I never know when I head out in the morning what I might find and this morning was no different.
You may remember my post last year The Stork Was Busy Today about new turkey poults and Phil, a new baby alpaca.
We have a lot of barn cats. When I say a lot, I am not talking crazy cat lady with 80 cats in a one room apartment, but a normal amount of cats for a ranch.
Attrition among cats can be high due to predators and some just wanting to go other places, or so I tell myself.
The cats do a great job of controlling the mouse problem, in fact I don’t think I have seen a mouse in the barn in 2 years. Their favorite “food” these days seems to be ground squirrels and an occasional barn swallow.
When some people hear the words “barn cat”, they automatically think that the cats are feral, (for you city folk, that means wild and unmanageable) and while this can be true, we have found that if we start to handle the kittens right from birth they will not become feral.
And of course like everything else there are exceptions.
We have had a few pregnant mamas sneak off and have their kittens who knows where and then they turn up one day and we can not get near them.
I have had one success story taming a feral cat.
This handsome boy was from one of those sneaky mamas and he would run for cover anytime he saw us.
But over time, by being patient, and bribing him with food, he started coming closer and closer.
At first all he would do was sniff my hand, then he would turn around and let you rub his tail until finally, I was able to pick him up and pet him. Now he wants nothing more than to be a house/lap cat. I will say that this is unusual, but it can be done.
But I digress.
As I was saying, when I went down to the barn this morning, there was one of our cats all curled up with 5 new baby kittens.
And yes, they do look like little rats when they are born.
Luckily this first time mama knew what to do and was happily licking and feeding her little ones. I picked them up and plopped them in one of our small cat carriers on a bed of straw and they all settled in nicely.
Not long after finding the kittens, I went back outside to just wander around and check on things, when I heard peeping.
We have been raising turkeys again this year (post to follow soon) and had started off with 11 hens.
Most of them I was able to keep track of, but about four of them disappeared and then resurfaced with little poults. You can read about one such hen here Turkey Surprise.
So this particular morning I found a hen that I had totally lost track of, in the pasture under the disk harrow. She had hatched about 6-8 babies, but it was hard to tell how many she actually had as the grass is so tall this year from all the rain we have had.
With all the hatching going on, we now have 4 hens with a total of about 20 poults of differing ages.
Two of the moms have teamed up and have been quite successful raising about 10 kiddos between them.
Since we have been talking about the stork, I wanted to include this very cute video by Pixar. It is a bit long, but I think you will get a kick out of it.
Until next time, Happy Trails,
