Frodo Has Left the Building

You can see just by looking that this White Polish Crested Rooster believes himself to be a rockstar. Even when it’s been raining on him all day, he doesn’t look like a bedraggled bird. He looks like a guy shooting a music video in the Islands.

Frodo (so called by the grandchildren of his original owners because of his aFRO hairDO) came to us as a very nice adolescent a few months back. Unfortunately, once he hit the ugly testosterone stage, he took over the flock and in addition to fighting with the older Auracana roosters and the little English cockerels, he somehow induced the Auracanas to fight among themselves. Now my oldest and most revered rooster, Paco Negro, He Of The Crippled Toes, he who survived illness as a chick and overcame, he who ruled in benevolence and equanimity all these years, is standing down in the corner of the pasture, totally bedraggled and terrified to come back up the barnyard where the rest of the flock is. Now the harmony of the flock has been shattered. Now the carefully laid out hierarchy of bird status, AKA the pecking order, which all chickens can remember in exact detail up to a flock of 30 birds, is all disarranged.

Now I am pissed.

So I got on the phone to the Extension and fifteen minutes and three phone calls later, Frodo has a date to be picked up in the parking lot of the hospital tomorrow morning to be carried off to the eastern part of the county to become part of a nice high school girl’s Polish Crested 4-H project. That kind of efficacy, my friends, is the hand of God.

So while Mr. Wonderful goes off to stand stud to a bunch of sparkling white babes, the younger Auracana has 10 days to return to good behavior. If he doesn’t, we’re taking a ride to the Poultry Auction at the fairgrounds on the 22nd. Now Playing: Bye-Bye, Birdie.

A Sad State of Affairs

I am sorry to tell you that Dolly Madison is a murderer. I am also sorry to tell you that, as predicted, Dolly hurt herself leaping from the barn one day and for two weeks could only stand up with assistance. That’s right, I went out every morning and hoisted the turkey to standing position, and then I went out in the afternoon and lifted her again. I understand what this says about me. I understand what my life has become.

The sheep would not let Dolly rest in their side of the barn, even though they don’t use it that often at this time of year because they would rather be outdoors, lying under the hemlocks. So I put Dolly in a pen closer to the house, with a tarp over it to keep the rain off. For company—and since it’s time to incarcerate the English hens and practice birth control for them so we don’t end up with even more English chickens—I put a handful of English in the pen too. They may well be the same ones that lived in the bunny crate with her last spring when they were all infants. I also added another hen—Hickety Pickety, a black yearling who liked to lay her eggs in the hay feeder in the sheep room, and whom I found one day hanging headfirst down out of the feeder with a paralyzed leg. At first I thought it was broken, but it failed to become useable again. It simply continued to stick straight out in front of her. But Hickety Pickety got around remarkably well on her wings and good leg, and it was obvious she wanted to live, so I let her.

After two weeks of physical therapy in the Paraplegic Poultry Ward, Dolly was able to stand on her own. The timing was good because I had to go away for two nights on business, and John was spared the task of standing the turkey up each day. The second morning I was away, he called to say that Dolly had gotten up on her own and had used her regained powers of health and locomotion to walk over and stand on Hickety Pickety, who had come down out of the coop for breakfast. Then she stepped off, took the hen by the neck and shook her hard. John return the poor hen to the coop, where she died overnight of her injuries.

Today it is almost a week later. John and I brought down a calf hutch his mother kindly let us borrow from her farm, and I cut out the doorsill so Dolly can walk in. She did not, of course. But last night I made her walk in, so she gets the idea of sleeping in there out of the rain. Unfortunately, as of yesterday, she needs help once again to stand up. I am no longer convinced that her problems are injury-based. I think she may just be engineered to have been eaten last November, not to be still walking around. Her suspension is not adequate to the tasks required of it at one year of age. So now this irritating bird, who killed another animal with a disability almost identical to her own, is suffering the legacy of her own genetics. And eventually I may have to decide what to do about it.

Chez Dolly, Or The Problem of Turkey Housing

We are having serious issues of turkey mechanics. Dolly Madison cannot get in or out of the hen room of the barn by herself because the door jamb is about three feet off the ground, she weighs maybe 45 pounds, and her wings are about 6 inches long and molting anyway. The barn foundation is concrete, with nowhere to mount a ramp. Dolly has grown accustomed to being put in and taken out each day, which involves me bracing myself, lifting with my legs and giving her a boost onto the jamb, where she poises herself and then jumps to the other side. Going into the barn, this is fine because the drop is only 18 inches. Going out, she invariably lands on her feet in the barnyard and then flips ars over tea kettle from the sheer momentum of her giant bulk striking the earth. It’s only a matter of time before she gets hurt.

I was hoping Dolly could sleep in the sheep room (next door to the hen room) because it is at ground level. But the sheep harass her and will not let her stay in there. I tried the old dog house, which is just the right size for a turkey shed, but she’s a little too wide for the doorway. Next I am going to call my mother in law and ask whether they have any calf hutches that are so banged up they can’t keep calves in them any more. If we can keep the sheep out, that might work—sheep are pushier than you might think. Otherwise I am going to have to build a mini-shed-roof off the side of the barn above the spot where Dolly sleeps on the ground when I don’t put her in the barn manually, just codifying what is already the de facto turkey bed.

Farming is just an endless series of making things up and trying to string together a solution out of a pile of assorted doohickeys lying around the yard. If I didn’t have the family’s native engineering impulse, I would hate it.

Dead But Not Endangered

I am a close watcher of roadkills as I make my appointed rounds, and I have often considered creating a roadkill calendar, from the first dead skunks of February through the deceased rabbits of early March and the August gray squirrels driven out of their minds, I suppose, by thirst. This year I noticed a lot of dead minks in the second half of March, and one day, not too far from here, I saw a really big one that was lighter in color than usual. Could it be, I wondered, a dead pine marten instead? I had heard that someone had seen one last fall during deer season. It was worth turning around and going back to find out.

My stiff little friend was in great condition, so I put him in the car and went home. The mammal guidebook said minks had a white patch on their chin, but pine martens had one on the chin and another on the chest. The deceased did indeed have a chest patch, so I measured him and photographed him and left a message for the neighborhood naturalist.

[Game wardens and other DCNR types will please note that I never even considered adding this critter to my earthly possessions. I was just looking him up.]

It turns out that pine martens were extirpated in Pennsylvania more than a century ago, so for this to be a pine marten would have been rare indeed, and I would have gotten my name in the Fish & Game News. But it was not a pine marten. The naturalist and our other neighbor, a retired wildlife biologist from a part of Canada where they still have living pine martens, both said it was a mink, and that the chest patch was just a kind of extended chin patch, not nearly yellow enough or glorious enough to be a real chest patch.

So our pretty fellow is just a dead mink like all the others. In a way, I feel better about that because if it were the only pine marten in Pennsylvania for a hundred years and it were dead in my freezer, that would be pretty sad.

Lilac for a Day

My husband has a thing for certain breeds of livestock, including Highland cattle and Boer goats. So when he phoned from band practice last week and asked if it was OK to bring home this little practically orphaned Boer goat kid that we were only keeping for six weeks and not a day more, so help him God, I figured it was time to let him work through the goat thing. (We worked through the cattle thing a couple years ago by way of the late lamented Herkie.) So Thursday after school, John and St. John went to get Lilac.

Lilac’s problem is not that her mother is dead. It’s that her mother prefers Lilac’s twin brother, and won’t stand for Lilac to nurse. In fact, she was seen yanking Lilac’s tail when she tried to make the effort. My longsuffering friend Pete, of Clodhopper Farm, solves this problem by holding the mama goat’s lip in a twitch while Lilac nurses. Lilac was three weeks old when we got her, so obviously the plan was working, though she was smaller than the other kids.

I went online and poked around for advice on what to feed goat babies. John stopped at his mother’s barn for some raw cow milk and calf panels, and at the feed store for a lamb bottle. Then he and St. John went out and came home with the cutest little goat you ever saw. She was springy and adorable and curious about everything. And if you went out of her sight, she went off like all the car alarms in New Jersey. Also, no amount of effort would persuade her to drink milk out of the bottle. Then John announced that he was going out to band practice. Because they had a gig tomorrow night. When he would not be available to care for the car alarm again. All I can say is “Good thing my blood pressure is not naturally high.” Because this would have been an excellent way to precipitate a major coronary event.

I watched Lilac for a few hours and tried a hundred more times to get her to eat. There is not much more frustrating to the cooking mother than an infant animal that will not eat. I sat down finally on the floor beside the wood stove, and Lilac came over and after tentatively sniffing and even licking at the stove a bit, folded up her knobbly knees and laid down beside it, apparently finding its warmth very like goat maternity. And at least the wood stove was not yanking her tail. I didn’t want to sleep on the kitchen floor, so I removed Lilac to a dog crate in my bedroom, where she slept quietly all night, with just one reassurance that we were still there in the dark with her.

But the next morning I sent her back to the farm. Because a little milk from an unwilling mother is better than no milk from the willingest foster family. St. John was sad; he and Lilac shared a common interest in jumping off stuff. I don’t know if 14 hours was enough to resolve the Boer thing for my husband, but I think I helped him complete the emotional arc when I offered to murder him with a skillet the next time he brought home a live animal. So now we are back to just dogs, cats, sheep, chickens and Dolly Madison, of whom more next time.

P.S. The maple run was practically non-existent this year, and coincided with rising creeks and a bunch of work gigs. So no syrup for us. We will buy some from the neighbors for whom the maple run is the work gig.

Ready to Run

Just as I was steeling myself for the New Ice Age and the permanent descent of winter upon us (and never Christmas), I have started to see some early signs of impending spring. We’re not talking anything as out there as crocuses or anything, but the house has sprouted some very impressive icicles, some of which are almost as long as me (not a big wow by human standards, but pretty big for an icicle), and although just a few days ago I poo-pooed my husband’s tentative plan to tap the sugar maples this weekend, now I can practically feel the sap starting to rise in the trees around me. That’s what 2 degrees Fahrenheit can do for you.

Furthermore, the big male skunks are out getting hit on the road at night (not something that would normally gladden anybody’s heart, but an indisputable sign of spring, because they’re out looking for mates after hibernating since Thanksgiving); my family in southern Pennsylvania and my friend in southeastern Vermont have both seen large traveling flocks of robins (my uncle says they left D.C. early this year to avoid the blizzard); I saw what appeared to be 2 hawks riding a thermal today (a thermal!); and I also saw three wayward Canada geese noodling around near some open water a couple dozen miles south of here, where it is a good deal warmer.

Obviously none of these things is going to cause a stampede of Easter rabbits and daffodils. But the evidence is accumulating, and apparently the sap is also rising in me, because I feel a sudden urgency to order seeds and march up to the sugarhouse to make sure they are no bears under it in advance of next weekend’s tapping session. I am taking charge of sugaring this year, because John is too busy, so you can expect to hear more of that shortly.

Adventure Thrust Upon Us

I have always had an interest in wood-fire cooking, and have always intended to learn about it some day. The previous occupant of our dear cottage, a woman of considerable oomph, had spent several years in the late '30s doing everything the hard way in the wilderness of British Columbia, and she left us some interesting cooking tools. I have even fantasized more than once about dragging the original wood cookstove back out of the barn and into the kitchen. But I have never been quite interested enough in wood-fire cooking to, like, do anything about it. Fortunately, yet another opportunity to learn and grow and fulfill my every ambition has been thrust upon me.

The gas range is dead. Well, it may not be dead, but it’s not feeling very well, and nobody is coming out to fix it until Monday, if it is fixable and the guy happens to have the right part in the van. So for a few days, it looked like microwave tea for me, and that is a level of culinary depravity I was not going to take lying down. It struck me that my mother on numerous occasions has said that the best tea she ever had came from the kettle that was permanently installed on her grandmother’s coal stove, because the water was still boiling when it hit the tea bag in your cup. So I tried putting our kettle on the wood stove, and by God, it made the water hot. So then I tried flipping some corn tortillas and frying my eggs in a little skillet on the stovetop, and by God, they cooked and were good. And then I remembered that there was a cast iron griddle in the cellar (shaped suspiciously like the work surface of the cookstove in the barn, come to think of it), so I brought it up and am going to try cooking naan on it this afternoon. And why not soup, right? So back to the cellar for some of the onions left over from the wedding, onions so immense that they can never be used at one time, and so have never been chosen for use. But what better onion to sweat down for French onion soup, am I right? So now I can smell the onions from the other end of the house and I am chainsmoking cups of the most wonderful green tea, and if the naan works out, a curry would be another good candidate for the cast iron pot.

Possibly the Complete Disaster of the gas leak and broken stove, which evoked yesterday’s anthem, tentatively entitled “Even As Men Wracked Upon A Sand,” has led to a culinary revolution at Wren Cottage. I recall a field trip my son’s class took to a canal, which involved traveling some distance on the canal boat at about 2 miles an hour. I remarked to one of the other moms that this seemed like a pretty good pace at which to live. She was aghast, but I think I just found the right way to cook dinner on the very slow-moving canal boat of my life.