This week we have been very busy, but not too busy to save a few waifs and strays along the way!
As most of you will know, we have collection of weird and wonderful creatures – we are a pretty soft touch for a story and end up with everybody’s left overs.
So this week, we did have an influx of calls from customers who wanted to get rid for some birds….so our collection grew somewhat.
Firstly, I get a call from a gamekeeper friend who needed to get rid of of some guinea fowl – they either went to people who wanted them or they were destined for the pot. I love the sound of guinea fowl in Africa so I thought we would have a few to see how we got on…we ended up with 10!
The next call was from a customer with a small holding who has had terrible problems with rats and foxes, so much so that they were reducing all livestock to a bare minimum. The foxes had killed all the female turkeys and all the female ducks, so this customer just had males now – not a good breeding strategy! The options were to kill them but they are all too old to eat and would just end up being buried, so I thought we could look after them as well!
The poor, ever suffering Karen just shook her head when I appeared with all this lot, on top of the guinea fowl!
Now turkeys are pretty big birds and quite a handful to catch etc. They are really strong and go a bit mental when you grab them, so catching them was interesting to say the least, but even more fun was letting them out back at home. As soon as the cage was opened, they all flew out in all directions! You cannot imagine that anything so big could actually fly. Later on, after they had settled down, I went out to see if everything was OK, only to discover they had made it on top of the very high shed roof!
Our mornings are now filled with the sounds of Africa and the sounds of god knows what as these turkeys kick off too – they don’t half make a racket!
Our menagerie now consists of lots of assorted chickens, geese, guinea fowl, turkeys, ducks, ferrets, tortoises and 3 dogs – Not to mention the kids as well…give me strength! Luckily, we managed not to take the pigs and goats we were offered recently – Karen drew the line at that!
At least they now have a fighting chance to live out the rest of their lives in relative peace, rather than just being killed and buried. Turkeys are just ugly, but already they are quite tame now and come when called for food. They seem to be enjoying it all here!
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