First Egg!

This is the first egg from the 2014 chicks!  I found it yesterday in one of the nesting boxes in the coop.  

It looks white in the picture, but it's actually a light green/blue.  Our chickens are Ameraucanas.  Their eggs will vary - light green to light blue to olive green.  Egg color is a result of the type of pigment deposited on the egg as it travels the hen's oviduct.  Different breeds of chickens have different types of pigment.

In my experience, an individual hen will lay the same color of egg throughout her life.  With my last batch of hens I could tell which of the three Ameraucanas we had produced which egg.  I have more Ameraucanas this time, thirteen of them, so it might be more difficult to match the hen with the egg.

And in case you are wondering - the yolk and the white of the egg look and taste the same as a white egg (although I think our farm eggs taste a lot better than what we buy in the store).  Only the outside color will vary because of pigment variations.  

Feeding a Chipmunk

We all have our own measure of what makes us happy, the event or events in our lives that give us the ultimate in enjoyment that can’t be topped by any other experience.  My ultimate experiences have most always come under the subject “close encounters with wildlife.”  I have had the pleasure of holding a bat, a scorpion, a baby opossum, and a tarantula.   Since even the thought of those creatures repulse most people, I will share with you my close encounters with chipmunks.

The first chipmunk I ever got to know was named Friendly Chippy.   He lived in Canada, in a hole in the ground.  Friendly Chippy got his name by his enthusiastic willingness to respond to a peanut tapped on a log and being called by his name, “Hey, Friendly Chippy!”  I never knew that chipmunks could gallop before I met Friendly Chippy.  I would say that his gait toward his peanut treat was a more like a bounding gallop, as if his life depended on it.  Friendly Chippy would take the peanut from the human hand, very gently, with his own delicate hands.  Biting away the shell he would stuff the legume center into his cheeks.  If he was in a hurry he’d stuffed the entire peanut in his mouth, shell and all.   I saw him stuff up to three unshelled peanuts in his mouth.  Galloping back to his hole, the goods in his cheeks, he had increased his stash for the long Canadian winter.

The following summer I had the opportunity to again meet with Friendly Chippy. But he had changed his name to Extremely Assertive Chippy, for he had taken on the habit of coming over to the lawn chairs where we, the human peanut providers sat, climbed up our legs and pilfered the peanuts we had in our pockets.  Even though this chipmunk had developed an entitlement mentality over the winter, I still found him to be one of the most delightful creatures I have ever met.

During that trip to Canada I was informed that taming chipmunks is quite easy, and can be done in a day.  Well, I was able to do it in three days and this is how I did it.

Two tree stumps, just a few feet apart served as the chipmunk restaurant.   I placed several peanuts on each stump and left.  The most difficult part of this whole process was to get the chipmunk to find the peanuts in the first place.  The chipmunk needed to initially find the peanuts with no humans around, so I left the area and watched from afar until a chipmunk showed up.   Once the chipmunk found the peanuts, it stuffed the peanuts in its mouth, ran to its burrow and stashed the peanuts in its larder.

I immediately put out a fresh batch of peanuts.  By now, I had noticed that the chipmunks were most active in the morning and evening -- they seemed to take a rest in the middle of the afternoon.  But, this chipmunk did return for more peanuts almost right away.  That’s when I made sure that I was sitting in the vicinity.  That way, I could put out more peanuts whenever the stump was empty, and just as important, the chipmunk would get used to my presence in the feeding area.   I chose a docile activity, reading, to pass the time.  I was reading The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester (a great book).  I will now forever think of chipmunks when I see an Oxford Dictionary.

At the first afternoon’s reading, the chipmunk would squeak and run when he realized that I was sitting in the lawn chair, about 10 feet from the peanuts, reading the book.  But by the middle of the second day, slowly, ever so slowly, I could move about without scaring the chipmunk.  By the end of the second day I could stand up, walk to the tree stumps and replenish the peanuts on one stump, while the chipmunk was gnawing the shells off the peanuts on the other stump.  This, I thought, was important, because now the chipmunk began associating my presence with the peanuts.  The human was nothing to be feared -- the human was the benefactor!

After the chipmunk was enlightened to the fact that I was the Peanut Goddess, it was an easy transition to hand feeding him.  I could now approach him and hand him a peanut.   As I mentioned before, a chipmunk has very delicate hands.  As the chipmunk extended his tiny arms and took the peanut from my fingers with both of his hands, I truly experienced one of the most gratifying experiences in my life.

As fate would have it, I could stay no longer in the wilderness area where I had my cultural exchange with the chipmunk.  I had to leave the next day.   But it was just as well, my new furry friend needed to remember how to live in his real world, and so did I.

New Chicks at the Lilac Ranch - Spring 2014

Some of the white chicks have a red mark on their head to indicate breed.

Chickens at the Lilac Ranch

Early June 2012

On Friday, May 25, Larry surprised me with 25 chicks in our new chicken coop.

They were big enough to go outside for the first time in July.  They needed to be big enough to not slip through the holes in the fence!

July 2012 - First day outside

The Girls 

Heading in for the night

This one is probably a rooster

First egg - October 14, 2012

Last Sunday one of the chickens laid the first egg.  We've had two more since then.

She said, he said

She said, "Why don't you ever compliment me?"

He said, "I don't want you to get a big head."

Sign of Spring

I saw a robin this morning on the way to work.  First one of the season.

Stories That My Grandpa Told Me

Herbert c. 1944

When I was a kid I thought everyone had a grandpa like mine that told stories. I didn’t realize at the time what a gift I’d been given. These are a few stories that my grandpa, Herbert, told me, as I remember them.

He had good stories about his years as a hired hand or working in the field. Once when working on a threshing crew (and having a little coffee), he somehow, on the sly, put baby mice in the coffee of one of his co-threshers. The hapless guy didn’t see the mice in his coffee until he got to the bottom of the cup, and then promptly went behind the granary and horked up his lunch. It never occurred to me to ask Herbert why he had baby mice in the first place.

I heard about his strong friend Rudolph who, on a dare during a card party, carried five 100 pound bags of flour up to the second story of the house. Rudolph had two hundred pound bags balanced on each shoulder, a one hundred pound bag under each arm, and held last one hundred pound bag in his teeth. My grandpa never mentioned it, but I’m sure there was some alcohol involved.

Or one Sunday, when Herbert was a hired-hand at Rudolph’s ---- and a minister and his family from Minneapolis were at Rudolph’s for Sunday dinner --- and the bull got out while grace was being recited.

Well….then there was the one about the man with the monkey tail, who only showed it to people when he’d had too much to drink.

Herbert’s best stories usually involved the natural world, and some freakish, shocking event in it.

One of his most exciting stories, especially when I was very young, was the one about his sister, Pearl, who was a telephone operator in White Rock. If it looked like a stormy night was approaching Herbert (who was probably pre-teen) would walk to White Rock and stay with Pearl so she wouldn’t be alone during the storm. If lightening hit any of the phone lines during the storm, lightening and fire would shoot from the phone switchboard in White Rock and flip on all the switches. Pearl would take a rolled up newspaper and flip the hot switches off.

And there was the story of Schubert. Schubert was leading a bull by a chain in the barnyard, and lightening hit Schubert, the bull or the chain. They both died on the spot.

I heard a lot about the hot summer of 1936. One morning when Herbert was working for Gertie and Sig, his sister and brother-in-law, he woke up to Gertie yelling at him from downstairs to get up because a big storm was brewing. Before he got out of bed he realized the blankets on the bed were floating up and down, raising and lowering on the bed. A tornado hovering over the house (that eventually touched down in Wisconsin) was his explanation for that phenomenon.

Snakes and other creatures played a big role in his stories. I believed in hoop-snakes for years. There was also the story about Cousin Ferdie’s account of a snake that was so huge, that it’s slithering made the oats in the field swish back and forth. And then there’s the story about the man who awoke to a feeling of movement and churning in his stomach, after taking a nap outside on the grass. This was very disturbing. But his good friend said, “I have an idea. Lie back down and put a bowl of milk by your mouth.” So the man did just that. In a short time a snake, that smelled the milk, emerged from the man’s mouth. The snake had entered the man’s mouth as he slept with his mouth open. And the milk worked well to lure the snake out because snakes like milk. And, oh, yes – snakes will steal milk from cow’s utters while they are grazing in the pasture.

It never questioned any of these stories or “facts” when I was a little girl. I heard them so many times; I knew they all had to be true.

But my all-time favorite Herbert Story is the one about the boy and the new boots.

A young boy got a new pair of boots, or at least they were new for the young boy. Not long after, the boy got mysteriously sick. Even as he got more and more ill, he wanted to keep wearing his new boots because he was so proud of them. Well, the boy eventually died. After he died his boots were removed and a red mark was noticed on his leg. Nothing was thought of the mark, it was probably just where his new boots had rubbed his leg. After the death of the young boy, his younger brother was given the boots to wear. In a short time this boy also got sick. And he also had a red mark on his leg, in the same spot. The parents decided that they needed to inspect the boots. Well, lo and behold, they found a rattlesnake’s fang lodged inside the boot! The poison from the fang had rubbed into the legs of the boys, killing one brother and making the other one ill. The younger brother lived only because they found the rattlesnake’s fang just in the nick of time.

I won’t say that I’ve been affected by all of my grandpa’s stories, but to this day I’m very leery of lightening, and I never put on my shoes before checking them first.