Farm News 06-05-05
Sunday morning, after chores
A Warm, Damp Morning
There is nothing like a nice, warm, moist morning, fresh with dew and birdsong, to make a man's scrotum itch. You just know that tiny Deer Ticks are crawling up there and attaching themselves to you.
Of the three common biters, chiggers, ticks, and mosquitoes, only mosquitoes are insects. Chiggers and ticks are both arachnids; not spiders but their first cousins. Like spiders they have eight legs.
They don't lay eggs under your skin, the itching is due to a foreign body reaction to their saliva. The best treatment is to not scratch the bites. Big help.
Ting (cont.)
Whoops! I failed to finish the tale of Ting's displeasure with my behavior. As I mentioned last week, Ting has learned that the most vulnerable parts of a human are their shoelaces. A vigorous attack on the shoelaces will almost always result in victory.
This is a situation similar to what is going on in Iraq: 'victories' are being achieved all over the place because everyone defines the results of what they are doing as victory. Temple Grandin, in Animals in Translation, discusses how some of the animal behaviors arise and why it is almost impossible to change them. She uses B. F. Skinner's term for them, 'animal superstitions'. Somehow, attacking shoelaces became embedded deep within her psyche.
So, every evening I pick up Ting from the top of the cat feeder and put her on a roost. Every morning she attacks my shoelaces. Meanwhile, the world continues to turn. Ling flutters out daily to grab a bite to eat and, acting like she's about to have a case of the vapors, says, “Oh, I must rush back to incubate my eggs!”
She's a faker, of course. She and Ting decided to save on housekeeping by sharing a nest. There must be twenty eggs in the nest, which I can't reach. Ling can't cover all of them at once, so she sets on some for a day or two and then the others for a day or two. Like most of the strategies cooked up by the Somerset Twins, this one was doomed to failure. If chicks are going to hatch from eggs, they hatch after three weeks of incubation. After five weeks of incubation it has begun to sink into Ling's head that something is not happening that should be happening.
Early in the week she tried walking around the barn yard, scratching, clucking, fluffing out her feathers, and acting like she was caring for a clutch of invisible chicks. It was a convincing display and would have convinced me she was a mother if there had been a single chick in sight. After a day of make-believe motherhood she went back to incubation, a move which the eggs are far past being able to appreciate.
If we are fortunate this experience will exhaust the Somerset Twins' mothering instincts for the year and they can return to their non-existent stage lives. Their standard performance art piece, 'Aleatory Elements in Chicken Lives', is bad, but still better than 'The Dedication of Mothers.'
Tinkerbelle Goose
Saturday morning I went to the barn as usual to do chores, and, as usual, I called out, “Tinkerbelle,” as I came into the barn. Saturday, there was no answering honk. At about one year of age, Tinkerbelle passed on, probably of pneumonia.
Tinker hatched with a crooked right foot and was never able to walk well. She lived in the barn instead of living with the other geese. This spring she built a nest and deposited an egg in it, then started incubating her egg. It never hatched and Tinker lost a great deal of weight while incubating and not eating. Early last week I removed her egg because I was worried about her health. I guess I was too late.
Tinker will be missed by her friends, especially the Somerset Twins, Trusty and Tessie, Christmas, and me.
Broccoli
We're having a very nice first cutting of broccoli. The late frosts didn't hurt it very much at all. The White Cabbage Butterflies are busy, though, and there are lots of green caterpillars to be found. The cleanest treatment for caterpillars is BT, the bacteria that gives them a diarrhea, if you can imagine giving a worm diarrhea as a clean way to do anything.
E-mail Subscribers: 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.
A Warm, Damp Morning
There is nothing like a nice, warm, moist morning, fresh with dew and birdsong, to make a man's scrotum itch. You just know that tiny Deer Ticks are crawling up there and attaching themselves to you.
Of the three common biters, chiggers, ticks, and mosquitoes, only mosquitoes are insects. Chiggers and ticks are both arachnids; not spiders but their first cousins. Like spiders they have eight legs.
They don't lay eggs under your skin, the itching is due to a foreign body reaction to their saliva. The best treatment is to not scratch the bites. Big help.
Ting (cont.)
Whoops! I failed to finish the tale of Ting's displeasure with my behavior. As I mentioned last week, Ting has learned that the most vulnerable parts of a human are their shoelaces. A vigorous attack on the shoelaces will almost always result in victory.
This is a situation similar to what is going on in Iraq: 'victories' are being achieved all over the place because everyone defines the results of what they are doing as victory. Temple Grandin, in Animals in Translation, discusses how some of the animal behaviors arise and why it is almost impossible to change them. She uses B. F. Skinner's term for them, 'animal superstitions'. Somehow, attacking shoelaces became embedded deep within her psyche.
So, every evening I pick up Ting from the top of the cat feeder and put her on a roost. Every morning she attacks my shoelaces. Meanwhile, the world continues to turn. Ling flutters out daily to grab a bite to eat and, acting like she's about to have a case of the vapors, says, “Oh, I must rush back to incubate my eggs!”
She's a faker, of course. She and Ting decided to save on housekeeping by sharing a nest. There must be twenty eggs in the nest, which I can't reach. Ling can't cover all of them at once, so she sets on some for a day or two and then the others for a day or two. Like most of the strategies cooked up by the Somerset Twins, this one was doomed to failure. If chicks are going to hatch from eggs, they hatch after three weeks of incubation. After five weeks of incubation it has begun to sink into Ling's head that something is not happening that should be happening.
Early in the week she tried walking around the barn yard, scratching, clucking, fluffing out her feathers, and acting like she was caring for a clutch of invisible chicks. It was a convincing display and would have convinced me she was a mother if there had been a single chick in sight. After a day of make-believe motherhood she went back to incubation, a move which the eggs are far past being able to appreciate.
If we are fortunate this experience will exhaust the Somerset Twins' mothering instincts for the year and they can return to their non-existent stage lives. Their standard performance art piece, 'Aleatory Elements in Chicken Lives', is bad, but still better than 'The Dedication of Mothers.'
Tinkerbelle Goose
Saturday morning I went to the barn as usual to do chores, and, as usual, I called out, “Tinkerbelle,” as I came into the barn. Saturday, there was no answering honk. At about one year of age, Tinkerbelle passed on, probably of pneumonia.
Tinker hatched with a crooked right foot and was never able to walk well. She lived in the barn instead of living with the other geese. This spring she built a nest and deposited an egg in it, then started incubating her egg. It never hatched and Tinker lost a great deal of weight while incubating and not eating. Early last week I removed her egg because I was worried about her health. I guess I was too late.
Tinker will be missed by her friends, especially the Somerset Twins, Trusty and Tessie, Christmas, and me.
Broccoli
We're having a very nice first cutting of broccoli. The late frosts didn't hurt it very much at all. The White Cabbage Butterflies are busy, though, and there are lots of green caterpillars to be found. The cleanest treatment for caterpillars is BT, the bacteria that gives them a diarrhea, if you can imagine giving a worm diarrhea as a clean way to do anything.
E-mail Subscribers: 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 8:09 AM
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