Finished The Aviary - well almost!

The ridge cap is just temporary! It will soon have green shingles and a ridge cap to match.

The first pair of birds in their new home.
Breed baby breed!

Today I finally finished framing and wiring the aviary. Made a door and got that on last evening. Now the first pair of birds are in there and although they are new to each other ( Craig the tree man gave me a nice little hen ) they seem to have hit it off. There are still things to do. It needs shingles on the roof and the gable finishing off but at least I can now put birds in it. Snakes could get in it if they have half a mind to but so far they haven't bothered the birds in the other aviary. I think it's because the birds can just fly up out of the way. This one is out in the open too so they are less likely to hang around it. Ken caught the snake that was living under the woodpile. We put him in a bucket and relocated him about a mile away. There are others out there though I'm sure. Tomorrow I have to get to work on building a door for the loft.

During the week one of our birds got loose. I thought for sure it would either take off back to North Carolina or fly away and be lost. What a great surprise when the next morning it was sitting up on the barn roof. She followed me around all day flying up in my face as if to say "look, do you see me?,I came back!" I waitied until she was real thirsty and then put some water in a cage on the ground. She went right in! So now we have one bird that we know has settled here. I can begin taking her out over longer distances and letting her fly home.

Woo Hoo! feels like we are moving forwards instead of standing still.

The Pigeon Loft

As I mentioned a while ago we started work on the new loft for our white homers. It's coming along well but seems to be taking forever. It's similar to the one Josh and I built at our old place but with improvements.

This time Ken is here to help. He's nearly always been deployed to the back of beyond during my other building forays and it's hard to get used to working with him again. We actually had a tiff ! His whole life is spent organizing people and giving orders and it's a long time since I was a little private! It didn't sit very well. I gave him the "do it your self then!" and stomped off to walk the dogs. Needless to say his way of doing things turned out to be much better.

He's not a bad old bean really.

Here are some pictures of the progress.

This is the sight that greeted me one afternoon when I walked into the barn. A black snake eating our first baby pigeon! Time to get to work on a proper loft.

Leveling the site 

Front 

Here you can see the "pigeon holes". These will be the entrances to the nest boxes on the wall inside.

It's Fixed!

Thank the Lord! My computer is back up and running.

No thanks to HP, however. I called customer service and spoke with their man in Mumbai. As I suspected the warranty had "expired Madam" and they now wanted a bunch of money to fix it plus shipping costs. Thanks but no thanks. I already paid you enough for the computer and at this point in it's short life I should not be conversing with Rajhi or anyone else regarding a problem with it.

A guy Ken works with thought he could fix it and he did! He wouldn't accept any pay so Ken took him out to eat. Maybe he'll bring him down here and take him hunting or something.

I'm so happy! I love this computer. It's the hp Pavilion a530n. It has slots on the front for just about any device you might want to plug into it. No crawling on the floor blindly trying to find the right socket at the back. You take the card out of the camera and insert it in the slot. No leads to mess with. Plus it has a 200GB hard drive which hubby says "even you won't fill that up!"

So lets see if I can keep the blog updated.