Showy-Offy, a house call, and bummer

First off, my freshly embroidered shirts in action! From the Scion show at the Knitting Factory.

Kid and Kiki from HarrietRoberts on flickr:

Ron & Jesse from Eric Rex on flickr:

When Jayne plopped down after about 15 minutes of grazing this morning (around 6.30 am, well before the heat), I thought I’d be on the safe side and ring the vet. As luck would have it, he was in the area and dropped by around noon. In a perfect world, I would have had him trim everyone’s hooves, but with another record hot day in the making, we decided to keep it short and sweet. He gave Jayne a once-over, noticed he seemed a little stiff in the hind quarters, but after checking all his joints, feet, etc., couldn’t find anything acutely wrong. He thought from Jayne’s gait seemed a little sore/stiff on the back end, so the doc gave him a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory shot and trimmed up his hooves for good measure (though they were in pretty good shape). I mentioned that he seemed to me to have grown suddenly over the last couple months, and the vet said that they’re typically done at around 14 months, which is right about where he is right now, so maybe it is a little late growing pain action. Hopefully it will resolve itself. The good news is that there’s no urgent problem. And I guess we’ll see how this plays out. Hopefully, he’ll grow out of it instead of deeper into it.

I do know my joints get a little sore and swollen when it’s hot and humid like this. When it’s really humid, my rings and watch feel tight and I feel so waterlogged I almost can’t close my fist. I know I’m a people, not a sheep, but still.

I’m shit at trimming hooves, so I also had the vet hit up Agnes. Her hooves are the only white ones, and they always grow faster and thinner than the other sheepies, so it’s good to squeeze in an extra trim for her. I think the others will be fine until fall, when I’ll either get another house call or nut up and try trimming them myself again.

I borrowed an stanchion from Sherri and had this great plan of conditioning the sheep to use it by bribing them with grain. Eventually, I’d be able to zip around trimming their hooves while they looked on mildly. But even if I did have the wherewithal to implement this genius plan, and even if they really would fall for it, I don’t have a convenient home for the stanchion. Right now, it’s in the hay shelter, which isn’t a handy location. And the barn’s way too wee to be its permanent home. So I’ll either need to make it a little shed or abandon the notion.

I think I’ve talked about all this before? Anyway, Plan B is a sheep deck chair from Premier 1:

In theory, you back the sheep up and tump them into it. It looks like they accept a pretty wide range of sizes. If it actually works, this would be great. I’m too short/wimpy to get Fudgy, Agnes, or Jayne on their rumps, and my size also makes it difficult to stabilize them.

Today was hot, but the woolies stuck it out a like champs. Here’s sun-bleached Ronnie.

Now for the big bummer of the day.

Sadly, when I went outside to get a few sheep pictures, I found Zoe dead in the coop. She was in the shade, but she’s a huge bird and I think the heat was just too much for her. Aside from making sure they were hooked up with plenty of water, I didn’t really worry much about the chickens today, since we had much more extended heat the last two summers than this one–plus they were fine yesterday, which was even hotter. But yesterday they were ranging and today they were penned because of the haying (I didn’t trust my overly friendly chickens to get out of harm’s way with big equipment around). I’m guessing the difference in temperature between the coop shade and the plant shade they prefer was enough to do her in. She was, shall we say, rather ample.

Or who knows? Maybe she choked on a wasp or something.

But to be on the safe side, I opened the pen (half of them stayed put) and wet the ground all around to cool it off and passed out some refreshing watermelon rinds. Fortunately, the heat will be letting up for the rest of the week. In the future, I’ll try to keep everything wet down if I have to pen them. I don’t even know if that matters, or if she would have keeled over either way.

But I was sorry to see old Zo’ go. She was a good chicken and responsible for our two coolest eggs on record, both the biggest one and the littlest one. In the first picture, the side eggs on either side are the normal ones and the huge one is a giant double-yolker; and in the second picture, the egg-shaped egg is the normal one and the little round marble-sized one is Zoe’s yolkless special.

And for good measure, a little remembrance of Zoe:  at two days old, as a pre-teen (already huge), as a young lady, and again yesterday (panting: foreshadowing, alas):

Onward, Zoe, to the great chicken scratching ground in the sky! And say hello to Peanut, Patty and Buffy for me!