Guests Aplenty

5 January 2010

What a busy few weeks it has been!

There has been no time for writing and barely enough time for reading or just taking time out.

We have had an almost continual flow of guests since HelpXer Sam arrived and finally as of today I’m getting some time out.

Sam was here for 2 weeks and diligently and quietly worked away on a number of projects until we sent him off to Marty’s for a week. He returned for a few days and then we sent him off to Muriwai Valley Farm for 3 weeks. We took him to Christmas breakfast at Troy’s and he unexpectedly gave us 2 fabulous books for as Thank you presents.

Another HelpXer Georgia stayed for a couple of weeks in December. She worked hard, read lots, chatted heaps and took the dogs for numerous walks. She, like Sam, was a pleasure to host.

We had a couple of guests lined up for brief visits over the holiday period and that was going to be it. And then just before Christmas we received an email from an Irish couple and also a young Spanish tourist wanting to stay. We ummed and ahhed but Irish Dave apparently had carpentry skills and we had a number of carpentry projects on our To Do list.

“What the heck” we thought and we invited the Irish couple.

They arrived 2 days before Christmas and stayed for 2 weeks. Had we been working during this time it would probably have been a fairly easy time for us all but we were with each other 24/7. The first week was grand but I think it’s fair to say when you have 4 people with very different personalities and different views about life, living in such close vicinity can at times be quite wearying for all involved. While Dave was a very laidback, happy person Ricky’s struggle with internal demons meant she often came across as unhappy and stressed.

But to be fair, Dave and Ricky worked hard, were respectful of our need to entertain the other guests that came and went and Dave’s carpentry skills were totally awesome.

Russell and Wattie made flying overnight visits and it was good to catch up over a few drinks.

Neighbour Gary and girlfriend Debs came for dinner one night before going off tiki-touring around the North Island for a couple of weeks and then came back for another dinner a couple of nights ago .

Scotty was due to arrive Boxing Day but turned up a few days late with 2 kids in tow. Although Aaron mentioned the kids coming I clearly wasn’t listening (an awful habit of mine) and hadn’t planned for their arrival at all. Not that it was a problem but I was completely unprepared for the energy required to host children.

Olivia (6) and Jacob (9?) are 2 of the most delightful, polite, well-mannered kids I have ever met. They weren’t just on holiday but on an educational trip to the farm and Olivia especially wanted to know about and be involved in everything we did on the farm. Everything took twice as long as usual to do and Olivia wanted to follow me everywhere. While I was delighted to be able to teach them about our way of life it made me realize just how exhausting parenting can be. It made me very grateful for choosing not to be a parent. I just don’t have the energy!

On the 30th Bev and Dave from Muriwai Valley Farm and Aaron’s older brother came around for dinner and a business meeting. It was a pleasant evening, although Aaron’s brother had clearly had a stressful day with the soon to be ex-wife.

Two days later CouchSurfers Tom and Alannah arrived. They were our only scheduled guests for that period and we were now a house of 9! Aaron managed to score the loan of a queen-sized mattress off Marty and we converted the bar into the kid’s bedroom. Subsequently we have now decided to turf out the old sofa and chair in the bar and invest in a couple of fold-out beds so we never get caught short again.

CouchSurfers Tom and Alannah were just absolutely delightful to host. We had a lot in common and conversation just flowed. They stayed for 2 days and we honestly felt like we just made some great lifelong friends.

Our guests left one by one and finally today the house is empty. Oh bliss!

For the past 2 weeks we have had guests with a wide variety of needs and animals with extra care issues and it often felt like I was running a hotel and veterinary practice. I am certainly richer for these experiences and even more convinced that we are making a positive difference to this planet, however I have absolutely exhausted myself in the process. Instead of starting 2010 feeling rejuvenated and relaxed I feel anything but.

Next holidays I think we will do things differently.

And Then There Were Seven

On December the 6th Joy appeared to be having contractions. She hadn’t built a nest but was lying in the shed as planned and I kept popping in on her every half hour. After a few hours she was up and about as usual and it appeared to have been a false alarm.

On the morning of December the 8th we put a bale of hay in Joy’s shed so she could build her nest. That afternoon I discovered she’d had other plans and had built her nest in the exact same spot as last year; on top of the hill, completely exposed and nowhere near water, wallow or food.

I wasn’t happy.

That day the temperatures sky rocketed and instead of keeping cool in the wallow Joy was only interested in creating the perfect nest. In the evening I sat with her and one by one the piglets slowly made their way into the world. Number 8 popped out and was very still. I massaged its body, cleared the mucous from its mouth and body, performed my best CPR and the minutes ticked by until I finally had to accept there was nothing more I could do. Ten minutes later number 9 appeared full of life and I felt somewhat better.

And then numbers 10, 11 and 12 also had me begging for them to take a breath, just a single breath. But it was not to be. I tried so hard to make them live but in the end I had to accept they had died before they were born. I laid their cold, perfectly formed bodies together on the ground and gently stroked them, shedding a few tears for what might have been.

Spring had been unseasonably hot and I can only assume this had played havoc with Joy’s womb. Based on the deceased piglets’ size I strongly suspect the false labour on the 6th was in fact when things went wrong for them.

About 30 minutes after the last piglet had been born we loaded the piglets into a vege crate and took them and Joy down to the shed. I think now that we made a mistake moving them so fast. Joy was completely out of sorts and for 2 days was moody and struggling to bond with her babies.

Eventually she came right and all was well until the end of week one.

I arrived late for morning feed out and discovered a piglet half crushed under Joy’s overturned trough. Without thinking I lifted the trough off and then lifted up the half paralysed piglet. It was almost flattened across the lower spine. I suspected it had been there for a couple of hours and the sudden flow of blood to its lower extremities caused the poor little piglet to suffer what appeared to be some excruciating muscle spasms.

We took him up to the house, made him a warm bed and tried to feed him baby formula every hour. He tried to refuse the milk and grimaced and shook as he lay on his makeshift bed.

We talked to him and stroked him and he eventually slipped into a deep sleep. We hoped for the best but secretly feared the worst. How could a half paralysed pig possibly survive?

And then early evening he suddenly stood up and very shakily, walked to the edge of the basket and went to the toilet. It peed so much he completely soaked the towel and went all over the carpet. I don’t think I have ever been so happy to have animal pee on my carpet. It then jumped out of the crate and unsteadily but determinedly tottered around and around Aaron where he sat on the ground.

There were smiles all around and we deemed him fit to return to mum, which he did. A week later the dent in his back was still very obvious and his tail had died and dropped off but other than that little ‘Stubby’ (as he’s now called) was doing well.

In the mean time another piglet had developed a slight limp. It appeared that Joy had accidentally stood on and bruised the little girl’s front right leg. Unfortunately the leg appeared to become worse rather than better and then one morning she appeared to have a broken back right leg as well. She bravely, if not altogether gracefully hobbled around the shed, ensuring she got in at feed time.

Aaron was extremely concerned but I was confident this was only a minor glitch in her life. But after a couple of days she appeared to find the 2-legged walking tiring and was crawling rather than attempting to walk. The other piglets were already out exploring the world, getting extra feeds and the little girl was struggling to keep up. As always amazes me with injured piglets, the other piglets took turns to keep her company in the shed. I continued to be positive.

But then on the morning of 31 December we discovered she had lost use of a 3rd leg. The knee joint had been swollen for a couple of days but she appeared to be coping. Now she was immobile. We had no choice but to take her up to the house. We built a temporary pen in our bedroom and gave her her first real meal of solids and a bowl of water. She absolutely loved the cheese (of course) and the apple and gorged herself, drank heavily and grunted happily. All day we visited her and talked to her and the kids spent time with her also, enjoying the opportunity to stroke and see a little piglet up close.

By the afternoon she appeared to be having muscle spasms. I massaged her body as she attempted to sleep. The spasms got worse. Aaron and I could see she was in pain. She hadn’t been to the toilet all day and seemed to be having stomach cramps. I tried to give her Panadol-laced milk but she refused to swallow I was feeling slightly panicked and then Jacob suggested sprinkling crushed panadol on some cheese. She also refused this.

Aaron suggested a solution but I wasn’t ready to hear it. I continued to massage and hold her little body and cried and pleaded with her to get better. In the end the spasms got so bad that she had an almost constant grimace on her face.

Her suffering seemed to be so bad that there was really only one solution and I completely broke down. I was forced to ask Aaron to end her poor little life and fled the house in hysterics.

It was something Aaron never ever wanted to have to do and distressed him immensely. And he had to do this and hold it together in front of our guests while I balled uncontrollably in the middle of Joy’s paddock.

Eventually Aaron came looking for me and took me back up to the house and I did my best to put on my host face.

The next day Olivia held my hand as we walked down the drive and told me she was very sad the piglet had died and that she had cried when she was told. We talked a little bit about it and I realized that, while not pleasant, this had been an incredible life and death farm story that few city children would ever get to experience.

Cats Don’t Belong In The Country

For a couple of weeks the dogs kept spotting some furry creature around the property, which they chased and barked at most determinedly. I assumed it was a possum and then one day I drove up the drive and spotted a juvenile cat on a fence post at the top of the drive. It jumped almost lazily from the post and quickly disappeared into the long grass. It had come dangerously close to our duck paddock and I wondered if that was the reason for the sudden disappearance of one of our ducklings. We kept spotting it around the property and then the weekend before Christmas I very luckily managed to trap it in the shed.

Only problem was we didn’t have a cat cage to hold it in, didn’t know how to catch it and had no idea what to do with it when we did eventually catch it.

We mulled it over for a few hours and decided we’d deal with it in the morning. I went to make sure it was still in the shed and Coppa discovered it hiding behind a large stack of wood and Gib board. I left it a plate of beef and a bowl of water. It was obvious to me from its demeanour that the cat was domesticated.

In the morning Aaron and I went into the shed. While Aaron built a new chicken house I spent an hour removing the wood and gib from against the wall. The food was gone but the cat wasn’t there. We looked all over the shed then determined it must have made it to the top of the shut roller doors and got through the large gap at the top. Bugger!

That afternoon as I was weeding at the top of the drive I could hear someone at the bottom of the drive calling out “Here puss, puss, puss. Here puss, puss, puss.” I raced down the drive as fast as I could but could find no one. Aaron and I went around to Kevin’s but no one was home. That left only one other possibility, the person calling for their cat was somewhere on the other side of the Highway and the wind had carried their voice.

I was elated to discover the cat can’t have been wild and had hopefully got such a scare it would stay on its side of the Highway. How it had managed to cross on a daily basis without getting hit was surely a miracle.

More Fowl Adventures

The Friday before Christmas one of my colleagues offered me a wild bantam and her 7 chicks that were roaming his property. I was delighted and agreed to pick them up on the following Tuesday after work.

They were just beautiful and I was stoked we would have chickens for our soon to be built chicken tractor.

Aaron had quickly built a temporary enclosure on the verandah and we placed in it the new chook house along with some crates of hay to scratch around in.

We were thrilled with our acquisition.

I got up for work on Wednesday morning and fed the new bantam hen and her chicks. They were wary of me but seemed to be coping just fine.

The rest of the animals were all present and accounted for and I went to work in high spirits.

An hour later Aaron got up when he heard a chicken clucking madly outside the bedroom window. The scene was not a good one. One of the dogs must have jumped at a sparrow that had gone into the temporary enclosure looking for a feed. A wall had collapsed in and all that was left was one very upset bantam hen. Aaron tried to catch her without success.

The chicks were all missing. He checked the duck enclosure on the off chance the chicks were in there but discovered something worse, one of the ducklings was missing. He rang me at work and I felt absolutely devastated.

Our chicken rearing abilities were nothing short of disastrous at this point.

As for our duckling, we could only assume there had been another stoat that morning. I was very upset and immediately spent several hundred dollars on the Internet on stoat, possum/cat traps.

At some point during the afternoon Aaron spotted the bantam hen with 2 of her chicks outside the dog kennels. He grabbed a net and a crate and caught the hen. He put her in the crate and caught the 2 chicks. As he put them in the hen flew out. He spent a long time chasing her down the drive and up and around Naniwha hill but eventually she disappeared out of sight.

We now had 2 very lonely bantam chicks back in the re-erected verandah enclosure calling desperately for their mother.

I arrived home, with our latest HelpXers Dave and Ricky, in a less than jovial mood. They must have wondered what the hell they had let themselves in for.

Determined not to fail at chicken-rearing Aaron went on Trade Me that night and discovered an auction for a Sussex hen and 10 chicks expiring in 2 minutes.
“What do you reckon?”
“You’re kidding me?”
“Come on, it’s about to expire, what do you think?”
“I think we’re useless chicken farmers”
“It’s about to expire. Do we or don’t we?!”
I wasn’t the slightest bit interested. “Yeah, okay, whatever”
“Sweet. We won the auction. I’ll ask if we can pick them up on the way home from Troy’s on Christmas Day”
It is fair to say I was not feeling overly thrilled with our latest purchase.

Determined not to lose any more ducklings I insisted we catch the remaining two 2-week old ducklings and their mother and bring them inside. I caught the ducklings and put them in a crate then I caught and somehow managed to let the mother go, at which point she promptly joined the other ducks and was instantly indistinguishable from the rest. It was a bad result but at least we could protect the babies. We brought them inside and put them in a large vege crate with plenty of hay, water and feed.

But because raising fowl is something we seem to be completely useless at, one of the ducklings went into shock and died.

The next day I put the last duckling back outside with its mum and buried the other. I fed out the ducks and chickens as per usual but for some reason they seemed not to see the duckling. It got stood on so much that it ended up severely concussed and was unable to stand. I put it to one side and shortly thereafter it went into shock and died.

I had only one desire at that point and that was to tell our HelpXers to leave so they wouldn’t witness anymore of our incompetent decision making and I could just drink myself into oblivion.

Christmas morning at Troy’s I was determined to be happy and became blissfully toasted after consuming a good litre of strawberry daiquiris for Christmas breakfast.

Late morning we left and drove to Warkworth to collect the Sussex hen and chicks. We were very impressed with the set up the couple had and very happy with our purchase until we discovered one of the chicks struggling to move in the pen. The couple seemed genuinely surprised so we assumed that it was suffering major dehydration.

We took them home and put them in the newly built and rather fantastic verandah enclosure Dave had built for us. The 2 orphaned bantam chicks had been placed in a box and we released them into the enclosure at the same time and they all seemed to get on well. Things were looking up.

The next day the Sussex hen started to aggressively chase the bantam chicks around the enclosure and the dehydrated Sussex chick now appeared more disabled than dehydrated. It clearly had problems using its legs and kept falling over until it just collapsed under its own weight and struggled to move.

By the now the word ‘chicken’ was becoming synonymous with the word ‘stress’.

Aaron and Dave then quickly built a lovely chicken run in the orchard behind our old raised vege gardens and converted the unused wooden pallet duck house into a chook house. We moved the Sussex mother and her chicks into the new enclosure that afternoon.

The 2 bantam chicks were once again alone and upset and cried loudly for their mother.
Amazingly Ricky spotted the bantam hen on front drive in the afternoon, but though Aaron and Dave raced around with the net she flew off into the bush.

We could only hope the chicks’ desperate calls would bring her back.

That evening we all took the dogs for a walk and when we came back I went to check on the 2 bantam chicks. I leapt back around the corner in surprise as I spotted their mother on top of the barbecue clearly searching for a way in.
“It’s her! The hen!”
Just like that Dave grabbed the net and caught the hen. He was so fast I swear I didn’t have time to blink. Within a minute she was inside the enclosure with her very, very happy chicks. The see-saw of luck had once again tipped in our favour.

A few days later we fed out in the morning and Aaron counted the older ducklings. Two were missing. We both searched the paddock thoroughly but they were well and truly gone. They were too big for a stoat and too well sheltered for it to be a hawk. That just left a cat as the culprit.

The constant livestock losses were proving to be more than a little stressful. Luckily all the traps had turned up in the mail and the kids helped Aaron bait them with rabbit meat and set them around the duck enclosure perimeter. The next morning we still had all our ducklings but depressingly none of the traps had gone off. The following morning another duckling was gone and still the traps were empty.

Then I realized none of us had seen the pig’s Barnevelder chicken for several days.

I was upset and so were the kids. I ranted despairingly at the injustice of it all.
“That’s it then! We’re just going to watch them get picked off one by one and we can’t do a bloody thing about it! Some bastard of a person brings a cat into the country and it just sets itself up here like its some bloody drive through take-away and we’re helpless to stop it!”

For whatever reason, Aaron went out to the back vege garden late morning to look at the traps again. The cat had come back for a 2nd breakfast but this time it proved to be its last. Before it got to the ducklings it found the rabbit meat and the steel bar had delivered a quick and fatal blow. We all whooped with joy.

While it had no collar, I had been right; it was definitely a young domestic cat. Olivia asked to see it. I showed her the trap and the small body that poked out from it. In hindsight it may not have been the best thing to do as she has pet cats and it upset her slightly. However, I explained as best I could why we had to set the traps and in the end she was happy with the explanation.

Aaron and I certainly don’t dislike cats and we felt very sorry for it. Aaron buried it and apologized to it for taking its life but in the end we’d had no option and we don’t feel guilty about it.

We continue to set the traps but so far they remain empty.

Yesterday Aaron, Dave and I created another temporary chook run in one of the old raised vege gardens and the bantam hen and her chicks are now happy scratching around in the weeds.

But Wait Folks There’s More…

This morning, as Aaron set off for work, I said goodbye to the last of our guests, and reveled in the knowledge I had a stress-free, quiet day to myself. I started this blog, walked the dogs, pottered around checking on animals and then after lunch started preparing pig meals in the shed.

About half an hour into it I could have sworn I heard meowing. The dogs were sitting next to me but hadn’t noticed anything. I went outside and strained to hear it again. Nothing. The dogs looked at me quizzically. I seriously wondered if after such a hectic couple of weeks I was actually imagining the ghost of a cat now deceased.

I finished making the meals and took them around to the coolstore. I could hear one of the dogs barking frantically; no doubt a hawk had flown over the shed. I went back in the shed and grabbed the crates of fruit. Whisky was outside next to the sheets of roofing iron barking crazily. Ahhh, rats. There’s always rats under the roofing iron.
“Whisky, stop barking!”
He looked at me then appeared to be pouncing at something in front of him. He barked aggressively and pounced again.
Nope, it wasn’t a rat. It must have been a dazed bumblebee. The dogs love to jump on them and bark. I didn’t want him getting stung so went to rescue the bumblebee.

I don’t know why it shocked me. I’m either tired or thick.
A terrified, tiny, black kitten hissed aggressively at me and the dogs as it tried desperately to disappear into the fence post it was pressed against.

Oh…My…God! It suddenly all became very clear. The cat that we had caught had most certainly briefly been someone’s pet. It had gotten pregnant though and was either dumped at our gate or had run away from home. The cat was gone but she had left behind a now starving family. This kitten was now obviously desperately searching for its mother and its next meal.

It had no knowledge of humans or dogs and was a wild bundle of black fury.
I threw a towel over it and put it in a vege crate on the table. I finished cleaning up and then trudged wearily up to the house.

No! No! No! No! No!

If there’s one there’s more.

We now have to decide how to dispose of this one and figure out how to find and capture/kill the rest.

Does this explain why Whisky keeps disappearing into the bush in the evenings? It took us a good 15 minutes to find him the other day. Then this afternoon I heard Arthur crashing and grunting through the bush and discovered him very upset and breathing heavily at one end of the paddock. It took a while to calm him down. Something had given him one hell of a fright. Another freaked out kitten perhaps?

When will this nightmare end? I like cats. I consider myself a cat person but what fucking idiot brings a cat to the country??!