After nearly 5 weeks away we are back at Tatum Hills and what a joy to return to such gorgeous Spring!

The house sitters did an amazing job and all the animals are happy and healthy.

The chickens are doing a great job laying us heaps of eggs, contact us if you'd like to purchase some eggs for eating or hatching.

The llama Are happy too and the babies have grown and will be ready for new homes soon.

Miley has finishe moulting... Thank goodness!

We have great plans for Spring so stay tuned for the latest!

We vaccinated all the llamas. This is no easy feat ... Each of them gets one or two needles, then after you've made them suitably cranky, you try to grab them to shove horse drenching paste down their gob! The boys were reasonably good, so we thought we could manage the girls OK. last time we tried they were quite well behaved!
Well, NOT this time... I reckon they've been training to turn their heads 240 degrees! They are in the crush so they can't move, or so we think... But this is an old cattle crush and llamas are the most compact animals you've ever met, they suddenly find all this wiggle room in this tiny space. So the only ones getting crushed are Damian and I, precariously perched half way up the structure trying to reach their heads, suddenly so high! Damian holds their neck (so much for our hours of gentle training where we try to avoid just that!) I am on the other side, trying to find their mouth, but they just turn their head ALL the way to the other side... I stick my arms through the bars to grab them, they move, CRUSH... OUCH! Did I hear a llama laugh? Eventually I manage to squeeze an insufficient amount of paste through their sealed lips and then the real entertainment begins... There's Connie, who already had a spit ready before I even gave her the paste (I could see her round, loaded cheeks, ready to fire!) so out comes the med, followed by wet chaff... Mmmh that was worth the effort! At least she just spat in the air, not AT us :) Beeghum and Reba kindly swallow a bit, but first prize goes to Renata, for the most creative way of getting rid of the paste.... First she holds it on her tongue with her mouth open for at least 20 minutes, with the most harassed look on her face, then approacha the wooden fence and smears it all over it... Now we have a perfectly worm-free fence, brilliant!

So after all of this, you'll understand my surprise when the next day everyone still cheerfully run into the pen and even willingly walked though the crush to get food! Oh well, hopefully this means we are now good friends enough with our llamas that they'll promptly forgive us the occasional rough handling!
And the drench? Capitalising on Damian's new-found stealthy injecting skills, I now have some injectable drench for them...

Our Buff Orpington Rooster had been sharing home with our boy in charge Roger for several months now. It was all going well with Roger looking out for Oscar and protecting him.... Until.... Oscar grew up!

We always knew this house arrangement wasn't going to last and Recently Roger started.chasing Oscar away from the girls and the food. His way of saying "you're all grown up now, go find your own girls!"

So Oscar started doing the rooster dance for me and finding me food... Thanks but no, I don't want a worm and a seed!

It was time for Oscar to move to his own home. We started building him a temporary home until we get time to make a proper pen in the spring.

But Roger must have had enough and a couple of days ago we found Oscar sitting sadly in a corner of the coop. All sorts of sinister thoughts came to my mind, but luckily, on closer inspection it appeared that only his pride had been wounded.

So in came Oscar, to spend an afternoon of TLC in the warm house for treats and vitamins, while we completed his pen.

The next morning Oscar joined a few of the girls in the new coop. Immediately, he started behaving like a rooster, calling them to food, crowing and flapping his wings. He knew these were HIS girls, not Roger's anymore.

Meanwhile, the little Maran girls have also grown up, so they moved in with Roger's flock.

One thing I really like about Winter is finding our llamas with frost on their backs in the morning. Their fleece is about 10 cm thick so they don't even know it's there and it just looks great!

Jamie is not really bothered by the cold either, though he does come to claim his warm brekkie every morning... and he just practices his increasingly showy display as his feathers grow.

When we moved to the country I was thrilled I could finally have a dog, so the search begun for the perfect Tatum Hills pooch.

I knew I didn’t want a puppy as I don’t have much experience with dogs and I am busy raising my own human puppy. So I started investigating different breeds and searching all shelters and rescue organisation as well as some breeders, for older, well behaved dogs.

Our ideal companion needed to be pretty special: safe around little kids, OK with cats and chooks and possibly even a bit of a guard dog.

Maremmas stood out as a breed and I put my name down with the wonderful Maremma Rescue Victoria group, but the right one still hasn’t come up for us, so in the meantime… Miley came along.
Her owners were giving her up and she just fitted the bill for us. Though she is NOT a guard dog!

She is the sweeteset, most patient dog ever, Saint Miley puts up with Elody’s play, which although gentle can be a bit annoying at times.

Unlike what we were told, turns out Miley HATES cats and growls and barks at them as soon as she smells a whiff of them. But she can’t see very well so she can’t really chase them… the cats are safe.
Miley wasn’t desexed when she came to us, but since her eye condition is genetic she really can’t have puppies… what a shame as they would have been gorgeous gentle dogs.
So after much deliberation I finally took the plunge and got Miley desexed. The vet was most impressed at how well behaved she was even though she was quite scared… That’s my Miley!
And now she’s getting even more attention than usual and all the luxuries to recover in comfort.

After the recent sad events, things have been pretty quiet here at Tatum Hills... which at this point seems like a good thing.
On a positive note, we have had some time to just quietly enjoy and observe our animals... pet therapy is not in short supply out here!

It was a cold evening in early April 2007. We were living in town and watching TV, when we heard the loudest MEOW! We thought it was the neighbour’s cat that had been locked out and didn’t think much of it, but when it continued, Damian when out to check. He returned very quickly “it’s the fluffiest kitten you’ve ever seen!” he said. Well that was a surprise, such a big voice for such a tiny thing, 600g of tiny fluff as we later found out.

I went out with some food and he soon came within
reach. I grabbed him and stuffed him inside my jumper. We took him to the garage as we were sure the owners would soon come looking for him and we didn’t want to unnecessarily stress our other two cats. Inside the garage I opened my jumper and found him sucking on my shirt, he was that small. We fed him and he made sure we felt very much thanked for giving him a warm meal. He would eat, then come to see us with the loudest purrs, then eat some more, then back for cuddles. When he finished the food he tried to eat the plate, so we gave him more food.

Over the following days we started searching for the owners but nobody claimed the tiny fluff ball…well there’s only one thing you can do when a cutie like that wonders into your life… KEEP IT. So we did. Our two middle aged cats, Migloo and Rusty were less than impressed by our decision but little Louis’s cheerful disposition soon won them over.

Over the following weeks, we understood the importance of nappies, though of course they don’t come in cat size, so we did without. As we waited for him to be old enough for desexing, we kept him in the house and took him on little explorations of the backyard on a leash. Quite funny, really. But it was clear that this was a free spirit…so as soon as we could let him, we set him free and started fretting every night, eagerly awaiting his return. A keen rodent hunter and an incredibly agile climber. Twice he got home in a bad state, once with a collapsed lung, which required open chest surgery to fix, and once with a heart issue, probably caused by a bee sting. Both times he was not expected to make it, but he did. Our fluffy purr champion would pull through the worst and shine again. 

When we moved to the country, he couldn’t believe his luck, unlimited rabbit and rat supply, all the space he could dream of and almost no cars! He would spend the days busily patrolling his territory or just curled up under a bush waiting to spring into action at dusk. But every night he would come home to a juicy meal and LOTS of cuddles!

Last Thursday night he didn’t make it home. I know Louis, he’s always come home if he needed help so I knew that if he wasn’t back it was because he couldn’t come. But cats are cats and you always hope they may have just gone on an adventure… he hadn’t. We found him today. His lifeless fluffy body just next to the driveway. He was coming home. We walked past there so many times in the past few days, calling him, looking for him, but we didn’see him and he couldn’t respond. Vale gorgeous boy, we are so sad and angry we lost you so soon, but feel totally privileged you chose us, on that cold night six years ago.

Let's start with the bad so we can finish on a positive note... As some of you may already know from my recent Facebook post, one of our little peahens, Jade, recently died... We tried so hard to get her better buytshe was too weak. Vale Jade.

So when yesterday I noticed Biu Biu, one of our young chicken hens standing all hunched up, I gasped... And immediately put some meds into everyone's water! This morning she was no better so I brought her inside to warm her up. Seemed better but wasn't so now she's back in. More meds and we'll see tomorrow... I am quite worried but she's a good plump weight so hopefully she'll have the strength to pull through...

The other good is that four new hens joined Tatum Hills. I must say, after losing Jade, my enthusiasm for their arrival was dampened substantially, but the purchase was arranged long ago and we needed more girls to keep the boys busy, so off we drove to Tarago. We visited the lovely Fiona and her amazing farm, where chickens roam happily in vast spaces of tall grass and trees. Chicken paradise! One of the Australorps boys we hatched in October now lives there. His name is now Olive and he's SO grown up and gorgeous! After a lovely tour and pats of the goats, cats and dogs, we had a short game of chasies with some wyandotte girls and brought 4 home. They are lovely big fluffy girls, currently quarantening in a portion of the big pen... Roger was most impressed when he found them there in the morning and I think he'll find it hard to wait for them to be let out of quarantine...

The other good is that four new hens joined Tatum Hills. I must say, after losing Jade, my enthusiasm for their arrival was dampened substantially, but the purchase was arranged long ago and we needed more girls to keep the boys busy, so off we drove to Tarago. We visited the lovely Fiona and her amazing farm, where chickens roam happily in vast spaces of tall grass and trees. Chicken paradise! One of the Australorps boys we hatched in October now lives there. His name is now Olive and he's SO grown up and gorgeous! After a lovely tour and pats of the goats, cats and dogs, we had a short game of chasies with some wyandotte girls and brought 4 home. They are lovely big fluffy girls, currently quarantening in a portion of the big pen... Roger was most impressed when he found them there in the morning and I think he'll find it hard to wait for them to be let out of quarantine...

The rain has been missing us for a few weeks now and now the grass is not great fodder. We want to give some of our paddocks a rest, so we tried to put our stud Enrique in with the other boys today.

Previous attempts to do this had not gone very well, but lately we have been feeding Enrique next to the other boys (separated by a fence) and he seems to be accepting them, so we thought we'd give it another go.

The operation was "oiled" by copious amounts of hay and we were all ready to step in and separate them... Instead they just went past each other like total gentlemen, with only a quick snort exchange and swapped paddocks.

Later Enrique returned to his dwelling and found the boys there... Silly Bakr, our junior stud, tried to mount Enrique... NOT a good move! Enrique put him in his place and all seemed good now... We'll see in the morning!

All the chooks and Jamie came to keep them company and all seems well. Happy day on the farm!