Farm News 10-29-06

Sunday morning, after chores

Growing Up

The little ducks and bunnies are growing up. This week the ducks left their stall and joined the big flock of ducks and the bunnies left their mother to be on their own. That means it is time for more babies.

A young duck has a big pile of eggs in the barn which she is keeping warm. They should hatch soon and give us another batch of baby ducks. Ducks take about 32 days to hatch. The difficulty is not in counting days but in figuring out when incubation started. Ducks tend to go back and forth for a while before they become serious about staying on the nest. So, for a week or two, the mother might have been jumping off the nest whenever she heard me come into the barn. Mother ducks are deceitful creatures.

There is no practical reason to be hatching ducks at this time of the year, it's that baby ducks are so cute. And, the later in the year they hatch, the longer they stay little and cute. The batch that hatched most recently are beginning to get long and leggy, Like a 12 year old kid that just grew a bunch. They are sleeping in a huddle away from their mother, now, but they still follow her around, or she follows them around, it's never too clear which it is.

They are now old enough to begin staging Keystone Kops routines. Out on the lawn they will spread out until they are all three or four feet apart. If they see me coming they go into panic mode. Each duck starts running toward the others and then they all meet in the middle in a crash in which at least one duck will fall on its back. Then they mill around a bit until one duck starts heading in a single direction. The rest of them fall into line and away they go. If any duck stops for any reason, all the ducks behind crash into it. I haven't been able to deduce from what survival traits for living in the wild these behaviors descend. The behavior does fit in with barnyard survival. The poor things appear to be so dumb you know you have to take extra good care of them.

Fog

We had an excellent foggy day this week. Wandering around in the fog can be great fun if there are no dangerous cliffs or crevices in which to stumble, nor are there large trucks travelling at high speeds anywhere in reach. When the visible world shrinks to blurry objects no more than 50' away other senses have to come into greater play. Driving back roads through the Flint Hills in the fog is a nice way to spend a morning.

Some years ago, on a foggy morning, I drove a road known as The Old Wolf Trail through southern Kansas. The Chataqua Hills have lots of trees, especially Black Jack Oak, the Flint Hills are treeless tall grass prairie. The Old Wolf Trail connects the eastern part of the treless Flint Hills and the western part of the wooded Chataqua Hills, more or less. As one drives west the trees thin out and vistas of grassland open up.

Very few people live on The Old Wolf Trail and traffic is quite sparse, school buses and mail delivery making up the largest part of it. Houses are two to five miles apart and there are only a few crossroads. In some places grass is growing up in the middle of the road, between the two tire tracks. Traffic is not a problem on The Old Wolf Trail.

On this particular foggy morning I could just see the trees and fence posts on either side of the road. Occasionally they would fade out, and occasionally I could see them clearly. I drove with the windows open, racing along at 5-15 mph, listening to the sounds and smelling the plants. It was lovely. At one point, as I slowly rolled past, I saw a nice old cow blinking at me through the fence.

Sometimes the fences and trees would disappear, and then a field entrance or driveway would appear, then pass from sight to the rear as the fence posts reappeared. I heard a dog bark once but didn't see it. I saw another dog but it didn't bark, nor did I.

As I came into the Flint Hills the fog began to lift. Sometimes I was back in the center of a hemisphere moving through the fog, and then the edges would lift and grassland would stretch away to the new limits of visibility. A rabbit appeared, motionless, in the circle and then disappeared out the back, then a coyote, sniffing the rabbit scent in the air.

I had started shortly before sunrise on the east edge of the Chataqua Hills, fumbling around in the dark and fog trying to find my way to the east end of The Old Wolf Trail. When I finally arrived the sun must have been up, but it wasn't easy to see the difference. It wasn't dark, but you still couldn't see more than fifty feet. For a bit I was disappointed. I had wanted to make this drive but I hadn't expected the fog. But, I was there, and the fog might lift soon, so I set out. I had estimated the drive would take about an hour, on this morning it took two and a half hours. And it sure was pretty.

Pandora Radio

The geeks have a new buzzword, internet 2.0. Roughly, it refers to the new kinds of web sites that can be nicely trained to do as you wish. Pandora.com is internet 2.0 radio. It uses your inputs to adjust music streams to your taste. Try it out, you might like it.

Old Addresses & Phone Numbers

It seems that as one ages the number of funerals for family and friends increase each year. I don't go to funerals very often, I figure if they died without my help then they can bury themselves without my help. Another reason I don't go to funerals is my black suit won't go around me anymore, I'm too fat. That is extremely discouraging, so I don't try to put it on any more.

Anyway, I noticed that my address book contains the last known addresses and phone numbers for a lot of dead people. Even if their cell phones still worked, I don't think I'd want to talk to any of them again. Sometimes it's better not to know some things.