Northern Goshawks prefer organic chicken, too

Young adult male Northern Goshawk.

Last week I was able to get some decent photos of a Northern Goshawk at our farm. Unfortunately it was standing on the dead body of one of our young New Hampshire cockerels, but what can you do.

We're guessing that this is a young adult male Goshawk. Looking closely at my photos, it appears that this bird is almost completely into its adult plumage. And like most raptors, the male Goshawk is smaller than the female, and this one is definitely smaller than the chicken  it killed. In fact, the hawk couldn't get off the ground with the chicken. (The adult Goshawk tops out at 2.1 pounds, and this 14-week-old cockerel was easily twice that weight.) The photo below shows the hawk trying hard to move the chicken, but it only managed to jerk it a few inches across the grass. I wonder if the hawk learned a lesson from this? Hmm.

The Goshawk tries unsuccessfully to fly off with a chicken twice its size.

I've been trying to get photos of a Goshawk for a while now. Our friend Shelly Ament, a wildlife biologist with Washington's Fish and Wildlife Department, told us that Goshawks are not often seen by humans in the wild. (Ha, I thought. Try letting some chickens free-range in YOUR backyard.) I retrieved a primary wing feather, which I saw fall from the hawk while it was flapping its wings, and we saved it to give to Shelly. She had asked us to be on the lookout for Goshawk feathers. Her department is interested in comparing the genetics of Goshawks in our area to those of hawks in British Columbia, so she was quite pleased to have the feather.

The white supercilium (eyebrow) clearly identifies the Northern Goshawk.

Since we choose to free-range our chickens, turkeys and ducks, we do lose birds to predators from time to time. Still, we feel fortunate to live in a place where we sometimes see beautiful animals like the Northern Goshawk. What a gorgeous bird.

Egg production slowing down; could the hens be molting already?

Well, this is interesting. We've noticed a slow but steady decrease in our chicken egg production recently. True, we did lose four young hens to bobcats earlier in July, but we don't believe this alone accounts for the slowdown. We've also had several hens who seem fairly persistently broody, and as you may know, when a hen goes broody she temporarily stops laying. We keep taking the hens off the nests, and don't let eggs pile up under them, hoping to get them out of mother-hen mode. I always feel a little guilty when I take eggs away from a broody hen; the poor things just want to hatch some babies. Then there's that pathetic sort of whimpering noise they make, which doesn't help a bit.

Still, our guess at this point as to why the chickens aren't laying quite up to par (the ducks are still laying quite well -- we get 8-10 eggs per day from our 10 laying ducks) is they may be going through an early molt. Certainly a number of chickens, as well as the adult turkeys, look as if they're molting. Generally our experience has been that the birds molt in mid- to late fall, say October or early November. I wonder if it has anything to do with the unusually cold, wet spring and summer we've had this year?

Those of you with chickens, what is your hens' egg production like this summer? Generally the longer days of late spring and early summer mean the highest production rate, although unusually hot weather can cause hens to slow down or stop laying briefly. I remember the egg laying dropped significantly last fall, following a series of bobcat attacks; stress can certainly be a factor. Anyone else notice signs of early molting?

Frankly, I hope we're wrong about the molt. We don't want our egg supply to drop too low during the summer; this is the busy season for the Alder Wood Bistro, and they buy nearly all our eggs. Our teenagers (the 10-week-old New Hampshire pullets) won't start laying till probably early November, so we'll just hope for the best. Thank goodness the ducks are still going strong.

Speaking of eggs, I have been getting more questions lately about what all the labels on egg cartons actually mean. In my next post, I will try to define these terms for you and clarify some (to me) confusing points.

Breaking news: Writer surfaces after a month away from her blog

...and the blogosphere breathes a collective sigh of relief. Seriously, though, I feel like it's been more like a year. This was not a planned sabbatical or vacation or even garden-variety procrastination. Actually, I cut my hand badly several weeks ago, and it is more or less immobilized in a bulky, truly uncomfortable splint. I'm supposed to keep it on at all times except to shower, until the end of the month; then I re-visit the orthopedist to find out whether the darn thing will require surgery.

By the  way, this happened 8 days before David was scheduled to be out of town for a week. I had been looking forward to a week to myself on the farm, knocking out query letters and other writing tasks in between bobcat patrol and collecting eggs. Several generous and kind family members spent part of the week up here, helping me out with things best done with two hands.

The good news is that I cut my left hand and I am right-handed; on the other hand (sorry), for the moment I can only type one-handed. The embarrassing thing is that I seem to type almost as fast with one hand as I used to do with two hands. This is frustrating, as I have recently been working hard on improving my typing speed. Oh, well! At least I am already in the habit of writing my drafts longhand. And now that David is back and handling most of the chores, I am throwing myself into my writing with a burst of pent-up energy.

Anyway, let's see, what else is new around here? It has been an unusual July weather-wise. Generally here in the Rain Shadow, July and August can be relied upon to be warm (sometimes hot) and dry. For the past 3 years we've had a week or so of 90-degree-plus temperatures in July; this year, we've had 2 (yes, TWO) days where it panted and groaned its way to around 80. We have had a few other mostly sunny days, but more days like today: cool, foggy, with rain showers at times. While it's allowing me to spend less time watering in the garden, it's not doing much for my beans and tomatoes.

I identified a new (to me) bird a few days ago, a Northern Goshawk. (Unfortunately, I observed it in the act of killing one of our 8-week-old New Hampshire chicks.) This brings to 64 the number of wild bird species we've identified on our property. With all the second-growth woods around us, and our two large ponds that attract lots of migratory waterfowl and other birds, it's like living in our own private nature preserve.

Thanks for hanging in there these past few weeks while I've been offline. I'm back now, and if not better than ever, at least I'm a more careful typist. Hope you all are having a great weekend!