Farm News 02-18-07

Ad Astra

Cold, clear, dry winter nights are nice for sky gazing if you are dressed warmly. Then, when you come in the house and pull your long underwear off, static electricity creates a great light show, especially if you wear silk longjohns underneath woolies. Watching your sweetie undress in the dark can be great winter entertainment.

Pruning Trees and More Seeds

A reader asks, “Is now the time to prune a peach tree gone wild? (young tree but produced over 100 pounds of huge peaches last year and the branches are way too long for the size of the tree).”

Yes, February is the month to prune fruit trees. Peach trees, unless they are pruned annually, will grow way too long and break apart when they set fruit. Pruning will reduce the number of peaches produced but not the total weight of fruit produced. So, a pruned tree will produce big peaches and an unpruned tree will break up under the weight of a lot of little peaches.

Another reader suggests Territorial Seeds and Johnnys Seeds. I've bought seeds from Territorial in the past and been happy with them, and a neighbor has had similar positive results with Johnnys.

For tree purchases, my wife swears by Miller Nurseries in the Finger Lakes region of New York. There are at least three nurseries with the name 'Miller', which all might be equally good, but the one in New York is the one my wife likes. They have a good selection of apples.

Waxwings

A flock of Cedar Waxwings has shown up and they are happily cleaning all the berries of the Highbush Cranberries, Viburnum trilobum. This is the first time I have seen anything really going after the berries. The Mockingbird pecks at them occasionally, but the Waxwings seem to relish them.

Waxwings will rest in the tops of trees, well spread out, and all facing the same direction. It makes them fairly easy to identify from a distance. This flock is fairly calm and have allowed me to move within 15 feet of them, but the sky is so bright it is still difficult to look at them.

To top it off, what appears to be a Phainopepla showed up. The only places I know where you can see Phainopepla are south of Los Angeles. I sent off a rare bird sighting on the internet, so if anyone else sees it there might be a confirmation. Currently there are no confirmed Phainopepla sightings in Kansas.

More Monkey Business

Holy Primates! Dr. Alexander sent me an email and attached a copy of the report from Evolution and Human Behavior. Here is what she says:

Hello – and thanks for forwarding the news letter. I am attaching the article for your daughter. As you will see, the spatial preference for explaining male toy preferences is not my idea and is based on the sex differences in play styles (males – human and nonhuman – are more active and play rough and tumble more frequently than do females). In other species, this sex difference in play styles is more certainly hormonally dependent. Your thought that a pot can be thrown is true, but once thrown it lies still. A truck can roll – and keep rolling. I have also heard about young girls who place their trucks in blankets – so trucks can be nurtured too!

Finally, you daughter may also find it interesting that these toy preferences (measured by infants looking times at toys) emerge in the first year of life – which makes it rather hard to attribute to a child’s understanding of what is “gender appropriate” or a preference for a particular kind of play (as infants are rather limited by their physical development). An interesting idea (Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge) is that males and females differ in terms of their preferences for processing things that have predictable, systematic outcomes, such as trucks (laws of motion) and things that are of the “social” world, like dolls. His theory is that both dimensions are represented in males and females, but generally females have stronger interests in what he calls emphasizing and males have stronger interests in all things systemizing. This is the same person who describes autism as the “extreme male brain” (very low empathizing, very high systemizing).

Characteristics are either retained or dropped in a species depending upon whether or not they contribute to reproductive success. The behavior of infants has little to do with reproductive success or failure, so the behavior of baby monkeys is not what was selected but is, rather, the early expression of some characteristic that, in adults, contributes to reproductive success.

Baby male monkeys like pickup trucks. Well, of course. Any good country boy knows you can put a mattress in the back of a pickup truck and increase your reproductive success.

A reader who is the mother of two children, one male and one female, commented that her daughter never wore out a pair of pants, and her son wore out every pair of pants, usually at the knees, from pushing cars around on the floor.

Another reader, the weirdo who always writes in red and centers his lines, says:

Having spent about

five years at

Texas A&M University

with a female getting a

Ph.D., I’m prepared to make

a statement or two about

“gender differences” among

students, and especially faculty

at that gigantic institution - the

third largest enrollment in the U.S.

It was an exclusively male, military

school, until sometime in the ‘60’s,

and is still quite heavily male ‘dominated,’

numerically, as well as other ways:

10% of the faculty is female, and

they only tenure about 10% of

female instructors who

teach there. “Graduation”

isn’t just Graduation, but

at the same time, in

the same auditorium

as graduation occurs,

military “commissioning”

occurs. I ‘heard’ that more

officers are commissioned at

the same time as they graduate

from that school than any other

in the nation. The little rotcy boys

wander around campus in their knee-high,

custom made jackboots, saluting each other

through the academic year and being contemptuous

of women. I myself have seen it, and have NO doubt that

it has a very negative on so-called “scientific” work that has

any ‘bearing’ on gender differences.

And that statement, being overly broad and completely unsupported, is a good place to end this discussion. My academically appropriate daughter refuses to offer any criticism of the work of someone else when it is outside her field and will not help continue the speculation. The only other thing I have to offer is to thank Dr. Alexander. I thought it was a very clever piece of research and I wish Dr. Alexander well in her future endeavors.

Next, I think I will read a book or two by Simon Baron-Cohen. His work on autism sounds interesting. I have two young acquaintenances who are autistic, both high functioning, and I often wonder if autism is a disorder or a different order of mind.