It has been cold here. Not Chicago cold - we don’t have the humidity for that. But, it’s in the teens or twenties most mornings when we start the chores.
There is frost on the tops of the fences, looking like diamonds in the sunrise:
All the goats’ water buckets are frozen solid. When we get to each pen, we have to remove the frozen buckets, setting them near a tree, where they’ll thaw by afternoon - and then we'll dump them at the root line, watering the trees. We give the goats fresh buckets of water from the heated pumps outside each pen. What a gift those pumps are! Only one of them doesn’t work in the cold. I have to carry water for the milkers from the back pen. But that just makes me appreciate the other pumps. I’m so grateful we don’t have to carry water all the way from the house twice a day!
But, isn’t it interesting how the water freezes? I looked up the crystallization process of freezing water - thinking that that was unusual. It isn’t. I guess I haven’t paid enough attention to ice in my life. But, the stunning thing about freezing water, which is different than most other substances, is that water loses density as it freezes, which is why water freezes from the top down. Also why ice floats. Most other substances gain density as they freeze, causing them to freeze from the bottom up.
You know how we always say, “Hot air rises”. It’s because the cooler the air, the greater the density. It’s why hot air ballooning works. But water is the opposite, and if it weren’t, life on this planet would be entirely different. Lakes with frozen surfaces, but liquid interiors where fish still swim, would be impossible. Think about that the next time you’re dropping ice cubes into your soft drink. Or driving your car out to your ice shack to fish.
In the afternoons, I take scratch to the chickens. This is one of my favorite parts of the day. I fill a bucket, beginning with some commercial scratch that my cousin buys - which looks like a bunch of different kinds of seeds and grains. Cracked corn, barley, oats, wheat, sunflower seeds, milo and millet. To that I add all the scraps from our last 24 hours of food preparation. Apple cores, slightly funky tomatoes, carrot peels. And then I toss in some celery, and some cheese. Sometimes we use big bags of grated cheese from the store, and sometimes we use chevre that Jan makes from our goats’ milk.
I take the bucket to the chicken yard. When I first moved here, the chickens all ran away from me. It takes a long time for birds to like humans. They’re not like mammals. Mammals are pretty trusting of other mammals. But, after a year here, the chickens no longer run from me. In fact, at 3:00 (which is when I normally take them their scratch) they are usually gathered at the gate to their yard in a big feathery clump. I have to open the gate gently - pushing the hens back slowly so that I can squeeze through. They swarm around my feet and I have to throw handfuls of scratch out over their heads. They chase it, and then I can take a step forward without stepping on a chicken.
When I've thrown all the scratch into the yard, I go inside the coops in search of eggs. I put the eggs in the bucket that has just been emptied of scratch, and clean up the chickens' poop. They excel at filling their coops with poop every day.
Yesterday, when I went to the chicken yard for our daily scratch experience, there was a bird sitting on the peak of their coop. (Here’s a photo of their coop - but after the bird was gone).
I was amazed to think that there might be a chicken on top of the coop, because I didn’t think any of them flew well enough to get up there. Then the bird jumped down into the yard, and I realized it was a roadrunner! It looked around, and then ran. But, I was humming the theme to “A Fiddler on the Roof” for the rest of the afternoon.
I don’t know why we think of roadrunners as gentle beings. It’s got to be the Warner Brothers’ cartoons. Real roadrunners eat rattlesnakes, scorpions, and desert centipedes. Maybe we’re just grateful, and that’s why the cartoon portrayed roadrunners in such a positive light. By the way, roadrunners’ top running speed is 20 mph, and coyotes’ top speed is 40 mph. Accuracy was apparently not the Warner Brothers’ priority.
In any case, Jet is still the guardian of the chickens - here she is, having taken all the new hens on as part of her responsibilities: (The chickens are pecking at the scratch I've just thrown)
This week my cousin missed a couple of goat feedings. Two in a row. It’s lovely feeding everyone together. Generally that process is filled with a lot of hilarity as we laugh over the goats’ antics, or complain about them trying to knock us over. But it’s also fine when I have to feed them by myself. When I do it by myself I dawdle more, sometimes kissing most of the goats on the nose, or on their furry lips.
Well, it’s fine for me if Jan misses a feeding, but it turned out it was not fine for all the goats. When she came out to feed the goats after having missed just two feedings, Jordan acted as if he was seeing a long-lost friend. He is our senior buck, the father of most of the kids who will be arriving this spring. Below is a photo of him, but this photo is misleading. He looks like a big doofus in this photo, because he’s sitting in his feed tub. All the goats sit in their feed tubs. I don’t know why. It’s like all cats get in cardboard boxes. But, Jordan is the goat with the most gravitas of any goat on our farm, and this photo belies his great dignity. When he was overjoyed to see Jan it was a beautiful thing.
