Happy Thanksgiving!
This is my anniversary post! I came to live on my cousin’s goat farm a year ago this week! I have learned so much in a year!
Today I am in Colorado, picking up a goat named Harper. We need a new buck, in order to maintain good genetic diversity on our farm. And, I need to pick Harper up while he’s still young enough to move. I’ll write all it next week. But this week, I’m going to include my favorite items from old blogs - mainly things that I think most people missed.
From the beginning of last December (my third post):
Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve been hearing a strange sound. It’s a kind of whirring, trilling sound. Sometimes it’s loud, sometimes not, and sometimes the sound vanishes. The other day, I finally asked my cousin what on earth the sound was. She said it was the sandhill cranes!
The sandhill cranes winter here! They come to the Middle Rio Grande Valley for its high quality water. When we drive past corn fields here, the fields are just loaded with snacking cranes.
These cranes may be the world’s oldest birds. There are sandhill crane fossils in Nebraska that are 10 million years old. The Smithsonian says the sandhill cranes have been on this planet since the Eocene Era, which ended 34 million years ago. The opossum is one of the few other animals that lived back then that still looks the same today.
This may explain why cranes look like some sort of crazy dinosaur.
Individual cranes live to be 20 years old, and they mate for life, migrating with their extended families. They are four feet tall!
They’re usually here in New Mexico by Halloween, and they leave at the end of February. They head up to Nebraska, but they only stay there until April. From there they head further north.
Now, whenever I hear their sound, I look up, and there are cranes flying over! Yesterday, when I was coming home from yoga class, there were a bunch of cranes running out into the middle of the road! I just stopped the car where I was to photograph this guy.
Jan says that they can’t land on our farm. Our farm is only 2 acres, and has a lot of small pens. Well, she says they could land here, but then they’d be stuck, because they wouldn’t be able to fly away again. The cranes need a lot of room for take-off. Today, when I was coming home from the grocery store, I saw a group of cranes trying to take off. I saw what she meant. It’s like watching an over-loaded bomber from World War II trying to climb into the sky. They need a long runway, and then they struggle into the air - watching them you just want to give them a boost - it seems as if they’re going to fail and fall back to earth. They don’t get high enough to clear the fences for maybe two or three minutes! And then they’re soaring. Their weird dinosaur bodies with their flashy red splotch on their heads suddenly turn graceful.
From last November (my second post):
Look at this bell:
I found it on the dining room table. It’s so pretty - my kind of bell. I asked my cousin what it was for, and she said, “Oh, that’s for wethers.”
Jan explained that you can put that beautiful bell on a wether and he’ll lead the does (the female goats) off to graze someplace, and at the end of the day he’ll lead them back. He’ll even break up squabbles between the does. If you have several wethers, the wethers themselves will decide who’s the leader, and he’s the one you put the bell on. And the bell lets you know where the flock is, even if they’re out of sight.
This lead goat, because he gets the bell, is called the bellwether. WHOA! My brain exploded! Who knew that’s where we got that word! I was in a convulsion of delight! That word comes to us from Middle English. When Jan explained this to me, it was like a John Ciardi moment in our own dining room.
And, our final “clip” is from January 3rd. More people have read this one, but I include it because I feel this nearly every day here. I am so grateful to have this place to walk out into every day:
On a completely different topic, another thing I want to share is the sound of our farm. How did I live an entire lifetime without these sounds? In the morning, we walk out with the hay cart and a bucket of alfalfa pellets to feed the goats. The sun has just come up, and the air is really cold - we’re swaddled in many layers - we move like we did back when we were five years old and our moms put us in snow pants, with mittens clipped to a string that ran up our sleeve, across our backs, and down the other sleeve so that we wouldn’t lose them, and boots with newspaper stuffed in the the toes because they were hand-me-downs and not yet quite the right size. We lumber towards the pens, stiff-legged and mittened, wearing our hats on top of our hoods.
Our neighbor’s rooster is crowing, our other neighbor’s cows are mooing, and all our goats are bleating at the tops of their lungs - each of them trying to stand in the best spot to watch us as we make our way to their pens with their breakfast. Often, the sandhill cranes add in to this, with their whirring noises; and there’s a train in the distance with its long, lonely whistle. I want to weep with the beauty, but don’t want tears freezing on my face.
And, possibly even better than that is the sound of silence after we’ve been to the last pen, and everyone has their head in their feed tubs, contentedly chewing. Goats, the neighbor’s cows, chickens - all grateful for the new day and for their food which appears twice a day no matter whether it’s snowing or scorching, raining or fine.
But, even more moving are the evening sounds. As the sun is setting, the humans are calling their dogs and their children back home, where it’s warm, where there’s dinner, where there’s family. The animals seem to say good night to each other. The chickens head into their coop for the night, and their roosting sounds tumble over each other as we shut the door that will keep them safe and warm until morning.
Do you know the Samuel Barber composition Knoxville: Summer of 1915? It is a setting of a text by James Agee. In some right-brained, emotional way, I feel as if this work really captures those evening sounds. Here’s a recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uq1st54E6Q. I chose this one because you can read the words and the music as it’s sung. The intrusion of the street car music doesn’t last long - stick with it. The part about the family lying on quilts on the grass just knocks me out. It’s how our farm sounds in those moments when day turns into night.
