All farm stays have animals. It’s what we do. That’s what our guests come to see but here at Diamond Forest Farm Stay we have some truly unique characters amongst our menagerie and you can get to see them all on our daily animal feeding.
Choppa the Kangaroo with One Ear
Choppa, the red Kangaroo is a rescue Kangaroo that came to us from the Port Hedland area. Sadly he lost his mum when he was a little Joey due to them both being run over by a truck. Choppa also lost his ear. His tail was quiet damaged too and he spent a lot of time being rehabilitated. That was approximately nine years ago and all that trauma is long behind him. He now has a great pen which he shares with Clancy the grey kangaroo but he is still the only kangaroo I’ve ever seen with just one ear.
Uther came to the farm several years ago. His original owner had tried to debud him that is tried have the horns removed when he was only a very young buck. Unfortunately it didn’t work very well and his horns started to grow. As a typical young buck, he liked to assert his dominance over the other goats and would frequently get into head butting contests with them. This caused one of his horns to get knocked off, repeatedly. Now one of his horns grows straight and the other one has curled up and he looks like he has one horn so we call him our Unigoat. He also has a blonde ringlet on his forehead and a long beard and a personality to match.
Mulberry, the Sheep with a Tail
Most sheep have their tails docked at a very young age to avoid things like Fly-strike, which can be very nasty and fatal. Mulberry came to us from a couple that had not wanted to dock her tail so they had left it on. By the time she came to us she was much too old to have her tail docked so she got to keep it. She is the only one in our small herd that still has her tail. It’s one of the things that makes her so easy to identify.
Elsie the Disabled Chicken
Elsie is a Plymouth Rock chicken that hatched in our incubator. When you hatch chickens, or ducks, in an incubator is very important to get the right temperature and the right humidity. If you get it wrong, even just a little bit, you can end up with leg problems in your chicks or ducklings. This is what happened to Elsie. Elsie has one leg that is bent up underneath her and she can’t walk on it. She still gets around very well and the young chickens and old chickens like to hang out with her because she doesn’t move around a lot and she doesn’t pick on them. Because Elsie has a disability we can’t put her in with the other Plymouth Rock chickens because they would pick on her and probably kill her. So Elsie stays in with our friendly bantam chickens. She gets a cage all to herself at night so that we can make sure she gets plenty of water and food.
We’ve had all manner of unique characters amongst our animals over the years. We had a blind duck and a white peacock once but sadly they are no longer with us. We will continue to add unique animals to our menagerie along with all our other farm animals. I guess it just makes us that little bit different.