More on Birds

Not much more… but I found this today:

Someone’s been successful.

Birdland

One of my fans (ha!) has asked whether I take blogging requests. Like a radio station. She only recently moved “up country” as we call it here in the hills, and is still in the thrall of the environment. I admit, I too have trouble realizing I actually live in such a place, and am not just on an extended vacation in a wonderful locale.

Anyway, Rae Anne begs me to report on the birds here about. This is easier asked than given. I like to put up pictures with my posts, and, though I do have a few birdie pics in my collection, good ones are hard to catch. It’s true, as she points out, the birds are a phenomenon in this highland country of small farms and big woods. We have Juncos and Sparrows, Chickadees and Towhees, Grosbeaks and Finches. Robins. Crows, Buzzards, Starlings and Grackles. Geese overhead. Nuthatches in the crabapple tree. Mourning Doves expressing their blues. Hawks of various sizes. Owls, deep-voiced or shrill. Steller’s Jays, stellar in their blue and black, Goldfinches, and occasional Mountain Bluebirds. Once we had an African Grey Parrot in the fir trees. We tried to lure it onto our deck with offerings of pretzels and cheese, but it had other engagements more attractive.

One rainy afternoon, a splendid Sparrow Hawk, or American Kestrel came to rest for a while on our deck railing. We went berserk trying to get the camera in position before he flew away. As it turned out, the pretty little hawk was content to remain where he was for several minutes. Here he is, posed in what I consider a miracle of cooperation.

And then, as if to make himself as extraordinary as possible, he turned around and gave us the other view:

The Sparrow Hawk is Falco sparverius.

 

A Battle of Wills

A picture is worth oh-so many words. Let me share one that brings glad tidings.

This little ewe lamb, having her breakfast, is really good news. She had a shaky start two days ago. Her mother, in a first-time birth, seemed to take one look at the lamb and think, “What the hell is that?” and “Get it away from me!” So for a day and a half, we pushed mom up against the wall, held her leg up, and made clearance for the lamb to suckle. After the first 4 times, the ewe had figured out what was going to happen, and held her own leg out of the way, but wasn’t much inclined to let the lamb feed without the wall-pushing part. A mother’s horns can throw a newborn a fair distance! But lambs are resilient, and determined as well. Between us all, we seem to have convinced Dottie to put up with this infant business. Let me tell you all how pleased I am not to contemplate bottle feeding her lamb for her!

Here is the lamb on her first outing from the lambing shed, on Sunday afternoon. First Day afternoon.

With a lot of white in her pattern, she sort of makes up for the dark one from last week. If we could average them, we’d have a perfect Jacob sheep!

The Crop

The hoped-for result of all this getting up in the night and checking on the sheep is, of course, healthy lambs. Here’s one stepping out on her first day in the real world. She’s 2 days old here. That’s her mom, warning me this is her lamb.

This one is pretty dark for an ideal Jacob sheep. We like them to have black spots on a white ground better than this overall big splash. The “knee patches” are good, and little black feet, and the eye patches, and her wool is of a nice texture. Her nose is dark but her upper lips are white, which is kind of funny. Like a milk mustache.

Here’s another :

They pose so pretty! We hope that halo is baby fuzz, that will go away. It usually does.

Surveillance

One year we tried spying on the expecting ewes by video. Richard installed a camera with a wireless transmitter that sent its signal right to our TV in the livingroom. Wow. No hauling yourself off to the sheepfold in the middle of the night.

This was a brilliant use of technology! Or, it would have been but that the sheep seemed to know where the camera’s blind spots were. If they were going to do something important, they chose to do it in the corners not revealed. It turns out you just have to go down there and look. Just get out from under the covers, slip into your bathrobe and mud boots, and go down there.

Clepsydra

This is a water clock.

Yes, it is.

A water clock, or clepsydra [KLEP-si-druh], is an ancient means of keeping time, ancient enough we will probably not know its origins. A clepsydra works by the steady descent of water from a higher basin to a lower one. Drip, drip, drip. One basin empties, the other fills. Even now, in our digital age of vibrating quartz crystals and resonating cesium atoms, a clepsydra is perfectly good for the occasion when you don’t care so much what time it is as how much time has passed.

So when would you use such a clock?

In lambing season, my friends.

The thing is, a shepherd feels a certain obligation to check on the girls regularly during the night. But you can’t stay up all night waiting for lambs. It’s tough on bed partners to have the alarm going off every two or three hours during sleep time and, after all, only one shepherd has to get up to go out and look for little strangers in the sheepfold. After our first lambing season, in which we slept surrounded by alarm clocks, I came up with a better method. The gentle, reliable water clock has never failed me.

In this case, the drinking glass is the upper basin of the clock. I am the lower one. A full glass of water taken before hitting the mattress, and sleep comes easily. Two hours later, I am up again. I check the sheep, reset the water clock, and go back to bed. It still means getting up in the night. But there are no alarms ringing, no jolting awake in the wee hours, no grumpy partner muttering in disturbed dreams.

I recommend the ancient clepsydra for dependable timekeeping.

More on Mules

Aristotle, it seems, was troubled by mules. Here he is, explaining things to his students at the Lyceum. Maybe he was telling them how it is that a mule cannot be.

In his On the Generation of Animals he wrote at some length in speculation on the mystery of the mule. English has a nice double meaning to the word “contrary,” which applies straight-on to the offspring of cross-mated horses and asses. Aristotle tried to work out the “contrary nature” of the mule. The difficulty for him was not that a mule is contrary, which it certainly is, but the fact that, being generated by a horse and an ass, yet being neither one, it is contrary to nature. [21st Century note: The offspring of a mare horse and an stallion ass is a mule; the progeny of a mare ass and a stallion horse is called a hinny. Mules are by far more common than hinnies, though it can be difficult to tell a hinny just by looking.]

It wasn’t only an interesting puzzle for Aristotle. It went to his philosophy of being, in which animals of every kind have an essential nature. Their nature is passed on to their offspring. Dogs produce dogs, lions lions, horses horses, and asses asses. But, oh dear, horses mated to asses produce these odd things that, in their turn, produce nothing at all. [21st Century note: A few reported cases of hinny reproduction exist. They all seem to have something unverified about them. It may be that an occasional mating has produced a second generation hybrid foal, but I am not going to think about what you would call it!]

Aristotle considered several possible explanations for the existence of mules, from the density of the combined seeds of horses and asses, to the relative temperatures of horses (warm) and asses (cold), to the opinion that

the genital passages of mules are spoiled in the mother’s uterus because the animals, from the first, are not produced from parents of the same kind.

Aristotle did not resolve his concern about whether, or how, mules are among us. He could not have imagined the truth. Equus caballus, the horse, has 64 chromosomes; Equus asinus, the ass or donkey, has 62. The mule and hinny come out with 63 (no wonder mules are odd!). Any deviation from the expected chromosome count results in an incomplete, or imperfect, organism. The mule is sterile because it doesn’t match the map for a complete animal.

Please don’t try to explain this to William. He views himself as perfectly complete.

Ears

We have a wondrous creature on the farm. His name is William. When he arrived a few years ago, his name was “Willy,” but he has far too much dignity for that.

Here is a portrait of William.

Hmm. Well, one of the problems with a mule is his curious nature. Try to take a picture of him and he will either come see what you’re doing, or, in another mood, will assert a mule’s most salient characteristic: attitude.

Here he is with attitude:

He’s been rolling to help shed out his winter coat, and his roll place is muddy from the rains, so he is especially lovely right now. How you can look like that and still exude superiority is a mule gift. How do I know he’s not just facing the other way? Because his ears are in their “This is what I think of your camera” position. Also, he slowly and elegantly passed gas during the comment period.

Here is another ear thing:

That may be half “yes” and half “no.” Sometimes it’s hard to be sure. Mules are greatly about ears.

Ah. Finally he made nice for a moment:

He still has on the old brown coat with the hairs and mud on it, but he’s looking kindly. Behind the tree on the right you can see Yellowcat departing the scene.

One more statement:

That’s his dinnerware. I suppose he doesn’t like the pattern.

Camassia Natural Area

Yesterday, on a dash to town for sacks of feed, I took a moment to detour into West Linn and park beside the Nature Conservancy’s Camassia Natural Area. This 26-acre patch of woodland, wetland, and grassland tucked around exposed granite boulders lies right among the neighborhood streets of West Linn. The Nature Conservancy has purchased the parcel, where several rare or endangered NW plants make their homes. The preserve takes its name from the common camas plant . This is the little bulb, Camassia quamash, beneath a glorious blue bloom that was a substantial part of the diet of northwestern natives.

 

(Linguistic note: the name Camassia quamash is a nice combination of English and native locution. Both parts of the binomial are the same word transcribed according to the best inclinations of differing ears. On 20 September, 1805, William Clark made this entry in the journals of the expedition of the Corps of Discovery:

…[The Pierced Noses] gave us a Small piece of Buffalow meat, Some dried Salmon beries & roots… Some round and much like an onion which they call quamash.

From this record of the word “quamash” comes the English Camas, and from that the Latin genus name Camassia.)

It’s still a little early for the grand bloom of the camas plants, but I was lucky. The lowest elevation meadow is just entering camas bloom. About 100 feet added elevation and the plants are still mostly grassy leaves hidden among the grassy grasses.

The Natural Area is a study in elevation change. It’s a small piece, really, but you start in woodland, progress through soggy wetland, and emerge onto an open bluff studded with erratic granite boulders imported from Canada by the Bretz floods. And here among the exposed little plants you will find the blue camas.

(Culinary note: Camassia quamash is sometimes called “black camas.” Preparation of camas bulb by steaming requires long cooking, originally in a pit. As the starch in the bulb converts to digestible fructose, it changes color, becoming black. Warning: the toxic bulb of Zigadenus sp., also known as Death Camas, grows in many of the same areas as Camassia, and is difficult to distinguish except when the plants are in bloom. Experimental harvesting of camas for table use is not recommended.)

I was fortunate in another siting. Along the path to the camas meadow, I passed a clump of rare white fawn lily, Erythronium albidum.

Because these nod toward the ground, you have to stand on your head to get a photo inside the flower. Or cheat and turn its face up to the sun. I opted to stand on my head. This is the slug’s-eye view of the fawn lily.

For information on the Camassia Natural Area, follow this link (long one: paste if you have to):

http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/states/oregon /preserves/art6795.html

For information on The Nature Conservancy, go to: http://www.nature.org

Renewal

Easter Greetings to you all.

I confess, I find these peculiar sheep a little disturbing. They look like they are wearing sheep suits for their frolic. But like my Jacobs, they have their tails undocked. I’m not sure what the date is on this card. It has a Victorian look to me, but I am not well-schooled in postal card dating.

The symbolism of the eggs is easy, though this business of having sheep come from eggs is odd. Mine do not hatch from eggs. Note the chocolate dripping from the porch roof. At least, I hope it’s chocolate. Let us not imagine any springtime symbolism in the shape of the dollops hanging from the eaves.

Here is another:

Altogether more innocent and successful as a light-hearted, secular Easter greeting card. Eggs again, but the sheep are not inhabiting them. Mother, infant, lambs, eggs… Maybe Edwardian, judging from the clothing?

This one has a date of 1908:

Again with the sheep and the eggs! (Note once more the undocked tail on the sheep. This goes to show cutting off tails is a modern practice. I do not subscribe to it. Jacob sheep are smart enough to lift their tails. It may be that these early 20th Century sheep were also so wise.) In addition, we have some pussy willows here, with their egg-shaped catkins. Willows must be among the most ready to reproduce of all early spring plants. Willow sticks are usefully added to the glass of water where you hope to root cuttings of other plants. They are so eager to grow they will share their pullulating hormones.

Well, no eggs in this 1910 card:

… though the shape of that brolly is suggestive of an eggshell. We have the pussy willows and the lamb again. And a dachshund. I do not know the symbolism of dachshunds. But, see, no one chops off their tails! The child seems to suffer from some anatomical irregularity. I can’t figure out the relationship of her hips to the direction her feet point. It seems like the artist might have changed his mind partway through.

In this 1907 view we have something new (along with eggs and pussy willows):

Putting the lamb on a pedestal… a lambpost? It looks like it doesn’t want to be there, this lamb.

Now, if any of us doubt the message of Easter, let us state it clearly: the world is reborn! It makes no difference what your religious beliefs are: the cycle is coming round once more, life is waking from winter slumber, and is getting fertile. All these images of baby animals, eggs and willow switches, and all the confused biological relationships point without error to this most awakening time of year.

Happy Easter to you all.