Farm News 04-16-06
Sunday morning, after chores, 66°
Columbines are blooming
Bulletin
Easter Sunday began with two baby ducks hatched in the incubator and six more eggs 'pipped', i.e., the duckling has made the first hole in the egg shell. In the rabbitry Suzette produced a single baby overnight. Maybe she will have some more, I hope so.
Fragrance
It smells pretty good around here. The Koreanspice Viburnum is blooming and it is definitely the dominant scent, sweet with light musk. You can smell it way downwind, especially in the evening. In the orchard there are apples, crabs, pears, and plums blooming. South of that there are sarvis-tree and native plums. The honeybee population is still weak but there are many species of native bees working the flowers and delighted angle-wing butterflies move from blossom to blossom. Butterflies can get silly around flowers.
Daffodils, or the Narcissi, a genus of spring bulbs, are still blooming. The fragrance of each variety is different, some strong, some faint. Hyacinths are blooming in several places yet, including a bright yellow variety by the south deck that is very nice. I drove over several of the plants with the pickup when loading the piano for the grand-nieces but they seemed to survive.
The White Flowering Dogwood, High-bush Cranberries, and Arrow-wood Viburnum are ready to bloom in a week or two but they aren't fragrant. After the plum and Koreanspice Viburnum finish blooming the fragrance intensity eases to the point that males over the age of 50 can go for 30 seconds or more without thinking about sex.
Queen Isabella, the one of King Ferdinand of Spain and the sponsor of Columbus on his discovery America, was proud of the fact that she had bathed only twice in her life: once at her christening and once when she married Ferdinand. In those days people had real appreciation for fragrance, I guess. But why did she think it necessary to bathe for her wedding to Ferdinand?
When it smells this good it is time to put up the hummingbird feeders to feed the little monsters. Willy LaDuke, a fine fellow who died some years ago, kept hummingbird feeders up for many years. He also lived at the edge of an oak wood, a habitat hummers seem to like. His population grew to an amazing size. Feeding the hummers seems to definitely help increase the local population, as long as the feeding is consistent throughout the season. It also helps to have two or more feeders, with the feeders separated by buildings or dense plantings; otherwise, one male hummer will stake out his territory around the feeder and no other males can feed there. The more feeders you have, the more males.
This also produces an environment in which hummingbird fights are fairly commonplace. They seldom hurt each other, that not being the goal, but they do often provide some amazing aerial displays. They strike each other with their wings while in flight, making a sharp snapping sound. Slowed down by a factor of several orders of magnitude, it must be an incredible dance, more exotic than the wildest flights of Asian super-warriors.
If sunflower seeds are also available year round there will be a lot of male Cardinals eating them. The Cardinal guys are spending a lot of time making noise about where their territories begin and end. The females are busy laying eggs.
Speaking of Eggs, This is the 3rd Week of Incubation (or is this the 4th?)
Here they come! It's baby season! Baby bunnies, baby ducks, baby goslings, baby bantam chickens, and baby goats: they all will probably appear within the next moon cycle. Wednesday evening I put a nest box in for Suzette, a tri-colored, mid-size, lop-eared doe rabbit; she immediately started preparing for bunnies.
I've started talking to the goose eggs. Though not essential, it does help them learn to recognize and respond positively to a human voice. Camille Woodruff, an expert on turkeys, says, "There is some synchronization of hatch initiated by the hen talking to the eggs and the unhatched poults whistling to her and each other close to the 'due date'.”
As the hatch date approaches you can sometimes hear baby birds talking from inside their eggs. Ostriches seem to be able to tell how close an egg is to hatching by listening to the babies and then synchronize the hatch by moving advanced eggs to a cooler area where they develop more slowly.
The ducklings and goslings are due the day after Easter and another litter of rabbits is due a week after that. The baby goats are due the first week of May, I think. Shotgun, the mother cat, looks like she was due three weeks ago but hasn't produced anything yet.
Baby animals aren't the only new things appearing at this season. Hundreds of Green Ash, American Elm, and Mulberry seedlings are coming up everywhere except in the pasture, where the goats nibble them off as soon as they appear.
Lucy
Lucy goat had a yellow tag in her right ear when I purchased her. The tag read, “KS 4H 39606.” That tag was her 4H registration. A schoolchild registered Lucy with the 4H as part of her 4H project. Show judges, advisors, and other contestants all know that “KS 4H 39606” is the same goat she was last year. Now, she is Lucy. She has retired from 4H to become a very pleasant member of the barnyard family, so, today, I removed her yellow ear tag.
Lucy is about the most placid goat I have ever kept. She is very cautious but doesn't go crazy when startled. She has been going into the barn every evening for weeks, learning to jump up on the milk stand and behave herself. Still, every evening, she pauses at the door to the barn and carefully, slowly looks around. That sort of behavior is much more common in beef cattle than goats.
The saying is, “Milk makes nerves.”
Dairy animals tend to be much more nervous and flighty than meat animals. There are many exceptions, of course, but that is the general rule in cattle and goats. Lucy is half Boer, a meat goat, and half Nubian, a dairy goat. This will be the first year I milk her, but, from the looks of her udder and teats, she is going to be a nice producer and easy to milk. Maybe I'm lucky and have a goat which combines the best of her ancestry.
Potbelly was my first dairy goat. She did not have a pleasant, placid disposition, not in any way; her disposition always brought to mind in men the expression, “Nasty old bitch.” Nevertheless, I put up with her until she died of old age. Potbelly could convert a bushel of weeds into a gallon of milk and still thrive. Every morning and evening, nine months of the year, for twelve years, she produced a half gallon of milk. During the tenth month she tapered off to zero production. A person with four goats like that could almost afford to keep a teenage boy.
In the barn, at that time, there were two goat feeding stations: stalls with three solid wood sides equipped with a bucket of water, a bucket of grain, and a hay feeder. One morning a tiny kitten cam wobbling into Potbelly's feeding station, tail sticking straight up. Potbelly looked at it, stretched out her neck, and picked it up by the back of the neck. She turned to the side and neatly dropped the kitten into her water bucket. Nasty old bitch.
Queers
Whenever I tell someone that I think that sexual orientation is genetic, they usually respond with, “Then why hasn't homosexuality weeded itself out of the genome? They don't reproduce.”
I propose that some homosexual individuals are inevitable in a population that reproduces sexually, that sexual orientation is much more complex than simply possessing X orY chromosomes, and that the genetic expression which produces heterosexual orientation is also able to express homosexual orientation.
What is sexual orientation? Is it a simple straight line scale, from those who copulate only with the same sex to those who copulate only with their own sex? No, it's a lot more complex than that, even though we assume that we are talking about people who have only two sex chromosomes and that those chromosomes are intact.
In our genetically correct population about 1 in 5,000 people will have external sexual characteristics that do not match up with what appears to be their genetic makeup. To help simplify the argument I would like to ignore those people. Their lives are interesting and they show that the idea of a simple binary dimension doesn't work even for sexual characteristics. There are many more people, though, whose sexual orientation does not seem to match up with their X-Y makeup. There are far more than one in 5,000 whose sexual orientation is to mate with those who have the same number of X and Y chromosomes.
Why? What keeps their genetic structure in then human genome? Although I know many homosexuals who have children, I know even more who don't. I homosexuals' lower rate of reproduction was effective there would not be any homosexuals by this time. Instead, there are homosexual birds. The last common ancestor we had with the birds came before the dinosaurs.
Biology, the blind watchmaker, is a slippery thinker. The reason, of course, is that we humans always look for thinking, not that there is any thinker involved. Because every biological activity is the result of patching together the quickest solution out of the closest available parts, the results frequently contain unexpected consequences. If you have no expectations, or cognition, you certainly can't expect to avoid unexpected consequences.
In order to produce sexual reproduction, there had to be sex. Sex itself, the idea of male and female, is a hodge-podge slapped together of various things. The X and Y chromosome determination applies to many but far from all sexual organisms. Most of us monkeys use a system called SRY: there is a gene S something on the Y chromosome which determines our gender. Most other animals use a gene called UBE-1, which also resides on the Y chromosome, to determine their gender.
Oh, well. Regardless of how they determine their external sexual characteristics, a tremendous number, probably most of the mammals, have noticeable homosexual populations. The only reason I can see is that occasional homosexuality is the result of sexuality in general.
Columbines are blooming
Bulletin
Easter Sunday began with two baby ducks hatched in the incubator and six more eggs 'pipped', i.e., the duckling has made the first hole in the egg shell. In the rabbitry Suzette produced a single baby overnight. Maybe she will have some more, I hope so.
Fragrance
It smells pretty good around here. The Koreanspice Viburnum is blooming and it is definitely the dominant scent, sweet with light musk. You can smell it way downwind, especially in the evening. In the orchard there are apples, crabs, pears, and plums blooming. South of that there are sarvis-tree and native plums. The honeybee population is still weak but there are many species of native bees working the flowers and delighted angle-wing butterflies move from blossom to blossom. Butterflies can get silly around flowers.
Daffodils, or the Narcissi, a genus of spring bulbs, are still blooming. The fragrance of each variety is different, some strong, some faint. Hyacinths are blooming in several places yet, including a bright yellow variety by the south deck that is very nice. I drove over several of the plants with the pickup when loading the piano for the grand-nieces but they seemed to survive.
The White Flowering Dogwood, High-bush Cranberries, and Arrow-wood Viburnum are ready to bloom in a week or two but they aren't fragrant. After the plum and Koreanspice Viburnum finish blooming the fragrance intensity eases to the point that males over the age of 50 can go for 30 seconds or more without thinking about sex.
Queen Isabella, the one of King Ferdinand of Spain and the sponsor of Columbus on his discovery America, was proud of the fact that she had bathed only twice in her life: once at her christening and once when she married Ferdinand. In those days people had real appreciation for fragrance, I guess. But why did she think it necessary to bathe for her wedding to Ferdinand?
When it smells this good it is time to put up the hummingbird feeders to feed the little monsters. Willy LaDuke, a fine fellow who died some years ago, kept hummingbird feeders up for many years. He also lived at the edge of an oak wood, a habitat hummers seem to like. His population grew to an amazing size. Feeding the hummers seems to definitely help increase the local population, as long as the feeding is consistent throughout the season. It also helps to have two or more feeders, with the feeders separated by buildings or dense plantings; otherwise, one male hummer will stake out his territory around the feeder and no other males can feed there. The more feeders you have, the more males.
This also produces an environment in which hummingbird fights are fairly commonplace. They seldom hurt each other, that not being the goal, but they do often provide some amazing aerial displays. They strike each other with their wings while in flight, making a sharp snapping sound. Slowed down by a factor of several orders of magnitude, it must be an incredible dance, more exotic than the wildest flights of Asian super-warriors.
If sunflower seeds are also available year round there will be a lot of male Cardinals eating them. The Cardinal guys are spending a lot of time making noise about where their territories begin and end. The females are busy laying eggs.
Speaking of Eggs, This is the 3rd Week of Incubation (or is this the 4th?)
Here they come! It's baby season! Baby bunnies, baby ducks, baby goslings, baby bantam chickens, and baby goats: they all will probably appear within the next moon cycle. Wednesday evening I put a nest box in for Suzette, a tri-colored, mid-size, lop-eared doe rabbit; she immediately started preparing for bunnies.
I've started talking to the goose eggs. Though not essential, it does help them learn to recognize and respond positively to a human voice. Camille Woodruff, an expert on turkeys, says, "There is some synchronization of hatch initiated by the hen talking to the eggs and the unhatched poults whistling to her and each other close to the 'due date'.”
As the hatch date approaches you can sometimes hear baby birds talking from inside their eggs. Ostriches seem to be able to tell how close an egg is to hatching by listening to the babies and then synchronize the hatch by moving advanced eggs to a cooler area where they develop more slowly.
The ducklings and goslings are due the day after Easter and another litter of rabbits is due a week after that. The baby goats are due the first week of May, I think. Shotgun, the mother cat, looks like she was due three weeks ago but hasn't produced anything yet.
Baby animals aren't the only new things appearing at this season. Hundreds of Green Ash, American Elm, and Mulberry seedlings are coming up everywhere except in the pasture, where the goats nibble them off as soon as they appear.
Lucy
Lucy goat had a yellow tag in her right ear when I purchased her. The tag read, “KS 4H 39606.” That tag was her 4H registration. A schoolchild registered Lucy with the 4H as part of her 4H project. Show judges, advisors, and other contestants all know that “KS 4H 39606” is the same goat she was last year. Now, she is Lucy. She has retired from 4H to become a very pleasant member of the barnyard family, so, today, I removed her yellow ear tag.
Lucy is about the most placid goat I have ever kept. She is very cautious but doesn't go crazy when startled. She has been going into the barn every evening for weeks, learning to jump up on the milk stand and behave herself. Still, every evening, she pauses at the door to the barn and carefully, slowly looks around. That sort of behavior is much more common in beef cattle than goats.
The saying is, “Milk makes nerves.”
Dairy animals tend to be much more nervous and flighty than meat animals. There are many exceptions, of course, but that is the general rule in cattle and goats. Lucy is half Boer, a meat goat, and half Nubian, a dairy goat. This will be the first year I milk her, but, from the looks of her udder and teats, she is going to be a nice producer and easy to milk. Maybe I'm lucky and have a goat which combines the best of her ancestry.
Potbelly was my first dairy goat. She did not have a pleasant, placid disposition, not in any way; her disposition always brought to mind in men the expression, “Nasty old bitch.” Nevertheless, I put up with her until she died of old age. Potbelly could convert a bushel of weeds into a gallon of milk and still thrive. Every morning and evening, nine months of the year, for twelve years, she produced a half gallon of milk. During the tenth month she tapered off to zero production. A person with four goats like that could almost afford to keep a teenage boy.
In the barn, at that time, there were two goat feeding stations: stalls with three solid wood sides equipped with a bucket of water, a bucket of grain, and a hay feeder. One morning a tiny kitten cam wobbling into Potbelly's feeding station, tail sticking straight up. Potbelly looked at it, stretched out her neck, and picked it up by the back of the neck. She turned to the side and neatly dropped the kitten into her water bucket. Nasty old bitch.
Queers
Whenever I tell someone that I think that sexual orientation is genetic, they usually respond with, “Then why hasn't homosexuality weeded itself out of the genome? They don't reproduce.”
I propose that some homosexual individuals are inevitable in a population that reproduces sexually, that sexual orientation is much more complex than simply possessing X orY chromosomes, and that the genetic expression which produces heterosexual orientation is also able to express homosexual orientation.
What is sexual orientation? Is it a simple straight line scale, from those who copulate only with the same sex to those who copulate only with their own sex? No, it's a lot more complex than that, even though we assume that we are talking about people who have only two sex chromosomes and that those chromosomes are intact.
In our genetically correct population about 1 in 5,000 people will have external sexual characteristics that do not match up with what appears to be their genetic makeup. To help simplify the argument I would like to ignore those people. Their lives are interesting and they show that the idea of a simple binary dimension doesn't work even for sexual characteristics. There are many more people, though, whose sexual orientation does not seem to match up with their X-Y makeup. There are far more than one in 5,000 whose sexual orientation is to mate with those who have the same number of X and Y chromosomes.
Why? What keeps their genetic structure in then human genome? Although I know many homosexuals who have children, I know even more who don't. I homosexuals' lower rate of reproduction was effective there would not be any homosexuals by this time. Instead, there are homosexual birds. The last common ancestor we had with the birds came before the dinosaurs.
Biology, the blind watchmaker, is a slippery thinker. The reason, of course, is that we humans always look for thinking, not that there is any thinker involved. Because every biological activity is the result of patching together the quickest solution out of the closest available parts, the results frequently contain unexpected consequences. If you have no expectations, or cognition, you certainly can't expect to avoid unexpected consequences.
In order to produce sexual reproduction, there had to be sex. Sex itself, the idea of male and female, is a hodge-podge slapped together of various things. The X and Y chromosome determination applies to many but far from all sexual organisms. Most of us monkeys use a system called SRY: there is a gene S something on the Y chromosome which determines our gender. Most other animals use a gene called UBE-1, which also resides on the Y chromosome, to determine their gender.
Oh, well. Regardless of how they determine their external sexual characteristics, a tremendous number, probably most of the mammals, have noticeable homosexual populations. The only reason I can see is that occasional homosexuality is the result of sexuality in general.
posted by The Geezer at 8:37 AM
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