Posts Tagged ‘recycling’
Quail diary – 39. Wild things (you make my heart sing)
Quail - fascinated by the flipflops. They'll all submit to being stroked now if they think I've got some mealie worms. Egg count - 248
A gentle hum pervades the neighbourhood. It’s June, and hot, and the borders are heavy with blossom and bees. Bantam Neighbour has taken up apiary. Outside the pristine new wooden hive at the bottom of her garden, little squaredances are taking place as the insects check for strangers. In her pond, half the size of a puddle, black blobs wriggle among the weed. Soon they will sprout legs and creep up on to land. I think they are toads. They are certainly much bigger than the tadpoles being watched over (and not eaten) by the newts in Little Brother’s rather larger water feature out beyond the commuter belt. The London tadpoles have only the goldfish for company, and the water snails twisting helplessly on the surface just out of the cats’ reach. The heron hasn’t found them yet, though it has cleaned out the pond up the road.
The stagbeetles have hatched too and are bumbling round, falling into plant pots and crashing into windows as they do every summer. They are supposed to be rare, but they seem to be doing just fine here, among the crumbling Victorian terraces that survived the Blitz. Their bulk and lack of steering can be quite unnerving at dusk. The other evening a bat joined the aerial acrobatics. A bat, in SE12? And there’s a woodpecker somewhere in the row of pollution-encrusted plane trees between our gardens and the ones behind, in the next street.
In fact, wildlife is flourishing in south-east London, and the quail (still laying with gusto in their homemade run) and I feel quite a buzz until Neighbor Nancy emails from the US to say she has no foxes – just hawks, eagles, raccoons, owls and bears in her bit of Pennsylvania; she has a hard time keeping the deer out of her sunflower patch, and do my quail eat ticks … Ticks? Bears..??
Kittens at the screen door
Suddenly, like turning over a stone, a hidden world opens. Out there on the wide, world web, in suburban gardens from Sydney to New Jersey, townies are getting stuck in – re-engaging with the seasons and the wild things around them, hooked from the day they tasted their first windowbox tomato. Along the way, some of us find raccoons and bears, some possums, and some of us just rats and cockney sparrows.
It is amazing how many of us there are out there, even in tiny crowded Britain, growing our own vegetables in small spaces, raising eggs, mulching our kitchen waste into reuseable compost, and mending things: bean-sprouts in Cheshire; compostwoman in Hertfordshire; colour it green (- loved the camomile “lawn”- ); and many, many more, from big hitters like self-sufficientish leading free-food foraging parties round Bristol, right down to small potatoes like me, blogging what one kind reader described as a “quail soap opera, by a London downsizer”.
Yes, apparently there’s even a word for us: downsizers. And we are not all knitting our own water supply.
Quail diary – 22. It’s an egg!!!
Quail egg
My first egg, at 5pm this afternoon! Three cms of dappled perfection, nestled in shredded bank statements inside the quail hutch, six months, twelve days and £278 later. Don’t know who laid it. The quail were all pootling about in the run. “Well, at least one of them’s a girl, then,” says Himself, promising to cook me an amuse bouche – a teaspoon of scrambled egg on a mouthful of toast.
And I finished the run… without adding further to south London’s suspicious knife injury statistics.
Jippeeee! Good quail.
Small but perfectly formed - bantam eggs (left), quail egg and hen eggs.
Quail diary – 19. Silly blogger
This blog was started six months ago as an exploration in digital awareness, an attempt to come to terms with urls, links, pingbacks, and what not, most of which remain as much a mystery as ever. My host, WordPress, slightly unnervingly keeps score, and reports not only that 862 people have so far stumbled on this everyday story of London quail but also that Quail Diary’s best day was 24th November last year, when the mouse under the hutch scored 34 hits.
But numbers are funny things. Is a ‘hit’ also a reader? Yesterday, when disillusion at my little enterprise briefly got the better of me (did I mention that the quail have so far not produced any eggs? In six months?? NOT ONE EGG …) WordPress’s figures inexplicably surged to 24. Oh, be still my beating heart. However, closer scrutiny reveals that one of the visitors had googled “teen big cock” to get there, so I suspect my disappointment was as nothing to his.
Still no eggs.
Quail diary – 17. Alarm!
Grey dawn – and I come down to find an enormous hairy grey shadow over the run, fishing for quail with one claw. The brute is huge, the size of a dog, or a dog fox. But it’s a cat, incredibly. The quail lie pressed into the straw, motionless and tinier than I’ve ever seen them. No fluffed feathers. Not a peep. I dash out to check they’re still in one piece, no ripped off heads… Thank goodness I invested in the smaller gauge wire. Clearly rats are not my only problem, security-wise.
Quail diary — 15. Food for thought
Quail - not laying any eggs
Still no eggs, but the days are getting brighter, and the quail livelier. They cluster at the wire for hours at a time, watching the new run take shape. They don’t mind the sawing, but they don’t like the drill. By now the first egg will have cost a princely £250 — in materials, feed, red mite powder, Poultry Shield cleaner, the cost of the quail themselves and the small barnful of straw bedding I have thrown down and shovelled up around them, (though I guess you could always offset the who-was-she-kidding gym membership, eventually working out at £60 a work-out by the time I admitted I wasn’t.) In short, with quail eggs at 22p in the supermarket, we need 1,136 to break even. So far. (No sniggering at the back …) That’s one each every other day. For a year. Or one a day, every day for six months. STARTING RIGHT NOW, I tell the girls.
The quail shuffle their feet, and clench their buttocks. Ah well.
I consult the coturnixers again on the matter of feed and armed with advice seek out my nearest dealer.
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The feed merchant is a different world. Perched on the edge of London, where 1930s suburbia rolls into north Kent and concrete crazy paving with ice cream vans and black cabs gives way to gravel and Volvos, it is a cave of wonders. In the shop, once-yummy mummies in cashmere and waxed jackets stock up on jodhpurs for Florences. And gloves and bodywarmers and hard hats and saddles. There are mugs with horses, and ornaments of horses, and jewellery featuring tiny horses, or horse shoes, or saddles. There are even pony-and-rider accessories, such as Barbie pink fetlock guards (for the quadruped …), with hat cover, stirrup irons and price tags to match.
Out in the feed shed, the size of a small aircraft hangar, there are adverts for horses, outgrown pets, their distraught owners seeking visiting rights as part of the sale. Here, sacks of knobbly things stretch away, chest high. There are bins of carrots. And crates of dog chews – gory chunks of pig and cow, for the larger jaw. There are beds, and blankets and feeders and buckets. And ointments and treatments and remedies. Shelves full of things like Equine America So-Kalm Plus (£18.99 a litre) to relax your nervous mount before competitions, or – my favourite – Dodson & Horrells’ Stroppy Mare (£12.50 for a kilo), advertised as soothing herbs for hormonal problems. Hmm. Let’s not tell Himself.
Clutching my bag of straw and quail mix I thread my way across the car park, where bales the size of beds are being heaved into shining 4x4s, and head back into the traffic jams, and home. I could always buy some quail eggs, I suppose.
Quail diary — 14. Quail nil
The bantams are laying, three eggs a day between them, 21 a week, and my neighbour now has such a superfluity she’s even started baking with them. “Have a slice,” she says, thrusting a plate of lopsided cake at me. “Eat it with your eyes shut.” Hens, lots – Quail 0.
I reckon it’s sleep. The hens greet the dawn with bustle, titupping down their catwalk – all big hair and pedigree markings – to scratch optimistically in the woodchip for some overlooked titbit or benighted worm. They spear stray leaves with housewifely fervour. The quail ungum a reluctant eyelid when the covers are torn back halfway through the morning (I’m a nightworker) and lie about exhausted, like the Grimms’ dancing princesses, threadbare shoes scattered metaphorically about the straw. Last night I came home to find them in a row at the wire, gazing at the moon. Lunatic quail.
Perhaps I’m feeding them wrong?
Quail diary — 13. Snow
The fox came at 8.30pm, strolling through the dimmed out garden for a sniff at the sheeted quail hutch — three feet away from the window where Junior Teen and Himself were watching, open mouthed. The prints in the snow made a leisurely loop and trotted off, back the way they’d come, to the broken panel behind the shed. The quail were unmoved.
The quail hutch in the snow, with fox tracks
The building of the snowman the following morning, however, perturbed them greatly and silenced even the robins. With the schools closed for the day, the garden erupted in whoops and shrieks. Senior Teen emerged from her duvet, peeled back the years to the inner six-year-old and hurled herself headlong into the drift on the lawn, flapping her arms and legs to leave a perfect imprint of an angel. Hmm. She was a tiny new baby the last time London had snow like this. Peering through their murky perspex windbreak, the quail burst into a protesting chorus – ribbet, ribbet, RIBBET! – as snowballs flew, and a tall, slightly sinister figure with bowler hat, coal eyes and banana nose rose up out of the trampled whiteness.
This morning the sun is out, the thermometer in the run says 22C and the quail hutch is an unsightly industrial blot in the whole Christmas card scene. Inside their plastic and bubblewrap, the quail are almost invisible under the straw. Still no eggs. I’ve started inspecting bottoms, but perhaps a Siberian cold snap is not the very best moment for studying genitals. Tom, Harry and Oeuf are definitely probably girls, I think …
Quail diary — 12. Slow bloggers
The quail love the perspex window in the nestingbox, designed to keep drafts out rather than as an alternative telly
The bantams at number 125 are good girls. Dusk finds them tidily inside the henhouse, huddled on their perch, heads down, six feathery bums outwards, eyes shut. They grumble at the draft from the opening door, but they don’t stir. They are producing an egg a day between them — which is four days to an omelette, but not bad for a cold, wet winter. It’s a start, I tell the quail.
The quail are not good girls. Nightfall finds them in a row at the wire, worshipping the outside light, or else in a heap under the straw, from which seven little heads pop up identically at my approach. (“We’re not sleepy”). They look like teenagers caught in wrongdoing. I half expect wisps of smoke to seep from their beaks. Even when the tarpaulin is drawn over them, blotting out the glow from the street and the last of the moon, you can hear them chuntering in the straw. At midnight they’re all still there. They don’t go to bed early, if at all, and they haven’t laid any eggs. Bad quail.
Still, it’s good to see them up and about again. For days and nights frost lay on the grass and they hid, fluffed up under the bedding with only their eyes visible, their freezing toes tucked into their tummies. They didn’t move if they could avoid it until I was so worried that I joined a chatroom to ask about solar heating and lighting for the hutch. Amazing. Everything I never thought to ask about coturnix coturnix, the common quail. My smoke signal triggered responses from Dorset to New Jersey NY. The internet ran hot: no light, leave them be, a break from laying is natural; the hutch is fine, don’t worry if they’re ignoring the nesting box, don’t bother with heating; they’ll lay when they are ready, probably next month, usually in thick straw where the eggs are impossible to find. Advice poured in. A new world opened. One night I found myself sucked into the tragedy of Rose, in Chester, who died of sour crop, whatever that is — and please don’t let me find out.
I still don’t know why my blog merits Google’s automated adverts for the Spanish IVF clinic (donor eggs), or the recipes (thank goodness the quail can’t read) or, most bafflingly – the slurry spreader .., but at least I no longer feel cowed by the snide little message WordPress leaves in the margins of my puny effort: “The widget has found no incoming links … yet. It’s okay — there is no rush.” I know. I know. I have been blogging for four months and have only managed 11 posts – 12, counting this one. But, oh joy, at last I am justified. No need to feel inadequate; slow blogging is, apparently, the new black — according to the Guardian newspaper. Slow blogging (ie with long gaps), slow food (grow your own – wait a year) and slow cycling (is there any other kind?) I’m not a fumbling idiot, I’m a trend.
*
Actually, I’ve always been a slow blogger. Or so the dour old Yorkshireman who was my first boss told me. Or words to that effect. We didn’t have the internet, or computers, or mobile phones when I started work. A camera took 35mm film, and a phone was a big black thing with a tangled cord. There was no broadband, or Google. In fact, our office hadn’t caught up with the electric typewriter – I had an old Remington, the size of an engine block. If I got carried away, the “e” fell off – leaving a lethal metal stump to impale fingers on. We worked on paper. With pencils and reference books. And lived in rented rooms in damp shared houses, with windows and doors so ill-fitting that tides of slugs would ooze under the back door each night and hold motorcrosses on the kitchen carpet. In the mornings, the whole floor shone silver, which entranced me even as I squelched across. We wore drip-dry and woolly hats, particularly indoors, and were word perfect in Monty Python’s “paper bag in’t middle o ‘t road” sketch, which we’d break into in muted choruses down the pub where we huddled for warmth over a dimpled half pint glass. And you try and tell the young people of today that … they won’t believe you.
But I digress.
Quail refusing to go to bed, and the new hutch under construction
The days are getting longer again. The new run, unfinished but already flagging up a whole new set of design faults, hogs the remains of the lawn. A tin firebucket now adorns the back step, courtesy of Himself’s mum, who objected to the discarded butts in the mud, (“That wasn’t the way he was brought up …”) and the quail are starting to make little nest-like hollows in the straw.
I shall continue to blog, slowly. And dream of eggs — and the days when diaries had covers and pages, and flopped out of the backs of cupboards years later, redolent of old paper and forgotten passions. Somehow, I can’t feel the same about an electric blog.
Quail diary — 11. Eggs!
The bantams two doors up have laid! Thirteen little brown eggs, unmarked, in shades varying from light to dark, discovered in the nesting box on New Year’s day. My neighbour, cock-a-hoop, presented me with one and I stomped off home to have a chat with the quail — although I forbore from waving it at them; even the thought of a bantam egg would make a quail’s eyes water. Now its competitive. I’ve searched the straw, just in case, but nothing. Come on, girls.
Quail diary — 9. All quiet on the quail front
The quail run is an island of tranquillity in a sea of mud, an oasis of trampled straw and millet and lettuce leaves, dotted with overturned flower pots.
At last, the girls are at rest. They sit quietly in their pots, or doze, or occasionally mud wrestle in the damp corner (no, I made that bit up). Peace has descended. After a week of surprise inspections, lifting up the hutch and stamping down new tunnels, the mice have taken the hint. The rats at the top of the garden have retreated into the next garden, to take stock, from under my neighbours’ trim patio, over the scattered remains of my compost heap. And even the foxes have squelched off to pastures drier. The grey cat is no doubt curled up on a besotted lap somewhere warm, answering to ‘Fluffy’ and playfully kneeding rapier claws into wincing thigh.
The lawn is like the Somme, and for several mornings the fitted tarpaulin cover we lovingly tuck round the run each night has crackled with frost, until I crack and swaddle the hutch with bubblewrap. It now looks like some art installation by Christo. Himself is not impressed. “They’re birds… They’re supposed to live outside.”
And in the hutch itself sits Glenda, alone. It turns out the mice, rats, foxes, cats, squawking flocks of feral parakeets overhead, fat woodpidgeon crashlanding on the roof like B52 bombers, looking for dropped millet, and even the occasional nosey squirrel common to a London garden were not the problem. The quail meister was right: it was pecking — and it was Glenda who dunnit. For a week she has terrorised the six others, chasing them off the food, ripping out feathers. Several times I’ve watched the run erupt, like feathers in a blender, in a shrieking, flapping blur. I was put in mind of the sticklebacks we kept in the biology lab at school. They had a big tank, but it was invariably empty except for one end, where a dozen little fish churned the surface, penned behind an invisible line by one darting blue and red shadow.
So I put in two more pots (cracked), some lettuce leaves and a second source of food, and silence fell. Human resources departments everywhere please note. Glenda still hogs the hutch, but even she cannot occupy all three pots at once. Ah bless my small, fat, drab, quarrelsome little alter egos.
The photographs show the quail hiding: spot five in the centre shot…
Quail diary 