every day is a good day
Ruby’s two month old chick isn’t ready to leave her mother’s side. Ruby is done being a parent, but she doesn’t mind when her chick tags along. When Ruby is off on her own, the little chick panics and goes running around, peeping while she looks for her mother. The chick doesn’t feel secure being on her own yet.
But when she is with Ruby, the chick loves racing through the grass by her mother’s side.
Some special things came out of the garden today: stinging nettles and shirohana-mame (white flower beans). The shirohana bean pods are starting to turn yellow, which means they can be harvested. I picked a handful to see how they turned out this year. The main harvest is still a few weeks away.
The recent cool spell has invigorated the stinging nettles and they are sending out new shoots.
The huge white beans are spectacular. I wish I had some extra to sell, but not this year. Don’t even ask. Most of this year’s harvest is for planting next year, the rest for our dinner table. Next fall I should be able to offer organic shirohana-mame. Try even looking for regular fresh shirohana-mame, let alone organically grown ones. Let me know if you find any place to buy them.
And what is that above? The latest art installation at the Gugenheim? No, the stems of stinging nettles after the leaves have been cut off.
And below is a bowl of freshly cooked shirohana-mame. Are we the only ones in the whole country eating a bowl of just picked shirohana-mame for lunch today? It’s possible.
Chickens spend much of their day hunting. I was turning and adding leaves to a compost pile. Lucky spotted me working and came running, her chicks in tow. She knows that when I’m turning a compost pile, the hunting will be easy.
In the short clip below, you can see Lucky plucking earthworms out of the ground and dropping them for her chicks to devour. You can also hear the staccato clucking sound mother hens make when they’ve found something good to eat. The louder the sound, the more delicious the food. Watch how excited Lucky gets when she finds a big worm. Chicks seem to know from birth what this sound means.
[wpvideo UyIfaOL0]
How is the meaning of a sound transferred via instinct? If we could figure this out, maybe we could change our DNA so that we could encode hundreds of languages so that children would be born knowing English, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Swahili, any language you could imagine. Entire encyclopedias inscribed in our genetic code so that as our brains develop all this knowledge would be at the tip of our tongues.
We woke up to steady rains. The long, cool, rainy season has begun. On a cool, wet morning, Lucky takes her chicks into the protected chicken yard for some breakfast. Watching the devotion a mother hen has for her chicks is inspiring. Until the chicks are big enough to be on their own, she will watch over them continuously. Where does this love and devotion come from? It is instinctual as hens raised without a mother, and having no training on how to raise a brood, can make excellent mothers. How does such complex behavior get passed through DNA and then expressed? How does a hen know to sit 21 or more days on her eggs to make them hatch? How does she know how to talk to them, how are the chicks able to understand her words? I’ve yet to find a scientific article that explains how such complex behavior gets passed down from generation to generation.
Having done a fair amount of programming in the past, I’m inclined to imagine that there are sequences of DNA where these instructions are encoded. But biology is infinitely more complex than software. It’s no doubt much more complicated than that.
It’s just a matter of time before the most momentous event of the year happens – the arrival of the swans. We divide the year into four seasons, spring, summer, fall, and winter. But actually, the year in this valley can be divided into two main seasons. The season when the swans are here, and the season when they are gone. While the swans are here, it is cool and wet. When the swans are gone, it is warm and dry. Around November 1, they will start flying in by the thousands from their summer grounds in Alaska and Siberia.
It makes you wonder which they prefer. Would they rather spend the year in the treeless tundra? Or do they prefer this forested land?
When they waddle through the fields rooting for food, they look like herds of sheep. When they fly above, sometimes so close you can almost jump and touch them, they take your breath away.
In the meantime, while I wait for the swans to fly in from the ocean, a cool, rainy day is a good day to bake a pie. Peeling and cutting apple, I end up with a bowlful of peels and trimmings. Everything that doesn’t end up in the pie is something the chickens relish. As soon as I toss the apple peelings and trimmings outdoors, Lucky and her chicks are having their desert. Ours comes out of the oven about an hour later.
A mother hen is on the go all day long. Lucky has her wings full. Her chicks will be a month old on Monday. There’s no time to look at colorful fall leaves and meditate. The only time she rests is when her chicks want a nap, and by the time they get to be a month old, they don’t want to nap as much as they did when they were little babies.
Month old chicks like to venture out on their own, and keeping up with her brood is a daunting task. Some hens are done raising chicks by the time they are a month old. Others stay on duty for a full two months or more. Lucky has been an exceptional mother. It will be interesting how long she will raise her chicks.
