Blogging, take 2

I'd like to apologize for dropping off the face of the net. For the past nine months I've been finishing my junior year at Amherst College, and as much as I love my darling birds they become my parents' responsibility while I'm away, and I have to sacrifice web-design and responding to peacock-related email to my academic and extracurricular responsibilities. Of course, I looked at this blog and realized my last post was in the beginning of July when I didn't leave for Massachusetts until the end of August and... what can I say. I'm bad at blogging. But I'm going to attempt to post weekly this summer, and see how it goes.

Lots of good things have been happening since last July. Eight new exterior pens were built and finished, so now I'm only two pens short of happy. Dear old Spaz, my India Blue terror, still has to share space with his dad Pete, but they are getting along. I didn't expect the two year old white eyed male I saved to be ready to breed this summer, but he has more eyes on him than any two year old I've ever seen, and I'm sure he'd breed the white eyed hen I had shipped in for him if only they had their own space. Unfortunately, they're sharing with the trio of three year old spaldings I saved from my emerald's dalliances in a mixed pen back in the days when I was chaffing under too many birds and not nearly enough pens to keep them seperated. Since I'm almost 90% sure the spalding boy has a silver pied mother I was sort of hoping for spalding white eyeds anyway... this may help that along, even though it'll dilute the spalding blood. Once again I'll end up with a bunch of crazy mutts. Of course, of all the birds, the spalding and white eyed hens are laying like gangbusters while my three cameo hens barely throw me an egg every few days. But that aside, it's so nice to have all my colors seperated, and minimal male fighting, except for the opal and spalding who like to glare at each other through the fence.

I did discover something during the long months of academic stress. When I have a thousand things to do and not nearly enough time to do half of them, I like to cope by buying peafowl online. Thanks to the UPA classified ads, I bought a mature pair of Opals and had them shipped home from Louisianna. Later, I bought a young pair of purple silver pieds from the same breeder, and three mature hens from Brad Legge (the aforementioned white eyed hen, a purple blackshoulder pied hen, to figure out the cause of my purple BS's white wing feathers, and an extra silver pied hen, since I have two darling silver pied boys.) I also ended up getting two white hens and a pied male from someone local, and swapped some young birds for a pair of BS split to midnight and white eyed. None of my friends quite understood this maddness, but I did have some pretty funny conversations about my little "problem." There was lots of eye rolling, and "Amy, you didn't..." It didn't really get my work done. But giving in to the peacock bug did give me something more fun to think about. And shipping in birds for the first time gave me confidence that I'll be able to ship birds out, which I'm going to need to do if our hatch is anywhere as successful as last year's (not looking good at the moment though).

If you need yearling peafowl, particuarly blue pieds, or two year old blue males that you don't mind might have a little spalding or white blood in them, please get in touch with me. I have a lot of darling birds I really need to find new homes for so I have room for some new ones.

Unfortunately, hatching has not been going too well thus far. I have a handfull of adorable chicks, most from my mutt spalding/white eyed pen, but our hatching percentage is way down, and at the moment I have a hatcher filled with 15 or so eggs due today and only two are cracked, and not getting very far at that! When my father opened up the last two bunches of eggs he saw that we've been losing chicks at various stages of development, which is not usually a problem we have. We messed with humidity and air and hoped we were doing better but... not looking up yet.

And that's pretty much life at the moment for this young peafowl farmer. I'm still behind on email, still quite a ways away from updating my website properly. The aviary isn't cleaned yet, and I have to clean and band chicks tomorrow morning. But it's good to be back on the farm, and there's so many eggs in the incubator I can't be too disheartened about hatch rate just yet. This is probably what I get for bugging my father for months about where all the chicks we were going to have were going to go. I am still absent a chick barn, although there is a trailer parked behind the aviary and plans to outfit it better than it was last year. Only time will tell, but I'll keep you posted!