I have been feeding some pumpkins to the poultry.  Here is what they can do in an hour’s time.  Impressive.

I did post this on facebook but not here.  Monday was our 24th Dateiversary.  Our first date restaurant, Pepper Sisters, has now closed so we went for our second date restaurant which was Olive Garden.  Here is our desserts.  Sorry, I took a bite before I thought to take a photo.

Tuesday morning I was up early and greeted the sunrise.

This song was in my head so I played it out loud on my phone to accompany the sunrise.

In this sunshine you could see all of the dewy spider webs in the grass.

I had moved Vanessa, our old crippled ewe, to the front side of the barn.  This was so she could captured some sun beams on the cold but sunny mornings.  She immediately seemed to appreciate it.

The turkeys seem to like it too.

I already had 9 roosters captured in the weasel proof pen because they were harassing the hens.  But yesterday I captured the rest of them to get ready for butcher day.  I built a second roost for them which they seemed to like.  I decided to keep two Bielefelder roosters, the black 2 year old Faverolle rooster that I named Cocky Locky, and Tyrone, the giant black rooster that was the only survivor of my March chick shipment.  We also have Bart, our Barred Rock rooster from last year, and Dirty White Boy, an escapee from butcher day quite a few years ago.  It was so hard to decide who I was going to keep and who I was going to butcher.  Tough decisions.  But I did try to make it as enjoyable as possible their last day.

I had removed the young Buff Orpington chicks from their hutch when I had to add some hens and rooster to their hutch.  I noticed one of them has a crooked beak.

You can see it better from this view.  I have never had one of these before. In reading about it, it sounds like I can keep her going with wetted feed.  In the meantime she seems to be getting picked on by the other chickens so I moved her back to the hutch today with a hen who is also being picked on.

Yesterday Tom built a fence in the back of the donkey pen for the cows to hang out in this winter.  It is higher ground for them and a little easier for us to feed and water them.

Steve waited patiently for us in the sun.

Last evening there was aurora borealis happening just before the skies clouded over.  We do not have great northern views, but I was able to capture some of the colors.

This morning we brought the poultry to the butcher.  It was 35 chickens and 2 turkeys.  Here is the line up waiting to unload.

Here are our birds in the back of the truck waiting to be unloaded.

And here they are waiting to be butchered.  It is so hard to leave them there where they watch the proceedings.  At least this year it isn’t dumping rain.  I console myself with the thought that they had good lives and wouldn’t have had any lives if it weren’t for this purpose.  But it is still hard leaving them like this.

We picked them up this afternoon in their packages.  So we have poultry to eat again, which is nice.