Good for you! :) Raising your own birds for table is FAR tastier and healthier than production chicken from the store. It sounds like you have your head on straight when it comes to what counts--raising the bird in a healthy environment and giving him a good life before quickly and calmly doing the deed. :) Be prepared if you will be raising Cornish Cross birds for meat next, though--heed what others on this board have said about them being kind of nasty-messy to raise, and make sure you butcher them on time. Allowing Cornish X birds to live beyond their natural butchering age is cruel, as they eat constantly and gain so much weight so quickly that their legs cannot support them and they go down on their hocks or their legs simply break. :( There was a show on PBS called 'The Natural History of the Chicken', which was a kind of quick and entertaining overview on all kinds of people who owned chickens. It included a guy who kept chickens both for eggs and meat, and he was so dead-on about appreciating the birds for their beauty, contribution to his ecology, eggs, companionship and meat for his table. He butchered his own birds and has a great outlook, I'd highly recommend it. There is also a great story at the end about a little Silkie hen named Liza, it's heartwarming. :) The guy I'm talking about is here, the first 3 minutes of part 2, and part 5, about 1:40 in: http://video.google.com/videosearch?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=the+natural+history+of+the+chicken&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title# The entire show is great, the only part I didn't really like was the part about the guy who kept fighting cocks--sad story and the noise they put in is REALLY annoying. *L* Velvet ~:>

Thanks for the explanation of your zoom, Claire. More information for camera shopping is always appreciated. We have finally had some warmer weather and so I went for a long walk yesterday down by the stream, through our far corn field (not visible from the house) and then through the next farm south which was an ornamental tree & sod farm at one point and is now returning to its roots as a food farm. I had been wondering where "our turkeys" had wandered off to and found evidence of them in several places: Crossing the stream From Jan 31, 2014 and then up to check out the manure piles in the field From Jan 31, 2014 but the real attraction seems to have been the ornamental crabs in the tree fields. There were lots of tracks in this area, but almost none around the other rows of trees. From Jan 31, 2014 Earlier in the week I had taken a quick ski around the corn field by the house and found tracks from fox and coyote as well as this little guy, perhaps a mouse based on the size and tail drag, where his track and the fox coincided. From Jan 31, 2014

Yesterday I was getting lunch for myself and glancing out the kitchen window at the Red-winged Blackbirds having their lunch, when a Sharp-shinned Hawk pounced on one of the red-wings. I guess it was lunchtime for everyone. I felt very sorry for the red-wing, but you can see from the hawk's posture that this catch was very important for it. It seemed to be looking around to see if another predator would take the bird away. The hawk soon flew off with the red-wing. I was glad not to have to see the meal. I took twelve photos out my windows before the hawk flew away (I was kind of hoping the red-wing would escape but it didn't). Here are some of the photos, the rest are in my Flickr account - I have a Hawks set now. Claire

It is interesting Pooh. Based on your post I downloaded and ran the program. At the moment this is still a BETA program, in other words it is being tested by those of us who elect to use it. Once all the kinks are worked out the final product will be available no doubt. On my computer it searched all 3 hard drive partitions and found 10 insecure programs and 4 end of life. However those tagged as end of life will not be removed, these are old programs I use and will continue to take the small risk they might pose. The live link to the right of each entry takes you to the needed update site for that particular program. It is one more program running in the background. Time wil tell if it stays on my computer but it is an interesting program