Got wood?

I set up the wood shed last weekend. About two tons of wood all stacked and stored.

The wood shed is a garden shed we originally bought to shelter George but he didn’t use it. He didn’t use it as a shelter. He’d stand next to it and hit it with his horns for a good hour at a time, but he never got into it to get out of the wind or rain.

He’s got an old chicken coop we got from the tip shop in Glenorchy for thirty bucks. I have to put on a new base on it and give to him before the weather gets much colder. He’ll probably spend more time on top of it than in it, but at least he’ll have the option to get out of the weather.

The wood shed was a chicken coop for a while as well. While we were living up in the hills we had it sitting in the chicken pen.

The birds had to be shut in every night as a precaution against Tasmanian devils. You’d expect that the geese would have helped keep the predators away. People say things like ‘geese are better than guard dogs’.

It’s true that our geese have very good hearing and start screaming to be fed once they hear me stomping around in the morning getting ready for work, but the night a tassie devil got into their pen they didn’t make a sound. Friggen things.

That’s the night our rooster Devil got his neck feathers ripped out. He wasn’t in the shed. Some of the roosters slept on top of the shed, for some reason. I figure they were keeping lookout. They were probably offering themselves up as prey, as an alternative death to the hens in the flock.

It makes sense that the roosters that are kept from breeding benefit the population by being food for the monsters instead of the more important hens.

 The lookout roosters were good alarms, much better than the geese. One of them fell off the shed once and the noise he made set them off for fifteen minutes squawking at each other.

After we moved down to the seaside the shed just sorta sat there on its side with a promise from me that I’d do something with it. The hens don’t need it anymore, they’ve got a proper chicken house my father-in-law built.
The roosters sleep in the trees. I’m going to make them sheltered roosts in the next few weeks with broomsticks and old tin, which they’ll probably ignore and just continue to sleep in the trees.

I moved the shed to the side of the garage we’re living in now, out of the weather. The shed had living under it a variety of bugs, mainly slaters and black beetles. There was also a skink, a brown tree frog, and a wood scorpion. The skink buggered off quickly, although it was probably his winter home I’d just wrecked. The scorpion trundled around a while looking like an alien. I assume it was hunting for something to fuck up. Scorpions always look like they’re hunting for something to fuck up.

I do like scorpions a whole lot. I’m a big fan of exoskeletons and things that look like weird toys from the eighties. If I ever travel I want to visit that dock in the UK that has one of the few wild scorpion populations in England. They just sorta live around the wharf, in the cracks and under rocks, after getting off a boat from Spain at some point. I love that these armoured things are there, where they’re not supposed to, clinging on in a weird niche they fell into.

After I lifted shed up the frog just sorta sat there. Pretty sure we’d heard this one several times in the rain, calling out. I think he was a brown tree frog. Apparently they’re the most commonly seen frogs down here. I poked him a few times and he’d hop when I did but then he’d sit there again. I didn’t want to handle him directly because frogs and hands don’t mix.

If you can avoid it, don’t touch frogs. It can be bad for them. The normal crap, salts and acids and oils, on your hands can burn a frog.

I scooped the little guy up with some curled bark and put him near a buxus bush growing near the shed. Didn’t want him getting eaten by the goddamn chickens. He hopped into the undergrowth. It hasn’t rained since so we haven’t heard him singing yet.

Labels: down on the farm, frog, hens, roosters, scorpion, Tasmanian fauna, Tassie Devils, wood

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posted by Oates at 4:53:00 PM