Monday Morning at the Chookhouse — a 12-Step Programme

1. Begin well: nimbly avoid liquid poop when clambering into hen boudoir.
   
2. Wearing gloves, pick up slightly more solid matter in boudoir; place in poop bucket.
   
3. Misjudge while backing out, thereby skinning shin on ledge, tripping on ramp and folding legs in various directions.
   
4. Land in unseemly heap on ground, mercifully still free of poop.
   
5. Collect Pink Pills for Pale Poultry from ground, where they also landed, and inspect for poop.
   
6. Catch Henemoa, pills’ intended recipient, without much kerfluffle.
   
7. Congratulate self on this achievement.
   
8. Dose chicken and, when she spits pills out, redose.
   
9. Suffer splattering of fresh liquid manure on shirt, trousers and gumboot.* Release chicken.
   
10. Exit premises, swearing softly and attempting to prevent soiled fabric from contacting skin.
    
11. In laundry, shed clothes and begin filling bucket with warm water.
    
12. Drop open Napisan container in bucket so it, too, partly fills with water...

Henemoa, not at all pale,
and looking as if butter
wouldn’t melt.

* Yes, it is possible to hold a chook in such a way that soiling of clothing does not occur. But after my unfortunate exit from the hen boudoir I was not in possession of all my faculties.

The Tremendous World of Small Things

A native Lycaena or copper butterfly
at Whatipu. New Zealand moths and
butterflies are the focus of an
Auckland conference in March.

We all love butterflies, ‘Even those people who insist that they hate insects’, writes naturalist Andrew Crowe. So it was fair enough for Egg Venturous to feature monarchs, the most frequently seen butterflies in New Zealand. 

Weta are another story, or several stories, but those monsters of the night have thrust themselves upon me, thus finding their way here and here. So now that’s enough about insects, isn’t it?

Well, no. While they are unlikely to win affection as hens (for instance) do, they are somehow fascinating. There are so many of them — yet we know so little about them. For all the diligence of collectors, forever ready with their killing jars and mounting boards, we cannot pin insects down.

Discovering Life on Earth
Earth may be home to 15 million species of insects, or 30 million. Of these, 10,000 or so are named species in New Zealand, but those unnamed may number as many again. So multitudes are yet to be discovered and described, a process akin to charting the planet by hand, down to the last millimetre ...several times over.

Even when an insect or other invertebrate is known to someone, it is seldom as widely known as the many larger creatures that most of us recognise; the ones with backbones, ranging from apes to zebra. Each day, an insect is discovered afresh.

In ‘The Exotic North’, New Zealand writer Penelope Todd described and drew a ‘small transparent moth ... simple, monochrome — black lace and glad-wrap’ that she spotted at her current place of residence, Whangarei Heads. She’d not encountered a passionvine hopper before; they don’t go as far south as Otago. But she’s given northerners (especially gardeners, who may have been rather jaded about them) a new way of seeing them.

Here Be Dragonflies — among Other Things
 Until this year I didn’t know we had katydids. Then I saw one and learned that they are common, native, and beautiful: a vivid, glowing green.

Katydid, Clevedon (above);
blue damselfly, Whatipu (below).

I didn’t know we had damselflies, either — let alone the differences between them and dragonflies — but both d’flies were in evidence recently at the Whatipu wetland on Auckland’s west coast.

About five years ago I ‘discovered’ the native bees and hoverflies in my sister-in-law’s garden at Thames. It hadn’t occurred to me that New Zealand had insects of its very own, other than huhu bugs, puriri moths and weta. 

Subsequently, Andrew Crowe’s book Which New Zealand Insect? revealed a whole new country to me. It includes introduced insects, admittedly, but also many that are native or even endemic (exclusive to these shores, not necessarily abundant).

As a child I was ‘into nature’, keeping shells, stones and other finds on display in my room. But my mother has also just reminded me that among them was a real live stick insect that I named, with the remarkable lack of imagination that children sometimes exhibit, Sticky. This brought back to me a vague (possibly false) memory, of securing Sticky in a shoebox covered with glad-wrap, in which I poked breathing holes with a pencil.

A Sticky End?
Stick insects or phasmatids lack the ‘ick’ factor of many invertebrates; there’s something endearing about their stick-figuration. In an acclaimed campaign for a UK disability organisation, ‘Slim the Stick Insect’ (complete with walking stick) was among Aardman animated characters telling real people’s stories.  

Slim, one of the faces of a UK advertising campaign.

Phasmatids are kept as pets or as subjects of scientific study, but care and attention are essential, according to Brian Chudleigh in New Zealand Geographic:

They require ventilation and a regular, light, fine spray of water, particularly when young. [Professor John T] Salmon had considerable trouble photographing stick insects moulting, as they frequently weren’t able to shed their old skin. This was probably because he kept his insects in an air-conditioned apartment, in which the air was far too dry. I’ve found that with regular spraying, failure to emerge from the old skin is extremely rare. By the same token, though, keeping the insects too moist encourages fungus, which can kill them.
      It is also important to replace the insects’ food regularly, before it begins to dry up.... Many New Zealand stick insects have restricted food requirements, feeding on just a few plant species.

No spray; hardly any air; probably the wrong food and all past its expiry date. Little wonder ‘Sticky’ failed to thrive. I don’t know his fate. It may have been as unhappy as that of Hidgil the hedgehog, another captive of my childhood, found dead one morning with his snout in a saucer of milk.

Landcare Research has six distinct stick-insect projects on the go. It’s unlikely I’ll ever be willing or able to go to such lengths in my own study, but in recent months a bright and shiny new toy has piqued my entomological curiosity again.

No Private Life
A camera that can take good close-ups makes all the difference, and even though it’s merely a ‘compact’, the Canon IXUS is quite capable. This device, and a fantastic new website where nature fans interact, have made looking at insects more fun. So last week I joined NatureWatch New Zealand where I recorded my first 10 observations ...and received species IDs from scientists.

Mating stick insects, Whatipu.

On noticing these stick insects at Whatipu recently, I was chuffed to have caught them with their pants down. Mating phasmatids have no private life: despite their camouflage, insect paparazzi frequently snap their intimate acts, then reproduce the images on the internet and in books. Brian Chudleigh describes mating couples as,

a common sight, the small male hitching a ride on his larger mate, the end of his abdomen twisted round and plugged into the underside of hers. Copulation typically lasts days, even weeks, though it may be briefly interrupted periodically while the female lays an egg. Both insects continue to feed while mating, but the male, unable to leave his perch, must be content with what he can reach from the female’s back.

Entomologist Stephen Thorpe identified the ones I posted on NatureWatch as Clitarchus hookeri, smooth stick insects. These, the most common species in New Zealand, were first collected by a member of Captain Cook’s expeditions. I’d asked about the little red protuberances on the female in my photo, one each end, and it is hard to convey my excitement when Stephen noted, “Looks like two interesting parasitic mites...”

A Unique Biological Jigsaw
NatureWatch, funded by a government biodiversity information programme, aims to document sightings of New Zealand flora and fauna. That doesn’t mean my backyard chooks, really, but Nature, red (and other colours) in tooth and claw.*

The idea is to piece together more of this country’s unique biological jigsaw. Anyone can contribute to and use the developing database, but its management by people with significant scientific knowledge makes it reliable.

Tree weta, Avondale.

Back to insects: three days ago as I deadheaded flowers in a vase, this impressive tree weta revealed herself to me, prompting my now customary expression of surprise. 

So even when we’re not looking for them, creepers, crawlers, jumpers, flutterers and freshwater fliers keep appearing — telling us the world is theirs as much as it’s ours, but also how spectacular and mysterious that world is.

 





Fact File
Stick insects are from the order Phasmatodea, which includes nearly 3000 species worldwide. ‘Phasma’ means ‘phantom’ and refers to the cryptic coloration (camo gear) that enables them to blend with their natural environment.

New Zealand’s 20-plus species are members of the Phasmatidae family; some other countries have ‘leaf insects’ belonging to the Phyllidae. All are solely vegetarian and tend to be nocturnal. When we find them during the day they’re at rest, often away from their food source. Clitarchus hookeri eat mainly manuka and kanuka.

Clitarchus species can be 8–10 cm long when fully grown. The females (and those of some other genera) can reproduce with males or without — parthenogenesis. Couples may be of different colours.

Dragonflies and damselflies are related (they belong to the order Odonata). Both need fresh water for their larval stages, and both have amazing vision: dragonfly eyes cover most of the face, says Crowe, and in the damselfly, about 80 per cent of brain power works to process visual information.

The two are in different families. Dragonflies fly fast and rest with their wings spread out. Damselflies tend to be smaller and fly slowly, fluttering like butterflies. At rest, they fold their wings back over their bodies. 

Dragonfly and damselfly habitat, Whatipu wetland.

* ‘In Memoriam’, Alfred Lord Tennyson
 
‘Princes of Camouflage: The Skinny World of Stick Insects’, Brian Chudleigh, New Zealand Geographic, Issue 83, Jan–Feb 2007
The Stick Insects of New Zealand, John T Salmon, Reed, 1991
Stick Insects, Steve Trewick and Mary Morgan-Richards, Reed, 2005
http://waitakereranges.org.nz/docs/newsletters/Email%20Nov%2009%20Newsletter.pdf

Conference: How to Help NZ’s Butterflies and Moths — Practical Ideas for Practical People, 16 & 17 March www.monarch.org.nz/monarch/projects/conference-2013/
 

Unforgettable Weta I Have Met

One small step for a weta, one giant
leap for wetakind: Neil Alden Weta
lands at Whatipu.

There was something I needed to tell our cleaner when she arrived the other day — before she began work.

‘The poos in the bath...’ I started, and her eyes widened, ‘are not from a mouse. They’re from a weta.’

We didn’t set out to be the Avondale branch of the Auckland Tree Weta Breeding Programme but that status seems to have been thrust upon us, and the weta on our property have enjoyed a very productive summer. 

Giants in the Bath
We’ve discovered six of these giant grasshoppers (grosshoppers?) in or around the bath over the last month — and no, they weren’t having a wash. We also had two would-be migrants hitching rides to far-flung locations on Auckland’s outskirts. 

The first weta we found, the one who mistook the bath for the toilet, we rereleased on the back deck, whence she disappeared into the foliage of an overgrown house plant. This was once the home of Willy (another weta, since deceased), who munched on its leaves.

Fallen leaf, with bits of stem the fussy eater spat out.

Our newcomer prefers to chew the stems and then spit bits out. The effect on the already ill-kempt plant is like that of a miniature beaver: several leaves have tumbled to the ground.

I have previously described my desensitisation process: a journey from utter terror of weta to respect, admiration, even fondness. However, it is still possible for a small “Eek!” to escape me when I look down to find one of these creatures clinging to my clothes. 

That’s what happened a few weeks ago when we were about to set off for Clevedon in outer South Auckland, to meet friends at the farmers’ market and go for a walk. In the car, I went to put my seatbelt on, only to find that a small male weta (about 3cm, plus antennae) had attached himself to my shirt like a brooch.

The Weta Dance
We were running late, so I jumped out and endeavoured to shake him off. Foolish move. Weta excel at holding on, and when the mountain he was on started to move, this one held on for dear life. Stopping what Carol dubbed ‘the weta dance’, I gingerly picked him up — and then something very interesting occurred.

“Ow,” I yelled. “He bit me!” In fact it was an overreaction. His little nip hurt a lot less than a henpeck (that is, not at all), and I was really quite pleased that I had got the fabled ‘weta bite’ off my bucket list and out of the way. The small male weta, too, had achieved his heart’s desire: to escape the clutches of the giant predator Homo sapiens. I let him go, and instead of being a goner, he was gone.

The chillybin stowaway.

Another adventurous male managed to conceal himself in our chillybin,* feasting no doubt on the supplies therein. He was noticed astride a red pepper two days later. 

By this time the stowaway had travelled with us to one of the wildest parts of the west coast, Whatipu, where we were staying at the wonderful back-to-basics lodge over the long (Auckland Anniversary) weekend.

After I released this weta from his space capsule, he scrambled away to begin a new, Whatipu offshoot of the breeding programme, and eventually to take over the world. (If any insect can achieve this, it should be the weta, of which at least one species — the mountain stone weta — survives being frozen and thawed.)

A Grinning Gargoyle
My most recent weta experience was the most chilling, metaphorically speaking. Taking a shower is, I tend to feel, a private occupation in which to relax as well as wash. While so ensconced and engaged one evening this week, I saw on the window sill above me one of our knick-knacks: a piece of copper crafted into the shape of a weta. In my reverie, I wondered what it was doing there (it usually sat in the living room) before realising that this grotesquerie, this gargoyle grinning down at me, was a real live weta.

Above, what I thought I saw (during a showertime
reverie). The Real Thing is below. This female has
been in the wars: she has only one antenna.

The “Oh my God” that then escaped my lips was not, I can tell my parents, a blasphemy. It was quite pertinent, as one West Coast (albeit South Island) Maori name for the weta is taipo, translated sometimes as “devil of the night”. Clearly, by uttering the name of the Almighty, I was claiming protection.

As I dried myself (keeping one eye on the creature above), it occurred to me that friends and family might be less willing to stay the night at our place — or at least to use the bathroom — from now on. The chances of being greeted by a weta, these days, are just too high.

But then I reconsidered. Native wildlife is all the rage right now, so perhaps we can capitalise on our natural assets and offer regular “weta encounters”. Let me know what you think: would you pay money to stay at Weta Manor? 




* chillybin
noun
NZ a portable insulated container for keeping food and drink cool.
– ORIGIN from a proprietary name. — Oxford Dictionary of English.

How do you know when a chook is crook?

My last post played out some poultry drama, concluding with a touch of the All’s Well that Ends Wells. Since then, however, Act II has begun. This is turning out to be more soap opera than Shakespeare, only instead of Neighbours with Kylie and Jason or Meerkat Manor with its matriarch, Flower, we have the backyard theatre and chickens.

Amelia, drinking alone.

Amelia the New Hampshire has resumed her slow moult, as if rebelling against life in general. Moults out of season indicate stress, and Amelia might be likened to the lady (it’s always a lady) who retreats to the chaise longue with a malaise as vague as the vapours.

I have no doubt that it’s real. Vanessa the Leghorn has been harassing Amelia more often, and the latter’s vehicular emissions are different, though only someone well acquainted would notice. Her comb is a bit flat (Comb Collapse Disorder?) and she drinks vast quantities of water. 

Emmeline spies –

and tries – my toggle.

Toggle or Not Toggle?
A couple of days ago, Emmeline the Light Sussex seemed to be going off her food again, taking no interest in the pellets that are a laying chook’s staple diet. I remembered the vet’s advice – ‘she needs fibre’ – and tossed her a gone-to-seed Chinese green vege, which she devoured with gusto.

For afters, she decided to try the toggles on the cuffs of my trousers, tugging at the elastic – something she does every time I wear that particular pair. Later, hours after everybody else, she was at the chooketeria, feeding happily on pellets at last.  

Not a crook chook, despite appearances: Vanessa is
taking a dustbath.

If I wasn’t experienced in hen husbandry I might worry about the health of Vanessa, as shown here: sprawled in the dirt (some of which has found its way on top); reluctant or unable to get up; feathers dishevelled, eyes closed. She’s having a dustbath, however, and it’s entirely natural behaviour.

Death Rattle, Hen Hernia, or ... ? 
Then there’s Victoria the Araucana. Sometimes her breathing sounds awful – like a death rattle, I imagine – and three times now one of her distinctive green eggs has emerged with a small smear of blood, a testament to her herculean efforts to produce it. Sometimes when she’s standing on the nest, partway to delivering, she huffs and puffs and strains like an Olympic weightlifter aiming for a new personal best.

The death rattle doesn’t concern me much because I suspect she arrived with it in 2010, and she was already a year old by then. However, I worry about the eggs. They’re small, but so is she. Laying one may, one day, be the end of her. At the very least, she’s a candidate for hen hernia – a prolapse. I don’t fancy my chances of successfully stuffing bits of Victoria back where they’re meant to go.

One of Victoria’s best is
tucked in the back, at right.

Late yesterday afternoon when I went out to the chicken run, Victoria was on the nest again, apparently absorbed in laying another egg, and panting a bit. This was unusual, because the girls usually get this business over and done with earlier in the day.

After 6pm I went out again to feed them, and she was still there – so Carol and I studied the instructions on egg-bound hens, just in case. Between courses of dinner (ours), I checked again: no change, though the other hens had given up and gone to bed.

Latex and Lube
Out came the vaseline petroleum jelly that I had bought around 20 years ago for similar circumstances. It couldn’t have gone off, could it? Probing our medicine cabinet more deeply I also found a latex glove, two of whose fingers had gone west. (Note to self: must buy more latex.)

I won’t go into details about what Carol and I then proceeded to do with Victoria and the vaseline out there in the chicken run but I will admit that I lacked expertise, and referred to the instruction book several times. At one point I thought I was on target, only to find that my hand was snuggled under her wing.

After administering a bit more of this treatment, we put Victoria on the ground and she tucked into a late tea. She then joined the other chooks on the roost, and I spread an extra-thick layer of sawdust underneath to create a nice soft landing in case her egg decided to present itself. Already she was making a gentle, regular chook, chook, chook sound, and I wondered what the next day might bring.

Victoria, all fluffed up and nowhere to go.
She returned to the nest shortly after agreeing,
reluctantly, to appear.

Relief
This morning there was no egg, but I had my answer: Victoria was glued to the nest again, and when I picked her up she emitted a shrill little cry. Far from being crook, she’s broody, as the sounds on the roost had suggested.

In the time I’ve known Victoria this is her second instance of broodiness; the first was only two months ago. Perhaps her chook chook chook is actually the ticking of the biological clock as henopause draws nigh, and she hopes to hatch a brood before then.

crook  

NZ & Aust. colloq. (of a person) unwell; injured. – New Zealand Oxford Dictionary.

An antonym is ‘a box of birds’ (fine or happy), which the Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms says is also a New Zealand and Australian coinage.

All that remains of Emmeline’s
delicious green vege.

A Poultry Drama

There’s been drama in the chicken coop over the last few weeks, and I’m not talking about a Christmas pageant.

Two of Amelia’s finest.

Red-headed Amelia’s Been Blue
It began with feathers. Amelia the New Hampshire Red began shedding some of hers, unseasonably, and it seemed mildly alarming that the larger ones from wings and tail were among the first to go. 

She hadn’t produced any eggs since her minuscule achievements of a few months back, and she’d been looking miserable: solitary, bunched up, off her food, frequently going for a lie-down ...all classic signs of Crook Chook Syndrome.*

So we went to the vet, who noted that when he placed her in the usual position for an internal examination, her comb turned blue — cyanotic. This is not supposed to happen.

My vet, for whom birds are a speciality, deduced that something was impeding Amelia’s air sacs (not altogether surprising, as at the end of winter she’d suffered a more acute respiratory problem, though antibiotics had appeared to fix it). Her egg-laying career was over, he suggested, and her future uncertain. We discussed surgery. Given the cost and invasive nature of such intervention, plus the likely prognosis, I opted instead for a course of different antibiotics.

An Outbreak of Maternity
Then Alice the Australorp went broody, which means she was determined to incubate eggs until they hatched. That would be no sweat if
a) the other chooks were cool with it
b) Alice kept right on laying
c) the eggs she was sitting on might hatch.

Alice, even more bouffant than usual,
looks for a way in to the chalet de poulet.

This beautiful black hen will readily go broody (unlike Victoria the Araucana, who submitted for the first time in November, and Vanessa the Leghorn, who hasn’t a maternal bone in her body). She takes some days to ‘go under’, and exhibits behaviour I haven’t seen in my other broodies: her feathers are always bouffant but at such times her hackles (neck feathers) really rise, and she’s been known to engage in an odd little foot-stamping routine as she prepares to hog the nest.

I always feel ambivalent about discouraging broodiness — it’s natural after all — but I do it anyway. So for most of Alice’s second day I shut her in the palais de poulet (spacious but nest-free), then let her out once the other girls had finished laying, at which point I bricked up the chalet de poulet (nesting house). 

She didn’t like this much but in three days I’d won her over. A couple of weeks after that she rejoined the egg assembly line.

Christmas Comes to Chickendom
At Christmas, the hens had unusual treats: various leftovers we biffed into the pen. They had a present, too — a chooketaria, the next best thing to a fully staffed caff for the workers.

Victoria takes first peck.

A chooketaria is a feeder that protects the contents from rats and sparrows because it opens only when something as heavy as a chicken stands on a step. The self-service arrangement also means, as the very generous givers pointed out, that we can leave the girls to their own devices for a night and a day.

We christened the feeder with sausage rolls left over from Christmas. Victoria was first to step up to the plate. By far the smallest of the flock, she’s also my best forager, and after grabbing a roll in her beak, she deftly flicked it out of the feeder and devoured it on the ground. Admittedly, we’d made things easy by setting the feeder to training mode (a simple matter of tightening the screws slightly) so that the ‘door’ was always open.

Emmeline lost these feathers in
two or three days (the eggcup
shows relative size). Below
is the hen herself, partly plucked.

A Moult Moltissimo
Between Christmas and New Year, Emmeline the Light Sussex upstaged Amelia by undergoing a major moult of her own, and it was more comprehensive than the official one she did last autumn. It was almost heart-breaking to discover more bits of Emmeline lying in the dirt, or floating on the breeze, every time I went out to the chook run.

I took to collecting every dropped feather (except those that had been trampled or pooped on). This, I felt, somehow reduced her public humiliation — but really I yearned to be able to glue them all back on.

Wanting to rule out a recurrence of whatever had laid Amelia low, on the 31st of December I made another trip to the vet. He agreed that Emmy looked “pretty miserable” and did some tests, for which my hen thoughtfully deposited a sample on the spot.

After microscopic examination, the vet concluded there was no need for quarantine, and no parasites were present. This hen needed feeding up, however: her crop was empty and the bacteria in her poop indicated that things weren’t moving fast enough, if at all. She was like, he said, a “stagnant pond”. The answer wasn’t a burst of protein, which I suggested to make up for the feather loss, but fibre to get her going.

New Year Resolutions
I bit back an indignant “I feed them HEAPS!” and resolved to try harder. So I set aside my worst fears (which resulted in a real party pooper — several end-of-year discussions about how to humanely kill a chook), and thus far I have: 

Vanessa (foreground)
prepares to tuck in to
some greens — yes,
Tradescantia too.

-  reduced the intensity of the chooketaria training schedule
-  cooled the weather down and dried up the humidity (well, okay, I can’t take credit for that)
-  searched through composting weeds and leaf litter for worms, slaters, centipedes, earwigs and hoppers for the girls to hoover up
-  cut back on overripe fruit and Christmas leftovers
-  increased servings of good greenery, filling my vet’s prescription
-  minimised wandering willie (Tradescantia) servings, apparently delicious but full of water and presumably not nutritious
-  made the floor of the run more interesting for the flock by digging up bits of it and adding leaves from elsewhere on the section
-  regularly slipped extra feed to Amelia, so she could get her share while lurking low in the pecking order
-  resolved to buy just one pack of layers’ pellets at a time, as How to Care for Your Poultry reminds me that chickens turn their beaks up at long-stored feed. 

These methods have not been used scientifically — I didn’t want to risk death and destruction with an experiment that changed only one factor at a time — but something seems to have worked. Emmeline is growing new feathers and seems fine. Even Amelia has improved (enough, one day, to peck rather than be pecked), though the vet and I agree that what ails her will probably linger on.

My poultry priorities for early 2013 now seem clear: unless I suddenly go free-range, which would create other complications, I’ll be slaving over a hot garden, foraging for my flock. The chickens, no doubt, have other plans to hatch.

* Crook Chook Syndrome, as described in How to Care for Your Poultry, is not a specific disease but an illness that is unidentifiable, at least initially. Treatment is as general as the symptoms.

Amelia, resting.