.

 

That's when my trusty, 8 year old ReptiPro incubator suddenly stopped heating.

Despite opening it up for a good cleaning (and finding nothing appeared amiss), it refused to be resurrected. Well and truly borked. And the ReptiPro company no longer exists, haha.

 

Okay, I find one over at Vevor for a reasonable price that looks identical to my old ReptiPro, and get it ordered. But this means it will also be subject to a week-long test run, so our original Chickam start date & hatch date are out the window. 

 

Luckily it performs well, despite a few kinda big issues, cool chicken-disco blue light aside.

 

See that black thing on the top? That's a madly spinning, UNCOVERED fan. As you stand in front of the incubator it is below your eye level...and easy to forget it's there. Perfect for taking the hide off the back of your hand when you reach in there, haha.

I know this, because...

Yeah.

 

The exposed cord running from it down to the built-in fan is...odd, and no doubt will get pecked by curious chicks. Also, the two racks we always used in the ReptiPro to hold eggs are impossible, because (as revealed in the manual, no less!) there is a FIVE DEGREE TEMPERATURE SPLIT  BETWEEN THE TWO RACKS.

I tested it, and sure enough, one rack ran at 99.5, the other at 104.5 

Chicken eggs require a constant incubation temperature of 100.5, haha.

 

We must use the space between the upper and lower racks. This means we can only run ONE rack of 12-15 eggs, depending on their size.

But by far the worst thing is, there's no cord notch in the frame that the ReptiPro had--I cannot use my trusty water weasel/temperature probe combination to mimic an egg and give me a dead-on temperature reading inside an egg. And I don't have time to cut a cord notch in the brand-new incubator (for extra fun, the manual says there IS a notch. It lies).

*sigh*

 

Okay, run with what ya got. So here it is, today we started 15 eggs from our flock! In an effort to get eggs from certain hens, the kid and I spent two solid days sitting out in the coop, Johnny-on-the-spot catching the girls laying eggs...with so-so success. That's why you'll see names written on eggs--the ones with a question mark means we are only 90% certain of mama.

 

I'll candle them in 10 days to see how many embryos we have and remove any duds. Hatch day *should* be Saturday, May 31st - Sunday, June 1st.

 

When the first egg pips, we'll start our YouTube webcast here:

www.youtube.com/@jackshenhouse 

My Weapon Of Choice: The Appalachian Dulcimer

 I first started playing the lap dulcimer (also known as an Appalachian dulcimer) in the 1980's--it's easy to play basic melodies, and you can jazz up your music by throwing in chords. I got started learning by taking lessons from Dorothy Chase at the Folk Music Center in Claremont, California. The Folk Music Center has been around since 1958, it's a store but also a VERY cool museum. Please do go if you ever get a chance, it's amazing! I also got to work the Folk Music Festival they put on and made a giant banner for the stage. Big fun!

 

Right now I have two dulcimers: a small, tough-as-nails 'backpack' basic Rugg & Jackel Folkroots dulcimer that I got in the early 80's and have strapped to my back and dragged around to every Renaissance Faire and folk music festival around, hence the ribbons and bells on it. Folkroots got sold to Folkcraft after mine was built, so funnily enough this inexpensive  instrument has increased in rarity/value. The other is a lovely Blue Lion that is my main instrument (and is MUCH larger than the Folkroots model). The Folkroots dulcimer has a high, bright sound, while the Blue Lion has a deeper, richer, very sweet tone--and it's LOUD, with tons of sustain. Just to confuse the uninitiated, there are also hammered dulcimers--huge trapezoidal instruments that you stand in front of and whale away on with little wooden hammers held in your hands.

 

Dulcimers have diatonic tuning (like the white keys on a piano), so yeah, weirdo spacing on the fretboard. This makes not looking at your fretting hand because you're looking at your sheet music next to impossible.

 

And you have to not look at your left hand, because when you do, you lose your place on your tablature--instead, you have to develop muscle memory as to where the frets are, kind of like on a violin...but at least dulcimers have frets. Oh, that's the other thing--dulcimer music isn't scored using the musical scale, because being gluttons for punishment, we use tablature! Did I mention there are also a BUNCH of tuning modes for dulcimers, because why make things easy? Throw in the capo you often have to use and it's enough to make one weep. Jam session folks hate to see us coming.

 

The tuning mode thing makes for...not so much dulcimer tablature being out there. So, I spend time watching YouTube videos of people playing songs...and then sit and tab it out. First figuring out the tuning, then rewinding the video 9 bazillion times so I can watch their fretting hand and get the notes right.

 

But it's worse when the instrument they play isn't a dulcimer and I have to pick the tune out by ear. Then I have to replay the video even more often.

This is pretty much the opposite of fun.

 

But anyway, here they are:

Wait...is that...blue painter's tape on the Folkroots' fretboard...?

Why yes--yes it is.

You see, that instrument didn't come with a 6 1/2 fret, which is something dulcimer players discover pretty quick is something they really, REALLY need (and the Blue Lion has).

So shortly after I got it, I cheated in a 6 1/2 fret using a broken-off paper clip and masking tape.

Yeah, baby, classy.

 

But hey, it worked for the short term, and I figured at some point I'd live it up and get a real 6 1/2 fret put on the instrument.

 

Twenty years later, the tape and paper clip were still going strong. So heck, I left it that way. It was only this year that the masking tape gave out. So blue painter's tape it is!

I still plan on getting the poor thing a real 6 1/2 fret...someday.

 

These days people are creating tablature for dulcimers with a fret at 1 1/2, as well. I won't get one installed on the Blue Lion as it would cut right through the little bird inlay. Luckily it isn't as important as a 6 1/2 fret is.

 

But my Blue Lion won't be upstaged when it comes to fussy, 'Me, me, ME' neediness.

Recently I got a new set of strings for it. Took the old strings off, cleaned & polished the instrument. Putting on steel springs isn't kind to your fingers, and involves getting stabbed quite a bit. Then I remembered, we have a string winder! Cool, I can save a LOT of frustration and time using it!

But...

LOL, the universe having a perverse sense of humor, the peg heads are too big and won't fit inside the string winder.

*sigh*

Cue me winding strings on by hand.
 

The kid has joined a ukelele group. So for about the last 8 months, every week when I drive him to practice, I sit out in the hall and get in a couple of hours of dulcimer practice. The classes are held at our town's community center/senior center, so there's always people walking by who stop, stare, and inevitably ask, 'What is that?!' It's neat to introduce folks to an unknown American instrument. Even better when I tell them what dulcimers are related to...of all things, bagpipes.

No, really!

When Scottish and Irish people settled in the Appalachians, they missed the sound of bagpipes (go figure). So they created dulcimers, where the melody is played on the first two strings (the ones side by side, at the bottom edge of the fretboard in the pics above), with the other two strings strummed as drones. It creates a sound very similar to bagpipes! But sweeter and without all that squealing.

 

Which brings us to tablature. You don't need to read music to play a dulcimer, instead you use a numbering system with the numbers indicating which fret the fingers of your left hand will use.

But...dulcimers not being wildly popular, tablature tends to be hard to find, with the pickings slim and mostly confined to old-timey standards or hymns. Consequently dulcimer players share tablature like mad, and put up videos online.

And some of the tab I've run across is downright evil, in that it appears to be scored for men with hands the size of dinner plates.

 

 Here's the fretboard on my Blue Lion (which by the way, is the normal size for a dulcimer).

 Dulcimer players usually use their thumb and first three fingers of their left hand to fret. The example above wants me to place my ring and middle fingers on the first frets (at the bottom of the little bird's tail), and my thumb on the fifth fret (at the base of the rose part of the inlay).

Yeah, not gonna happen.

To make matters worse, you fret using the side of your left thumbnail, which shoots your manicure to shit and you end up with this:

Those two grooves are courtesy of the very tight melody strings. And YES, they hurt, and make playing a swear-laden trial as your thumb and nail are filleted (I also play banjo, so I'm using to sadistic fretting issues on way-too-tight steel strings that are out to cut a bitch).

BUT!

For Christmas I got a few things to make playing easier. Nifty gray thumb sock (marketed for Smartphone users) protects the side of my thumb while still giving an acceptable 'feel' to find my place on the fretboard. The neato Delrin picks in the thin size I love cut 'pick noise' to nearly non-existent, and the little stick-on rubber things trimmed to fit my picks keep the pick in my hand, rather than flying across the room to take out someone's eye.
 

 

But back to bad tablature. I had a bad feeling about this, and as I checked the tab I'd downloaded, quickly found that this type of sadistic tab had snuck its way into a bunch of the songs I had. 'Meet Me In Dreamland', a very pretty song, had the dreaded 1-5 stretch (underlined in blue).

 But at least I've got a good use for one of my fingers for this thing...

 Becase HAH! I've figured out a workaround!

Mine sounds better, anyway, so there.

 

Some of the other impossible freakin' left hand positions I ran across:

 And this evil POS later reversed that hand position.

When they aren't trying to split your hand in two, they want you to fret with your hand curled up like some mad, contorted crab until you develop a fatal hand cramp.

This sort of nonsense led to me feeling free to make sweeping changes in the tab. And then there's the tab that is simply...incorrect. Some of which I suspect was assigned to an AI program to tab out, they're so screwed up. Of course, sometimes I discover later what works, and what, despite tons of practice, never will...which leads to frenzied, scribbled changes.

 

 It just got worse and worse. Because I damaged both hands in a fall years ago, I have to get creative with left hand finger positions, LOL. The red dots are a marker for me: Watch out, weirdo chord coming!

 

So scribbled up that it looks like something the hard-bitten detective on a TV show would find at the crazed killer's apartment crime scene.

Sometimes I resorted to creating my own tab when I couldn't find one for the song I wanted. I now have a double-sided list of songs I plan on tabbing out.

 

...because every musician needs to be able to play 'Girl From Impanema'...don't they?

I started tabbing the song out as a joke...but heck, it actually sounds really great in that tuning!