December07

Sunday, 9th

Having been rather mean with entries and photos in November I am trying to make amends. I'll start with 3 dark pictures taken this morning:

The 5 in the picture at the top were let out first and immediately went into that channel of mud they've created. By the time I'd fetched the camera to photograph the "mudlarks" they'd stopped dabbling, of course, and were preening themselves. Next I let out the top 9, and after snapping them on the water I actually caught them running out of the gate on their way to the duck pond. I've not put 'extra light' on these photos, it really was that dark, and you might just manage to discern, coming through the gate from the front: Donald (Circle hidden behind him), Sweetie, Florrie, Fanny, Primmie, Blob, Decibels, and Rellchen bringing up the rear.

I went back to the duck pond with camera and lettuce early this afternoon to take some brighter pictures:

They certainly liked the lettuce. Candida was the first to grab a leaf and rush into the pond to eat it. She tore off a bit, dipped it into the water, ate it, tore off another bit, dipped it, ate it, and so on, just like they all used to tear off bits of vegetation from around the frog pond until it was all gone ....

Fanny here on the left has a beakfull of lettuce,

and Primmie and Anabelle look like they're going for the same piece here.

I don't know what it is - must have something to do with the season - I keep coming up with these tree shapes. Only the other day I got the ducks to make a pyramid for putting on Christmas cards:

We went to Gerd and Maria's yesterday, a belated birthday visit for Gerd, and we had been lucky to arrange for Annie and Eleanor to come from the other direction. So we were able to have a little family get-together. G+M were superb hosts, they gave us a great lunch, we swapped presents, and Gerd obliged with the self-timer on his camera:

We couldn't get back home in time for ducky bed time and Elizabeth - and Julie, this time - did the honours. Having achieved the impossible of getting Anabelle into the top hut last time around they managed to get Decibels into the bottom hut this time, I couldn't believe it this morning! And I couldn't find the water buckets again - they'd been stashed away neatly in the garage.

Funny how the ducks swap their allegiance. Anabelle seems to have got over her little fling with Donald and has been going into her "home" hut quite readily. Circle hasn't done any swaps lately, but last week, for the first time, Fanny stayed out of her hut at the top which I didn't realize until after I'd closed up shop up there. She then refused to go into the bottom hut after the 5 had gone in and I had to trap her near the fence and carry her - she was protesting loudly - back to that hut and throw her in. She was very raucus next morning and ran uphill all by herself to call the top lot down!

Tuesday, 11th December 2007 Annie's birthday - Happy Birthday again!

It was Florrie's turn to 'do a first' and spend a night in the bottom hut. She didn't really want to, not even after Anabelle had gone in with the other 4, and she wasn't an easy catch like Fanny had been. In the end I had to let them all out again and use a couple of sticks for "extended arms" to drive them all in.

And Anabelle insited on stopping at the top again tonight - I don't know what's going on with them.

With having had frozen ponds and water buckets this morning I prepared for tomorrow and put the cleaned and filled buckets into the big greenhouse overnight and covered them with bags - belt and braces.

Tuesday, 18th December 2007

The 'frozen' weather has continued all week. I've had to break the ice on the pond every day, the little pond for a second time in the afternoon sometimes so they could swim to their hut. Yesterday morning we had a particularly severe frost and it was tough going to break up the ice - where I hadn't touched it on the big pond the day before it was a good centimetre thick!

But this morning, oh joy!, it had been thawing and I actually had a jet of water going into the duck pond to clean and fill the buckets. Look, even Captain is flapping his wings for joy [you can see by the eyes how dark it still was]:

Having been restricted to a small area of moving water
for some days

they certainly enjoyed the greater freedom. I loved this picture of the two drakes doing a bit of synchronisation:

and of the lot of them getting out of the water to search for the leftovers of yesterday's spaghetti.

Compare this photo with one taken from the opposite end 2 days before
where you can still see ice shards behind them:

I was fooled by the ice a couple of days ago. Went down to release the duck pond 5 first, and the pond looked as if it wasn't frozen at all - small waves all over it. So I let them out and WALLOP, they skidded horribly on the ice which was thick enough not to let them break through. They had an awful job slithering and sliding trying to get on land again.

So I started to break up the area nearest the hut - that bit behind the birch on the first picture above - and the ducks went to the opposite side of the pond, obviously convinced there was water there for their morning ablutions. Oh, oh, skidding and slithering again. Anabelle had the sense to walk along the fence at the back of the pond and come back on the pond [and water!] from behind; Captain, Hedda and Candida managed to scramble off the ice again, but Pinky persisted and literally SKATED, very, very slowly and carefully, all the way back towards the hut and the water I'd cleared of ice. It's a shame I didn't have the camera handy, but it looked something like this:

Since I wrote my first December entry on the 9th I've learned something about lettuce and spinach from my German friend Lexx which I'd had no idea of. The nitrate content of this green stuff can be extremely dangerous to ducks [and to hamsters and rabbits!] because it can literally dry them out from the inside. So I've learned to give them lettuce no more than once a week!

On another serious note I'd like to reproduce here the excellent article on the 2007 flu situation by Dr Chris Ashton of the IRDA. The H5N1 bird flu problem affects us all, but the true causes of it - intensive factory farming and trade - don't seem to get covered in the media at all.

Flu 2007

In 2005, avian influenza marched through Asia, exacting an unprecedented death toll at Lake Qinghai in China. Nobody believed it was AI at first. Waterfowl should not succumb to the disease like this. But that is exactly what it was. There followed scenes of sickening cruelty in the cull of affected poultry and ducks. The disease spilled over into the Middle East, Turkey, Africa and Central Europe, including Germany and France. Britain received the ‘Cellardyke swan’, and Europe’s high Commissioner, Marcos Kyprianou warned us that avian influenza would be with us for the next 10 years.

Yet what have we done about the disease? AI outbreaks continue in the Far East, but Vietnam, traditionally one of the worst affected countries, now has an essential and very effective vaccination campaign. They don’t always test: they get on and vaccinate. Only non-vaccinated, illegally held, sick birds are culled. Disease outbreaks are fewer. Cases seem to be restricted to non-vaccinated birds. Human incidences of H5N1 are now rare. There were no ill effects when vaccination was used commercially in France in 2006 (though they lost their export and stopped vaccinating). Voluntary vaccination was allowed in Holland, though only for hobby birds and free range poultry. Germany, despite conducting field trials on the new spray vaccine, still condemns its domesticated birds to an indefinite lock up.

Britain is more circumspect. DEFRA has listened to people who cannot lock up their birds. It has listened to organizations such as Elm Farm Research Centre, the Soil Association and the British Waterfowl Association. Representatives of these bodies were on the Vaccination Technical Working Group to thrash out a Vaccination Delivery Plan. As a result, DEFRA now holds 10m doses of vaccine. We have the doses on call, and we have a delivery plan—but we still cannot use the vaccine. At least DEFRA has a point. They expect the disease, when it arrives, to be quickly identified and exterminated. They believe this is the cheapest and most effective policy in the UK. And for most of us it is—so far. But there are further issues to be addressed. East Anglia is the most vulnerable area in the UK for two reasons: it is a wildfowl haunt but it is Britain’s most densely populated poultry area. It suffers a constant threat from its own trade activities. This region was identified as high risk area with a need for access to vaccination in a DEFRA stakeholder meeting in January 2006. HPAI has visited for a second time this year, and one wonders how frequent these visits might become.

If DEFRA is to persist with the cull policy, then we need a better approach to the problem of AI. Why are poultry enterprises – both free range and housed - allowed to locate adjacent to areas of open water? Open water areas are known to be a risk – just look at what your Poultry Register questionnaire asks. In that case, why can commercial premises locate adjacent to them? However, we now realise that the wild birds may bring the virus to poultry; infections are caused by transport. So an even bigger risk is the potential endemic infection of the wild birds from a poultry industry outbreak. The European Food Standards Agency recommended in a 2006 report that high risk areas for the introduction of AI by wild birds should be separate from industrial poultry areas. No doubt there will be conflicting issues between different departments – between the local authority, DEFRA, Food Standards Agency etc. But on such an important issue as this which is concerned with disease transmission and public health, a workable and secure location policy needs to be addressed.

So how should we deal with the disposal of poultry waste? Perhaps permission should not be given for intensive units to set up unless the litter can be disposed of by incineration in a local plant. Surely it’s time to finish the practice of spreading spent litter – including some dead casualty birds no doubt - on local fields. And then there is the problem of slaughterhouse waste. The parts not fit for human consumption should go to the rendering plant, but what happens to the effluent? Is it left to sit in open lagoons? Sea gulls have an easy life in East Anglia. A report about the Central European situation this year admits that we really don’t know how the disease is transmitted. Do the wild birds infect the poultry? More likely the poultry keep infecting the wild birds.

Why are so many healthy birds being culled? They did that in Germany too. From one allegedly infected goose, on a routine surveillance sample, all poultry in the PZ were culled in a case this year. Not one was found to be infected. Here in the UK, dangerous contacts only are culled. So far the UK has not found it necessary to institute even more draconian measure of disease control for AI. But how many samples at the Redgrave outbreak and associated sites will be found to be infected? If more rapid testing equipment were available in the field, then perhaps the cull could be less. Real time tests are available which give a result in 20 minutes. They are cheap to operate. They are enough to indicate, with enough samples, if a flock is clear of the disease. An on-the-spot outcome is surely better than a blind mass cull.

How much unnecessary trade is there in live poultry and poultry products? International trade in the free-trade area of the EU is music to the capitalist’s ear. In fact it clocks up the food miles and allows the virus to hitch a ride. Whilst DEFRA urged game rearers to obtain their chicks and poults from the UK in 2006, international trade still continued with France. Ducklings are imported from Belgium and Holland and the lorries roll in with live and dead poultry meat from Central Europe. This all for the ever-increasing demand of cheap poultry meat. If issues about increased risk of disease transmission remain then it really is time to look at the preventive vaccination issue again.

There are those in the industry who claim that the biosecure sheds protect against the disease, yet it has always been the case that indoor birds can succumb to the disease from contacts within the industry. Witness Holton. It is the intensity of the industry and its linkages which puts us all at risk. Poultry sheds which produce the £2.00 chicken on Brazilian soya not only incubate the virus: they also clock up fuel food miles. With Ban Ki-moon’s official findings on global warming now in the news perhaps it’s time for more of us in Europe to downsize. Time for the industry to downsize too, and everyone say goodbye to cheap chicken on both welfare and environmental grounds. Now that could be the end of avian flu.

Chris Ashton

See http://www.defra.gov.uk/animalh/diseases/notifiable/disease/ai/pdf/vacc-deliveryplan.pdf

Sunday, 23rd December 2007

If I don't find the time to write again I would like to wish everyone who happens to be reading these notes a truly wonderful Christmas and an especially happy, healthy and prosperous 2008.

To close here's a picture of our 14 coming close to the house for the first time in months. I found out later that was because I'd forgotten to open their gate near the greenhouses and they couldn't get in to their second food trough!

It's nice to see that both the "fat ball baskets" are in use by birds, there's a waterhen right in front and a sparrow or chaffinch? just on the left at the foot of the birch. Happy Christmas to all birds/animals and humans!