ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

..the turkeys are revolting plus other mixed news from the birds

MISSING: After a ruck with the geese

 ELVIS, the little quail who found a home in my handbag and a way into the hearts of folk in a Jedburgh post office queue, has disappeared without trace. I left him basking in the sunshine with food and water by the back door while I went to find a book before joining him. After a few minutes I heard an almighty racket from the geese and dashed outside to be confonted

WAITING GAME: broody turkey's patience

could soon pay off

with an upturned miniature water bowl as the gander Jack scoffed the last remnants of Elivis's corn.  The quail had scarpered and has been Missing In Action ever since despite exhaustive searches of the immediate area. Jack, a bully by nature, was looking a little coy although totally unmoved by my distress.
 This now means two of my birds are MIA - a turkey went wandering off nearly two months ago and hasn't been seen since. I keep hoping she'll reappear with a clutch of little ones but that over optimistic view is fast fading with each day.
 Meanwhile the broody turkey who has been sitting on everyone else's eggs for the last two months may finally become a mum in her own right ... well, sort of. A good friend of mine who was touched by her plight brought six fertile turkey eggs for her to sit on and they're due to hatch next week. I forget what breed they are but it is quite clear she will not budge until she has hatched some chicks.
 The only other way of getting a turkey or hen out of its broody mood is by plunging the creature in a bucket of cold water and, as inconvenient as broody poultry can be at times, there's no way I'm going to do that.

MADGE: Playing the waiting game

 On the hen front, another of my Scots Dumpys has turned broody and she's sitting on seven eggs though I confess I slipped in a quail's egg to see if it will hatch. I've moved Madge - one of the Isle of Wight hens - into her own box where she won't be bothered by the others although I do try and make her exercise and walk around for atleast 10 minutes a day.

SAD DAY AT THE DOVECOT: Three fantails

remain

 Scots Dumpy eggs are notoriously difficult to hatch because of a lethal gene which means a high number will fail to develop after a few days. But I'm hopeful we'll see some of Madge's offspring later this month.
 In the meantime I've some upsetting news from the Dovecot where my four fantails have been residing. One was found dead this morning inside with no apparent injuries or signs of distress. Another death, another mystery but the other three seem fit and well. The nets are off now and they seem happy with their new home.
 And there's more grief on the turkey front - Ant & Dec, previously joined at the hip are no longer BFF. War has broken out and the pair are inconsolable; they've had their squabbles before and I've been known to wade in and separate the two but this time the rivalry has overtaken their friendship.
 No longer can their turkey gobbles be heard in unison - instead I've had to put them in different pens after the last fight drew blood on both sides. As you can see from the video to the left a truce is unlikely which, because of practicalities, leaves us with no other choice than to to make a choice between the two.
 He-who-should-be-obeyed-but-rarely-is can sort out that problem for me and may be my mum will get a halal turkey on her next visit.

I hope that doesn't sound callous but it's been nearly two years now since I moved to the Scottish Borders and in that time making unpleasant decisions has become just one of the harsh realities of countryside life. As usual any advice is most welcome.

INVASION OF THE EGG SNATCHERS

 Another case for 'B' ... Jedburgh's CSI

RAT SNATCHERS: Painting by Igor Maykov

 AN INTRIGUING series of events has rather focussed our attention these last few days - every morning a part digested egg has been found in the rear yard. Two contained the fully formed embryos of what looked like tiny turkeys while another couple of crushed shells simply could've come out of the hen pen and contained nothing more than traces of yolk.

 Since I collect daily from the hens I ruled out foul play from the pen but wondered where else the hens eggs had come from and who was the culprit and where did the turkey ones come from? And even though I'm still reeling from the last badger visit, I knew Old Brock couldn't be blamed this time round purely because he wouldn't have left any evidence. A fox would've scoffed the turkey embryo while perhaps leaving a few fragments of shell. Then I remembered a story I'd been told a few weeks back, I thought it was an urban myth, but it is perfectly illustrated in the charming picture above right by Latvian artist Igor Maykov. There was nothing else to do I simply had to call in the countryside crime buster, Jedburgh's equivalent of CSI Miami's 'H' aka Horatio Caine. It's a wonder 'B' hasn't gone ex-directory as every other day there's seems to be a murder-style mystery to be solved on the farm but like most folk in the Scottish Borders he's happy to oblige when we struggling townies get out of our depth.

ANOTHER EMPTY EGG SHELL: But no trail or other
clues between it and the stable door in the background

 And so local gamekeeper 'B' duly arrived, surveyed the scene you can see on the right and scratched his head. He paced up and down and walked in and out of the stable several times - it was empty apart from the surrogate Turkey mum. I told him how I collected the hens eggs everyday and since the nesting boxes are all off the ground it would be too difficult for a rat raid, especially in broad daylight.

 He asked about the broody turkey and how many eggs she was sitting on. I told him I didn't know as they were due to hatch any day and she wouldn't let me near her. I told him that she had originally started sitting on her own eggs but I'd replaced them with pot eggs and then changed them to hens eggs. And then, when my other turkey was killed by the fox I'd transferred those eggs to her so she was sitting on a mixture of turkey and hen eggs. The penny dropped, sort of, as I said that.

SILENT WITNESS: The

surrogate turkey.

 Working out all the machinations 'B' said there were several scenarios but that all of the egg shells I'd found came from the same source ... underneath the turkey pictured above left. The real mystery is how they came to land 20 feet away in the yard.

 'B' reckons either several rats baited the turkey during the night and while one distracted her attention to leave the nest the others snatched an egg and rolled it away across the yard to eat. Or the turkey, herself, is separating dud or infertile eggs from the batch which are then being picked up by the opportunistic rodents.

RAT:  Charged, tried and found
guilty in absentia 

 Hens and turkeys will do this if they sense an egg is infertile or if there's something wrong with the developing chick inside. This could explain the near fully-formed eggs we found the other day. I do hope this doesn't mean all of the turkey eggs are duds after their courageous Bourbon Red mum paid the blood price for protecting her nest against a fox recently.

 Time will tell - as for the egg snatchers ... that's another mystery to solve. He-who-should-be-obeyed-but-rarely-is has some detective work of his own to do to track down and get rid of these pests.
 And wouldn't it be great if he set up a web cam or infrared night camera up in the yard to catch the thieves in action. There's a great deal going down here but sadly most of it happens when I'm fast asleep.

THE THREE TENORS

But who rules the roost?

MOST hen pens have a cockerel who will control the birds and literally rule the roost. Well more by accident than design I somehow ended up with three of them when I began to collect the rare breed Scots Dumpys and while each displays quite different characteristics you can set your watch by them.

The Adhan - Islamic call to prayer

 In fact I was quite amused when scientists recently concluded that cockerels will instinctively crow at the same time every day regardless of whether they can see dawn breaking or not - this is great for me as a Muslim living in the Scottish Borders. Yes we are a bit of a rare breed too and with the nearest mosque being around 50 miles away, it is unlikely I will ever hear the call to prayer from Edinburgh. Plus most mosques in the UK are banned from allowing the call to be made unlike in most Muslim countries where a cacophony of calls to prayers known as The Adhan can reverberate across towns and cities.

 So thanks to my three cockerels I don't need to set my clock for the dawn prayer, known as Fajr which is the first of five daily prayers offered by practising Muslims. My 'three tenors' wake me up with their voluminous cock-a-doodle-doos every morning regardless of the weather.

Napoleon & Josephine

 But let's return to my feathered friends. As I say they are all quite different and the oldest is, I believe, Napoleon who came to me from Northampton with his soul mate Josephine. He was not the first rooster but he is, without doubt, the alpha male in the group and set about asserting his authority with all the hens on the day he arrived. Despite his duties as lead rooster, Napoleon and Josephine share the same cree every night and are inseparable on an evening.

 Napoleon is black and has a superb scarlet comb (the red bit on top of his head) and a magnificent pair of wattles (the two dangly bits below his chin). He often shakes his head and shows off his wattles and the whole performance is known as "tidbitting" and is designed to attract the other hens, which it does.

 This had a salutory effect on the light cuckoo-coloured rooster Horatio, hatched in a hen house in the Isle of Wight last June, who was ruler of the roost until Napoleon arrived. Poor Horatio has some catching up to do but I think the arrival of another, more senior rooster, has knocked his confidence.

 And just when he thought things couldn't get worse they did when Jumpin' Jack crashed onto the scene from leafy Cheshire. Despite being younger than Horatio he bounces around the pen on his long legs producing an annoying swagger. The perfect bred Scots Dumpy is supposed to have very short legs and a boat-like shape which almost causes it to waddle as it makes its way around, but JJ's long-legged defect doesn't seem to concern him at all.

 Not only does he spend his day ducking and diving out of the way of the other two roosters, it appears the majority of hens don't like him either and get quite aggressive when he comes a courting ... in the poultry world it's called treading! He's very pushy and has already had a downward effect on egg production because his unwanted and unwelcome attention has upset some of the hens.

 I am getting another coup built and I think that JJ will have to move out for a while to give the hens some breathing space.

 In the meantime here are my three roosters giving their best cock-a-doodle-doos for the camera - first up is JJ, followed by Horatio and last but not least Napoleon with a tidbitting demo as well. Which one do you think excels? And if you are a poultry expert any advice would be gratefully received in the interests of maintaining harmony among my chooks.