Farm News 04-03-05
Farm News
Sunday morning, after chores, 54°, daffodils and hyacinths
No Baby Bunnies
Losing Rosie's litter left the farm with a hole in the continuum of bunny production. Ayte's bunnies are weaned and much too large to take visiting, but there are not yet any baby bunnies growing to take the place of Ayte's litter. I still have Svenn, but don't want to breed her because I would like to keep the number of mother rabbits down to three.
On the top deck in the rabbitry are three cages ideal in size for big mother rabbits. The lower deck has four of the cages in the same length, about ten feet. The lower deck cages are adequate for Fluff, the buck, and any weanlings needing rearing. By using just two of the cages for weanlings, I could convert the last cage to use for rats, mice, both, or something else such as hamsters.
I like rats. They're interesting animals. Actually, all animals are interesting, but rats have been domesticated for so long that they are better tuned to attracting the interest and care of a human. Now, I'm not talking about wild rats, I'm talking about domesticated, tame, nice rats, usually white, but sometimes with neat color patterns. Once, I saw, at the same animal sale, rats and pigeons with the same patterning. Both were primarily white with ruffs of brown that stood out instead of lying flat.
When an undergraduate, with even less intelligence than that usually implies for males, I had a pet rat named Butch. Butch was a fine fellow with a pleasant disposition, even though he was a refugee I liberated from a university psychology lab where the ideas of B. F. Skinner ruled. Freed from the rigors of learning to run a maze for maize, he took to stealing cigarettes, which tells you something both about cigarettes and rats.
Butch would find his way to a smoker's shoulder and settle down as if here were going to behave himself. Then, when the moment was right, he would lean down to the smoker's shirt pocket, seize a cigarette from the pack, and run away. Once clear, he would bite the cigarette at several places along its length, making it unusable, drop it, and, using a circuitous route, return to the smoker's shoulder, apparently hoping his theft would be forgotten.
Rats are in the lead for the rodent of choice. Hamsters don't do much, nor do Gerbils. Mice are nice and make good owl and snake food, so I would consider them. Beavers are way too big and so are groundhogs. Does anyone have any suggestions?
The Radio, The Rooster, and The Dog
I was sitting in the hayloft of the barn, listening to an interview on NPR. The person being interviewed had written a book on bird calls, and they were playing clips of the bird calls. They played some Chickadee calls that were mostly above my hearing range and then spent quite a while playing the calls of a Wood Thrush.
Claudius, the Bantam Golden Sebright rooster, and Drusilla West Wall, Drusilla2, and Drusilla3, his three hens, were quietly roosting above the barn door where they could easily poop on my head if I stopped under them. Trusty, the hyperactive puppy, was in the hayloft chewing on something.
Then, from the radio, came the call of a Barred Owl. A fraction of a second after the call of the Barred Owl began, Claudius was on his feet, alert, and making the chicken alert call, a sort of rising trill. Trusty jumped up, looked at Claudius, then ran to in front of the radio and stopped, listening intently, I assumed, and later modified to 'looking intently'.
My impression was that Trusty had just learned to associate the call of a Barred Owl with a threat to the bantams. Smart dog. I usually consider smart animals to be a nuisance, but Trusty might change my mind. His predecessor was dumber than a barn door but excellent company. Trusty is so active that he isn't always the best of company, but he sure is a lot smarter than the barn door.
Trusty's tendency to 'guard' consists of a lot more complex stuff than a simple 'instinct'. One part of it, which I learned from Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation is that many mammals enjoy pursuing the solutions to problems. Finding the solution is not the pleasure generating activity, searching for the solution is. Trusty's world of problems seems to include a great deal of matching up visual examination with scents and sounds he detects.
Thanksgiving Goes Broody
Thanksgiving, the Blue Slate hen turkey, built a nice nest, laid ten eggs, and went broody. She has been on the nest for a week, now, and seems very determined. We'll see. She has eight eggs left, I had collected numbers 2 and 3 and brought them in to eat.
Most barnyard birds lay a lot of eggs before going broody and some, like the commercial layers, lay almost year round without ever going broody, relying on hatcheries for reproduction. Khaki Campbell ducks will lay all summer if you leave one or two eggs in the nest. If the count builds up to a dozen or more eggs in the nest the duck goes broody.
Just because a bird starts setting on eggs doesn't mean that babies will hatch. Stuff we tend to pass off simply as 'instinctual behavior' is often more subtle than we suspect. In the end, the hatch rate (percent of eggs that hatch) for an incubator is seldom any better than the hatch rate of a mother bird setting on ten eggs. Incubators offer the advantage of being able to hatch hundreds of eggs at a time.
Long time readers might remember the Astrophysical Ducks. The AD's were eight Khaki Campbell ducks who had taken an interest in astrophysics. One of those ducks was a female to always carefully hid her nest under brush piles or thorny shrubs. She would lay about twenty eggs and then go broody. About two weeks later she would reappear, say something about her contract including sabbaticals, and then engage in typical duck leisure and play. Two or three days later she would go back to her nest and settle down on her now chilled and unhatchable eggs. I've always said that females have no place in astrophysics.
Time Changes
A person would think that the religious right would take on the government over this weird habit of changing the time twice a year. What's wrong with using God's time all year? If God had intended for the sun to be somewhere other than overhead at noon he would have put it there.
We should at least be able to hire someone who can operate all these things to come to our house to change all the various clocks in microwaves, coffeemakers, VCR's, wristwatches, and so on, and deduct the cost from our state taxes.
Farm News Changes Format
Some people, like my daughter and her husband and his father, have strange attachments to a certain fruit brand of computer. Their wonderful graphics machines crash under the impact of descriptions of chicken poop encoded in html. Therefore, Farm News will be plain text for a while.
Farm News is mailed by a program called e-Newsletter Manager. It is a free product of a company called e-Undertown, an Italian firm, I think. E-Undertown's main business is creating software for managing the maze of public services routed around underneath cities. Underground utilities are a nuisance on this place. I've cut the telephone line twice and a waterline once. I appreciate the use of e-Newsletter Manager and thought I'd mention it.
There are 97 subscribers to Farm News, currently. I don't have a hit counter on the blog, but I doubt if it gets much action. At the current rate of growth, I will, if I live to my goal of 115 years, become a lesser known newsletter author by the time I die. Good.
Saturday Morning Bunnies
Nyn produced bunnies sometime Friday night. Later this week I'll check them out and count them. There are live bunnies in there, though, because I could see the fur move.
E-mail Subscribers: Subscriptions are free until 2036, when they will increase to $5 per year. To subscribe, unsubscribe, contribute stories, complain or send a gift subscription, send an email to FarmNews@GeezerNet.com . The editor reserves the right to steal ideas submitted, rewrite submissions, and sign false names to them whenever it strikes his fancy to do so.
Sunday morning, after chores, 54°, daffodils and hyacinths
No Baby Bunnies
Losing Rosie's litter left the farm with a hole in the continuum of bunny production. Ayte's bunnies are weaned and much too large to take visiting, but there are not yet any baby bunnies growing to take the place of Ayte's litter. I still have Svenn, but don't want to breed her because I would like to keep the number of mother rabbits down to three.
On the top deck in the rabbitry are three cages ideal in size for big mother rabbits. The lower deck has four of the cages in the same length, about ten feet. The lower deck cages are adequate for Fluff, the buck, and any weanlings needing rearing. By using just two of the cages for weanlings, I could convert the last cage to use for rats, mice, both, or something else such as hamsters.
I like rats. They're interesting animals. Actually, all animals are interesting, but rats have been domesticated for so long that they are better tuned to attracting the interest and care of a human. Now, I'm not talking about wild rats, I'm talking about domesticated, tame, nice rats, usually white, but sometimes with neat color patterns. Once, I saw, at the same animal sale, rats and pigeons with the same patterning. Both were primarily white with ruffs of brown that stood out instead of lying flat.
When an undergraduate, with even less intelligence than that usually implies for males, I had a pet rat named Butch. Butch was a fine fellow with a pleasant disposition, even though he was a refugee I liberated from a university psychology lab where the ideas of B. F. Skinner ruled. Freed from the rigors of learning to run a maze for maize, he took to stealing cigarettes, which tells you something both about cigarettes and rats.
Butch would find his way to a smoker's shoulder and settle down as if here were going to behave himself. Then, when the moment was right, he would lean down to the smoker's shirt pocket, seize a cigarette from the pack, and run away. Once clear, he would bite the cigarette at several places along its length, making it unusable, drop it, and, using a circuitous route, return to the smoker's shoulder, apparently hoping his theft would be forgotten.
Rats are in the lead for the rodent of choice. Hamsters don't do much, nor do Gerbils. Mice are nice and make good owl and snake food, so I would consider them. Beavers are way too big and so are groundhogs. Does anyone have any suggestions?
The Radio, The Rooster, and The Dog
I was sitting in the hayloft of the barn, listening to an interview on NPR. The person being interviewed had written a book on bird calls, and they were playing clips of the bird calls. They played some Chickadee calls that were mostly above my hearing range and then spent quite a while playing the calls of a Wood Thrush.
Claudius, the Bantam Golden Sebright rooster, and Drusilla West Wall, Drusilla2, and Drusilla3, his three hens, were quietly roosting above the barn door where they could easily poop on my head if I stopped under them. Trusty, the hyperactive puppy, was in the hayloft chewing on something.
Then, from the radio, came the call of a Barred Owl. A fraction of a second after the call of the Barred Owl began, Claudius was on his feet, alert, and making the chicken alert call, a sort of rising trill. Trusty jumped up, looked at Claudius, then ran to in front of the radio and stopped, listening intently, I assumed, and later modified to 'looking intently'.
My impression was that Trusty had just learned to associate the call of a Barred Owl with a threat to the bantams. Smart dog. I usually consider smart animals to be a nuisance, but Trusty might change my mind. His predecessor was dumber than a barn door but excellent company. Trusty is so active that he isn't always the best of company, but he sure is a lot smarter than the barn door.
Trusty's tendency to 'guard' consists of a lot more complex stuff than a simple 'instinct'. One part of it, which I learned from Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation is that many mammals enjoy pursuing the solutions to problems. Finding the solution is not the pleasure generating activity, searching for the solution is. Trusty's world of problems seems to include a great deal of matching up visual examination with scents and sounds he detects.
Thanksgiving Goes Broody
Thanksgiving, the Blue Slate hen turkey, built a nice nest, laid ten eggs, and went broody. She has been on the nest for a week, now, and seems very determined. We'll see. She has eight eggs left, I had collected numbers 2 and 3 and brought them in to eat.
Most barnyard birds lay a lot of eggs before going broody and some, like the commercial layers, lay almost year round without ever going broody, relying on hatcheries for reproduction. Khaki Campbell ducks will lay all summer if you leave one or two eggs in the nest. If the count builds up to a dozen or more eggs in the nest the duck goes broody.
Just because a bird starts setting on eggs doesn't mean that babies will hatch. Stuff we tend to pass off simply as 'instinctual behavior' is often more subtle than we suspect. In the end, the hatch rate (percent of eggs that hatch) for an incubator is seldom any better than the hatch rate of a mother bird setting on ten eggs. Incubators offer the advantage of being able to hatch hundreds of eggs at a time.
Long time readers might remember the Astrophysical Ducks. The AD's were eight Khaki Campbell ducks who had taken an interest in astrophysics. One of those ducks was a female to always carefully hid her nest under brush piles or thorny shrubs. She would lay about twenty eggs and then go broody. About two weeks later she would reappear, say something about her contract including sabbaticals, and then engage in typical duck leisure and play. Two or three days later she would go back to her nest and settle down on her now chilled and unhatchable eggs. I've always said that females have no place in astrophysics.
Time Changes
A person would think that the religious right would take on the government over this weird habit of changing the time twice a year. What's wrong with using God's time all year? If God had intended for the sun to be somewhere other than overhead at noon he would have put it there.
We should at least be able to hire someone who can operate all these things to come to our house to change all the various clocks in microwaves, coffeemakers, VCR's, wristwatches, and so on, and deduct the cost from our state taxes.
Farm News Changes Format
Some people, like my daughter and her husband and his father, have strange attachments to a certain fruit brand of computer. Their wonderful graphics machines crash under the impact of descriptions of chicken poop encoded in html. Therefore, Farm News will be plain text for a while.
Farm News is mailed by a program called e-Newsletter Manager. It is a free product of a company called e-Undertown, an Italian firm, I think. E-Undertown's main business is creating software for managing the maze of public services routed around underneath cities. Underground utilities are a nuisance on this place. I've cut the telephone line twice and a waterline once. I appreciate the use of e-Newsletter Manager and thought I'd mention it.
There are 97 subscribers to Farm News, currently. I don't have a hit counter on the blog, but I doubt if it gets much action. At the current rate of growth, I will, if I live to my goal of 115 years, become a lesser known newsletter author by the time I die. Good.
Saturday Morning Bunnies
Nyn produced bunnies sometime Friday night. Later this week I'll check them out and count them. There are live bunnies in there, though, because I could see the fur move.
E-mail Subscribers: Subscriptions are free until 2036, when they will increase to $5 per year. To subscribe, unsubscribe, contribute stories, complain or send a gift subscription, send an email to FarmNews@GeezerNet.com . The editor reserves the right to steal ideas submitted, rewrite submissions, and sign false names to them whenever it strikes his fancy to do so.
posted by The Geezer at 9:34 AM
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