Category Archives: Pets

Belize, Farming, Pets

What Happened To Duckie-zilla?

We are going from dry to wet season right now and there seems to be a more apparent transition this time round.  It’s raining at night and in the daytime it gets seriously hot when the water from the rain evaporates.  It’s like wading about in a sauna!!  Is this Paradise, by the way…

Anyway, do you remember that we had a lovely yellow duckie co-habiting with the guinea pigs because she was a one-duckie incubator hatch?  She started off really small (of course ha-ha!!).

Duckie.

And the she got bigger and bigger in the guinea pig metropolis so we started calling her Duckie-zilla…the awkward teenage years…

Duckie-zilla!!

She is the first of a new generation of laying duckies and so we have dubbed her Dalai Duckie.  Well now she has turned into a beautiful golden yellow duck so she is also called The Golden Maiden.

Here she is and  she is out with the older generation of duckies.  What a beauty:

Dalai Duckie.
The Golden Maiden.

Ooooh and one more…

Dalai Duckie.

She has started laying already.  Now we have 7 laying duckies so the plan is to start replacing the older 6 with a new generation.  The old generation are still going strong despite being over 5 years old; apparently, ducks lay good numbers up until the age of 5.  That’s according to information on the Internet…we have to see what real ducks actually do!!

Amusing, Belize, Pets

Goosie Tales!

Oh what a relief!  We had a really lovely heavy rain early this morning and a nice sleep in until 7am because it was so cool.  The last few weeks we have been getting up at 4am to start at 6am which is the coolest time of the morning.  It’s been really exhausting and the heat has been relentless.

Anyway, our goosie with the broken leg is recovering.  It is actually able to weight bear and managing to limp around goosie hospital.  It’s getting a bit lonely so I am allowing 1 to 2 hour visits from fellow goslings (one at a time).  It gets a bit over-crowded with all of them twittering , messing around with food and pooping.  Over-night stays are not allowed…way too much carrying on…Munchkin and Gnome don’t take kindly to interrupted sleep!

Oor Goosie!

Operation: Get broody turkey sitting on goose eggs unfortunately failed.  The Duchess (aka Female turkey) was a champion and sat the thirty days (and more) but none of the eggs hatched.  We’ve read that goose eggs need to be turned on a daily basis (by the goose or by human) but once the duchess was sitting, there was no budging her.  We thought that it was just best to let her do her Mama thing and wait it out.  So in conclusion, it doesn’t look like turkeys can set goose eggs because they are too heavy for them to be turned.  Oh well, we tried!

Sitting Turkey.

The other baby goslings are doing normal baby gosling things like twittering, pecking at each other, eating grass and pooping.  We take them for supervised walks at the pond area and sit with them while they do their goosie thing.  The other day, Gnome’s mum phoned us and said,

“How are my grand-children?”

The grand-kids are doing very well:

Goosie Walks.

Home schooling has started because we want to make them into proper little scholars…unfortunately they keep on falling asleep every-time we open the book…perhaps we should review the goosie curriculum?

Intellectual Goosie Education.
Belize, Farming, Pets

Giving Goosie A Chance!

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About a week ago we found  one of our goslings, 3 days old at the time, sitting immobile and unable to stand.  It was twittering away to itself and appeared unperturbed.  On closer examination, it appeared to have broken its right leg.  We are not sure what happened because he was fine before; maybe a guinea pig had accidentally trod on its leg or a clumsy gosling had sat on him…who knows?

Since it was unable to move, it was not eating or drinking.

Gnome, accident and emergency specialist said that it would probably take 4 to 6 weeks for the leg to completely heal.  He further explained that this would mean that we had to open up a 24 hour hospital care unit for the little one.  In other words, this meant one to one care, attention and feeding.  He asked me:

“I know that we are both very busy right now.  Munchkin, do you want to look after the goosie?”

I thought about it carefully because there are plenty of things to do on the farm and many other things that we do including seeing patients and making products.   Do I really want to use up my time looking after one goosie when there are many healthy goosies to give the time and attention to?

Oh well, this one was too cute for me to say “No.”

Sleeping Goosie.

As Gnome says,

“Cuteness goes a long way…”

Goosie Hospital is officially open; run by Matron Munchkin!!

Goosie Hospital.
Belize, Farming, Pets

A Terrible Sunday.

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It’s taken us a wee bit of time to recover from Sunday.  You see we lost two out of three of our new goslings.  This is what happened: On Saturday night, we performed Operation: Move Mama Goose from bush with goslings to safe house.

Mama and Goosies.

We did our usual kidnapping and bundling and moved them to a nice luxury nest in the Zen garden coop.  We cleared everyone out of the place so that she would have the place to herself.

The new baby goosies:

Of course, Geese don’t take kindly to being moving about and the next morning she was making a racket.  She had free reign of the entire coop with water, greens and grains but she wouldn’t have any of it.  She kept on pushing against the fencing and incessantly complained the whole morning.  The three little goosies were just following her about and were not perturbed by her fussing and complaining.  Occasionally, I would cast an eye over to make sure that the babies were doing okay.  The last time I looked was about midday and everything was in order.  At about 1pm, it started raining so I decided to run outside to make sure that the baby goslings had found shelter.  And lo and behold, mother was there with no goslings!!  Arrrgh!!!  Deep Shock…where were the babies???  I called Gnome and we searched the entire coop looking for the babies and couldn’t find any trace of them.  Mama was so distressed and kept on crying out…

We eventually opened the coop and let her out because she was just going crazy.  She ran back to her original nesting spot and plonked herself down, refusing to move.

We again scoured every inch of the coop…still nothing…

Was it a hawk?  What could take away three baby goslings without leaving a trace?  We did deduce that it wasn’t our cat because he had an alibi…he had been asleep inside the house all day.

We finally decided to get Mama goose back into the coop in the hope that she could call the babies and perhaps they would miraculously appear.  Anyway, she did her calling and Gnome thought that he heard some peeping noise coming from the cardamom bush in the coop.  He went over to investigate and meanwhile, I walked around the coop again and found the bodies of two of the dead babies.  They both had similar injuries to the head like they had been grabbed by the head and shaken back and forth.

Gnome found the third one…luckily, still alive and uninjured.  Thank Goodness!!

Anyway, we both agreed that the dead bodies of the goslings were not in the coop at the beginning of the search.  How did they mysteriously appear in the coop midway through the search?  After thinking about it a bit more, we realised that we had both left the coop to retrieve the mother and during this brief moment, the culprit must have snuck into the coop and performed the wicked deed.

So who was it Sherlock Gnome and Munchkin??

It was the dasdardly drake:

The Drake.

He was the only one who could get in and out out of the coop because he has discovered a secret weak spot…the rest are too fat to get through..  I recalled to Gnome that I  saw the drake sitting next to the cardamom bush when I had run down to check on the babies.  He quickly scarpered and I forgot about him in the ensuing confusion.

Oh dear, that means that the babies were probably still alive at the beginning of the search?? But we lost them when we both exited the coop.

The remaining baby gosling has been put in with the two older goslings in the safety of the guinea pig cage.  Everything has quietened down and mama has already forgotten, thankfully.

Well, it’s up to these two to look after the new baby goosie!!

The Other Two Goosies.
Amusing, Belize, Farming, Pets

Goosie Galore!!

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This story started yesterday morning when we woke up at our usual 5am time, all bleary eyed and half asleep trying to block out  the incessant morning gobbling of the turkey.   I wasn’t too sure what was going on…rubbing my eyes wearily,  I recall that we had been watching a Scottish film the night before (The Legend of Barney Thomson with Robert Carlyle which was incidentally based in Glasgow).  This is what happened first thing: Gnome started talking with a broad Scottish accent.  He wasn’t putting it on intentionally either…

I just guffawed at him and said that I needed a wee cup of tea before I could comprehend why he was talking like that.  Gnome exclaimed,

“What do you mean?  I’m just talking normally!!”

After finding some semblance of normality with my Yorkshire tea, it suddenly dawned on me that Gnome and I spend every waking (and un-waking) moment together, with sparse company in-between, and he has got so used to my accent that he has adopted it unconsciously.  It did occur to me that on many occasions, he has been mistaken for a Scot.  I usually pipe up and say defensively, in a strong “can’t mess with me” Scottish accent,

“Hey hang on a minute!!  I’m the Scottish one.”

It makes me laugh when people get awfully confused because I look Chinese (Cantonese) and I come out with such a rough accent. Ha-Ha!!

Anyway, I thought Gnome’s Scottish accent was pretty good and that’s something coming from a Glaswegian.  I then proceeded to challenge him and I said (think of me talking in my usual accent):

“Well, son, you might be able to do Scottish-Glaswegian, but can you do Scottish-Sean Connery-style??!!”

Gnome said,

“Well, I’ll have to watch some GoldFinger with Pussy Galore and practise some James Bond lines….”

He didn’t manage to finish the sentence because all of a sudden there was a tremendous amount of goosie noise coming from behind the house.

We ran outside and saw that all the geese were surrounding a setting goose (May Jones; one of the Jonesy Girls).  This goose had decided to make her nest in some long grass about 15 yards behind our house.  Since we didn’t want to move her (we’ve had failures with kidnapping and re-location) we decided to leave her alone.  Gnome got to her first and then shouted at me to come quickly.

Mama and Goosies.

This what we saw. Three cute fluffed up goosies hiding behind mama!

I couldn’t help it and I said amusingly,

“Ooooh….Goosie Galore!!!”

Gnome replied,

“It shertainly sheems sho, Mish Moneypenny!!”

in a mock Sean Connery accent.

Amusing, Belize, Pets

Sunday Plumbing and Goosies.

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There’s certainly no rest for Gnome even though it’s the Easter weekend.  The sink got completely blocked up yesterday so this morning his first chore was to fix it.  He was really nice about it and took the the plumbing apart and sucked up all the garbage (it was really quite horrible) and lo and behold, he found  a wooden chopstick inside the sink trap!

He held the chopstick up in the air and looked at me incredulously:

“Darling, how did you get a chopstick down the sink?”

How embarrassing…I really don’t know how it happened and when it happened!  At that point, Gnome felt justified in putting his two cents worth,

“You’re lucky we don’t need to call in a plumber to do this for you…because they probably wouldn’t come out for the holiday weekend!  And, most probably they wouldn’t bother coming out for a chopstick emergency!”

Yeah I know.  I feel really silly and sheepish and I still don’t know how a chopstick got into the U-bend.

Anyway, I must get over this silliness and show you our lovely little goosies.  I am teaching then to eat their greens:

“Eat your greens!!”

Double Goosie!

After they have eaten and pooped, I let them sit on my lap (while they fall asleep and make whistling noises).

Sleeping Goosies.

Spending quality time with the little ones on Easter Sunday!!  They are an absolute joy!!

Lovely Goosies.
Belize, Food, Pets

Happy Easter!

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A Happy Easter to y’all and hope that you are enjoying a lovely weekend!  We’ve had an Easter hatching so now we have two goslings.

New Born Goosie.

This one has darker eyes, also has a little bump above its beak like a Chinese goose and is very talkative.  As usual, they are very independent; at first they are unsteady on their feet, wobbling all over the place and falling into the container of water . After about 24 hours, they become steadier and can start eating solids quickly.  In our house, they get mashed up boiled egg and chopped up greens.

Well, what are we eating for Easter?  That’s actually a tough one because my cooker broke down two weeks ago.  Can you believe it…the knobs (which were made of plastic) were slowly breaking off one by one.  At one point, I only had 3 knobs so I could only have 3 out of 6 burners going at the same time.  Alas, all  last 3 knobs broke at the same time.  One of the knobs was for the oven so that means I have no oven…which means no roast lamb.  Having said that, you can’t get lamb for love nor money down here anyway.  If you are lucky, you might find some mutton.

Anyway, we literally rushed out to buy a new stove top. This is what Gnome said,

“Oh no!!  This is an emergency!! We have to get Munchkin a new stove.  Otherwise she will waste away to nothing!”

Ha-ha, that’s a joke.  It would take me a very long time to waste away to nothing.  In fact, I’ve actually been counting calories lately.  I am not over-weight (nor am I skinny) but I think it is healthy not to over eat.  I also found it a useful exercise in devising tasty meals which don’t  pack on the pounds.  We don’t eat breakfast so that’s any easy one (zero calories) and lunch time, I have devised meals that are about 300 to 400 calories…Gnome eats double because he needs the energy to do physical work.  Here are some examples of my low calorie lunches.

Fresh tomato, potato and blue cheese.
Boiled eggs, bread and rocket salad.

I don’t count the calories for dinner but I expect it to be about 1000.  So right now I’m trying to decrease my calorie intake from 2000 (recommended energy intake for adult female) to about 1500.  For junk food, I’m counting my Pringles (10 at a time costs me 100 calories) and a two finger Kit-Kat is 100 calories.  So through-out the day, I weigh and juggle my intake in order to get to 1500 as my total at the end of the day.

Oh, and Gnome and I are making gelato with no sugar…with his Grandmother’s recipe which is just milk actually.   That’s a great alternative to shop bought ice-cream and I don’t feel so fat after eating it!!

Have a Happy Easter.  We’re having Osso Buco tonight so I really shouldn’t have lunch, should I?  Ha-ha!!

Amusing, Belize, Farming, Pets

Sulphur and Goosie Trouble!!

Gnome has been boiling up sulphur and lime for our Lime-Sulphur XXX Pet Dip For Mange, Fleas, Ticks and Ringworm.

Boiling Sulphur and Lime together.

Available at the Farmstore in Punta Gorda, Toledo by the way.  Just ask for Presidente…for Pets.  You will know why once you see the bottles because we are recycling old Presidente beer bottles:

Lime-Sulphur Pet Dip.

He’s making it on a kerosene stove on the veranda which has been inadvertently converted into yet another work space…not fit for people…he does it on purpose so that we can’t  invite anyone around:

“errh…sorry folks you can’t come round because I’m boiling sulphur today…sorry about the inconvenience…maybe another day when I’m not boiling sulphur!!”

Today the sulphur concoction boiled over so there was a very strong eggy smell pervading the veranda, the house and our senses.  Gnome loved it and as I have previously mentioned he is a Catholic Gnome so he feels thoroughly cleansed when he plays around with sulphur.  He said to me, in a rather a playful manner,

“Don’t cry over spilled sulphur my dear…this will get rid of the snakes…the evil eye…and bad spirits…I’m giving the house a thorough cleansing!”

Well, what could I say?  One can not go against the word of a Catholic Gnome!

Okay, we also have more goosie trouble.  Our white goosie (we call her January Jones) has been sitting on a clutch of goose eggs.

Sitting Goose.

I’ve mentioned in a previous post that there has been problems with a male goose who keeps on fighting to sit on her eggs (yes, I know…do ganders get broody too??).  After many fights, the eggs were getting smashed and alas she ended up with one egg.  I had been timing her sit and her EDD (Estimated Date of Delivery…Ha-Ha using medical terms…might be Estimated Date of Hatching) was on Wednesday.  Anyway, we gave her a few more extra days and lo and behold, the egg exploded because it was rotten.  Now you would think that she would get off her nest since there were no more eggs plus there was a terrible  stench of exploded egg.  No, she wouldn’t budge an inch.

Since January Jones had no more eggs to sit on and she had lost so much weight over the last month, we made an executive decision to throw her off her nest and out of the coop.  I know it sounds horrible but she was wasting away and we needed to break her broodiness so she would start eating again.

Well, she’s thoroughly pissed off with us!  Every morning she waits outside the house to ambush us.  She runs full throttle at us and tries to leap and thrash at our legs!  What a feisty goose…I hope at some point she will find it in herself to forgive us because these goosie attacks are getting a bit too much.

Anyway, I still want to end on a positive note.  Here are some recent baby pictures!!  We love Oor Goosies despite their evil temperaments!!

Hello Goosie!!!
Goosie Eating.
Amusing, Belize, Farming, Pets

Kidnapping The Duchess!!

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Officially we are now crepuscular; up at 5am, doing our stuff until it gets too hot to move!!  I just wanted to share with you a funny story that happened about two weeks ago.  This was when we had no idea what to do with our goose eggs; the incubator was unreliable, all the female geese were insisting on nesting in the middle of the bush, there was a lot of pushing and shoving resulting in broken eggs  and there were no reliable broody poultry.  Our first solution was to get Muscovy ducks as they are known to be become broody at the drop of a hat.  These silly little ducks have proven to be duds.  As Gnome says,

“They’re treating this place like a hotel….”

Muscovy Ducks.

These two possess absolutely no broody tendencies.  They just twitter, stuff themselves full of corn and will have nothing to do with us.  Talk about a bunch of free-loaders!!

Anyway, at about the same time, our darling duchess (aka female turkey) had laid a clutch of eggs and was sitting all snug and cosy on top of them.  And then lo and behold, the Overlord (Aka male turkey) came along and smashed up the eggs (we are not sure why he did this) and the poor duchess was left whimpering on top of a bunch of broken eggs, refusing to move.

Overlord and Duchess.

This is when we decided upon Operation: Kidnap the Duchess.  Gnome made a lovely luxury nest cabana-style in the coop.

Deluxe Brooding Cabana.

In the middle of the night, Gnome stealthily grabbed and snatched the duchess and placed her in the new nest  on top of 7 goose eggs.  I assisted with a flash-light to guide the way.  The next morning, we opened up the nest door to find the duchess all quiet and calm,  sitting happily on top of her eggs.  Since then, she has not moved at all and we place food, snacks  (she loves bananas) and water by her side.  We hope that the eggs hatch…we have about another two weeks to go.  We did read on the Internet (although we are now cautious of any information that we read) that when a turkey sits on goose eggs, you actually need to help her move the eggs around on a daily basis and spray warm water to keep them humidified.  Well, the Duchess will have none of that because she won’t  get her off the eggs!  God forbid that we try moving her about; she would probably freak out and we definitely do not want to de-brood her!  Let’s hope and pray that we get a few goosies out of this one…

Sitting Turkey.

Keep on going Duchess!!  You’re a Champion!!

Amusing, Belize, Farming, Food, Pets, Philosophy, Plants

We Have A Happy Gnome!

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Yes, indeed, we have a happy Gnome so that really means that we also have a happy Munchkin!  When we tell you what makes us satisfied with life, you’ll probably giggle and guffaw at the simplicity of our wants.  Yes, indeed this ascetic life-style  has made us put our lives into perspective (as there is time for quiet contemplation) and you realise that life can be fulfilled with very simple things.  The meaningful things to us might not be everyone’s cup of tea!  But, we do think that it’s good to develop new interests and passions all the time.

Yes, firstly…the worms…the worms…of course.  Special thanks to Graham and Joyce for their assistance and friendship.  Here we are:

Red Wiggler Worms.

Lovely, lovely…this stuff makes Gnome very happy:

More Worms.

Gnome has set up a wormery to increase his population.  Once he is satisfied that he has enough worms, he will start his worm tower empire.

Worm Bin.

The next thing…aubergines…aubergines.  We are growing the Black Beauty variety.  Look at the lovely flower on this plant:

Eggplant Flower.

What’s next…ooooh Baby Goosie is a bundle of joy.  We are certainly enjoying being Mama Munchkin and Papa Gnome.  We even phoned up Gnome’s Mum to talk about the “baby” and how well it was eating and putting on weight. Gnome’s dad laughed at our conversation and said at last, we have a grand-child!

Goosie!!

Oh, last but not least…Gnome’s beloved tomatoes.  We did experience quite a set-back from the pesky birds.  I can’t look at a Montezuma oropendola without feeling self-righteous indignation!  Look at what they did to our lovely tomato:

Pecked Tomato.

Anyway, Gnome’s ingenuity has out-witted them…so far, so good!  Let’s give a show of hands to Gnome for his new “Hello Birdie…there’s nothing here to eat…so go away”  decoy.

Tomato Protectors.

The last picture has to be these: our very own Krim tomatoes.  Beautifully sweet and succulent.  We just sliced them and dipped them in salt.  Ahhhh…wonderful….

First Tomatoes.