Happy Chickens for Fiji Food & Climate Emergency!

Dear GlobalGiving Donors:

Right now the focus is on increasing the number of green and blue egg-layers in the flock, as the communities and farmers just love the diversity of colors in the eggs, and our rescue of brown laying hens from incarceration three to a cage has shifted the color balance to mostly brown eggs.  See attached photos of the eggs going into the hatchery to illustrate this. Also, there are two mobile rearing pens filled with 3-8 week old chicks that have come from blue or green eggs.      Updates from Austin, the permaculture farmer & master chicken breeder using methods learned from his grandmother

Kim's Blog Highlights including wonderful news about the long-lived solar power generated for hatchery:

I finally got a photo of the baby lamb. (Thank you, Akka!) I still haven’t been down to see her (shame on me), but she is a cutie. The hens give perspective – even if she is downhill a little, it’s clear that she is still pretty little. Also, look at those socks! I am going to have to go to look in person before this week is out.

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A big shock this week was seeing that one of Austin’s cheerleaders ( Hi, Nancy! ) used almost all of one of my blogs in her report to GlobalGiving – a place where folks go to donate to the Happy Chicken project … and she used stuff that had NOTHING to do with chickens directly.

So I need to give Nancy SOME chicken content. but what? Austin said to tell about the blue-green egg chickens. Of course, I was clueless about what-all he was talking about. So here is what he told me.

Some folks really get excited about blue and green chicken eggs, and a growing number of farmers are asking for those layers in particular. So instead of selling those chicks from a big hatch, Austin decided to grow them up to increase the flock.

They are big enough to be outside in the mobile rearing pens – two pens worth.

Oh, surprise! There is Lucy – and, in the back, a second gosling! Austin has 50-60 blue-green chicks coming up.

Down at the hatchery – there are multicolored eggs in the incubator.

I had not gone into the hatchery in years. I got another nice surprise:

The solar power is still working !!! All four boxes are lit up !!!! It was installed in May 2019. Six years of service and still going. And, as far as I can recall, George has not had to even come back to service it. That is INCREDIBLY GOOD longevity for equipment here. Yay!

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I’m swimming in grandchildren right now. In an effort to get two of them off of screens and back into nature, I sent them up the hill with the assignment, “identify five different things in the same category”. I thought they’d come back and tell me about five different birds or five different trees, etc. Instead, the first one returning CARRIED stuff.

This is Granddaddy’s namesake, Little Austin, with SEVEN different edible things from the vegetable kingdom:(left to right, back to front) lemon, starfruit, coconut, cocoa pod, ginger, noni fruit, and chili pepper. Impressive!

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My only photo this week was the nopal cactus in bloom.

This plant is quite tall – maybe 10 feet – and all the blooms are at the very top. I really don’t understand cactus.

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But I understand that helicopter thing from last week – thanks to Austin’s friend Robin who sent him a Fiji Times article about that helicopter thing after seeing it in my blog! (Yay for information! Yay for a reader I didn’t know about  Here is the article: https://www.fijitimes.com.fj/aerial-search-for-water-groundbreaking-survey-to-secure-clean-drinking-sources/

In short, Austin’s guess about it mapping groundwater was spot on. There is an extensive survey going on, and, in fact, that helicopter ended up flying over our settlement this week. Great excitement for the neighborhood.

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Granddaddy took some grandkids (and a grandpuppy) up the hill.

But the significance of this photo is that they are standing beneath “Vova’s tree”

Everything that is bright green above their heads is leaves of Vova’s tree. This tropical almond was planted eleven years ago by a sweet guest who was mourning the sudden death of her grandfather. I documented the planting this tree of at the end of the linked post.: https://ffwrfromfiji.wordpress.com/2014/08/20/21-august-2014/

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Akka tried incubating a bunch of discovered duck eggs. Two of them hatched so far. Here is the one that had started fluffing up.

MIRACLE GOOSE

Last year we only got one goose baby. All ten eggs we tried to incubate this year were duds. But somehow….

• one fertile goose egg rolled down a steep hill
• one valiant hen decided it was HER egg
• the hen personally incubated the egg — for 30 days – much longer than chicken egg incubation
• a live gosling emerged from the egg
• the gosling chirped enough to get human attention, and somehow escaped mongoose and hawk attention
• and, the gosling is a FEMALE (we’ve been woefully short of females)

Here she is shortly after discovery

And here she is two days old in Granddaddy’s hands

Austin says to tell you we know she is female because she is a pilgrim goose (an American breed) that has sex-linked color. She has a dark beak and gray on her back.

Akka sent me two more photos.

He noticed that the yesterday-today-&-tomorrow flowers are much smaller. He thinks maybe they are at end of the season or something. It’s just interesting to ponder.

And

He can’t resist taking photos of his favorite flower – Tekaeti, or maybe the hibiscus behind her ear.

I want to say once more how important you donors are to the raising of these Happy Chickens and other farm animals and sustainable crops which provide a livelihood to our neighbors & our coastal communities which would otherwise be overfishing the reefs.  From now and into the foreseeable future, you are the prime and only source of funding for this farming endeavor & training center. 

A thousand thanks & may you also be happy & prosper as you continue to help improve lives in Fiji.  Austin