Look at this sky. This is the sky above the back pen. Where Triscuit lives. And those two rescues from goat yoga. The sky here nearly always looks like this. New Mexico truly is the Land of Enchantment.
This week we weighed and vaccinated our kids. The vaccination is against clostridium and tetanus. We discovered that most of our kids have quintupled in weight in 60 days. And, the goats have pretty much kept in proportion with their birth weight. So, if they weighed five pounds when they were born, they weigh 25 pounds at 60 days old. If they weighed four pounds, they now weigh 20. I guess I thought maybe nurture would play a bigger role than nature. I was wrong. What is clear, though, is that everyone is growing like crazy. Here’s a photo of Polly today:
And another of her when she was a day old (she's the one in the front - the one Phoebe is sniffing):
Another thing that’s happened this week is: a pair of swallows are building a nest right above the milking room window. We could not be more pleased. First of all, barn swallows eat mosquitoes. So, of course we want as swallow nests as we can get!
But, they are wonderful neighbors, aside from their culinary habits. They build nests by somehow sticking globs of mud to the wall of a building - often barns - which is how they get their names. They prefer human-made structures. Then, they extend the nests out until they’re like little cups. Or, maybe tiny opera boxes. This is the nest in progress:
Barn swallows are one of the proud bird species who led to the founding of the Audubon Society. In 1886, George Bird Grinnell wrote an editorial in his magazine, Forest and Stream, about women’s hats. Most people who subscribed to his magazine probably had very little interest in women’s hats. But that same year an ornithologist named Frank Chapman had taken a walk through Central Park, looking at women’s feathered hats. He counted 40 different species of birds represented on 542 different hats.
By the 1880s, milliners had devastated the world population of egrets, ruffed grouse, spoonbills, and barn swallows. In fact, many of the waterbirds whose feathers were used by hat makers were on the verge of extinction.
Between Grinnell and Chapman, an entire movement of women arose promoting what they called “Audubonnets” which were hats made without bird feathers. “Beauty can be achieved without robbing the feather kingdom,” they said.
Then, the first portable camera was developed in 1888, and “birding” became a popular pastime. People realized that they didn’t have to shoot birds to enjoy them. !!!!!
Getting back to the barn swallow, there’s a legend that it was a barn swallow that gave fire to human beings. Some intrepid swallow stole fire from the gods to bring to us, and an irate god, seeing the swallow flying away with a piece of his fire, threw a burning stick at the bird, hitting him in the center of his tail, forever altering barn swallows so that their tails are forked.
The swallows that return to San Juan Capistrano on the exact same date every year are not barn swallows. They’re cliff swallows. Barn swallows are way more common, and yet, they don’t live here year ‘round. They just come here to breed. Then they fly back to Central and South America.
In any case, my cousin, Jan, says that when she first moved here the mosquitoes were terrible. It’s partly because of the way people irrigate here. They drench the fields, and then there’s standing water for days. Which is nice because it brings the cowbirds. But it also is ideal for breeding mosquitoes. One of our neighbors irrigated again just last week, and I snapped a photo, really because of the cowbirds. But you can see how this would breed mosquitoes:
Anyway, Jan said, when the first barn swallow came and built a nest on her house, the relief from mosquitoes was appreciable. So, yay for our barn swallows!
On the topic of pests, we put out fly predators this morning. You know, the first time Jan told me, back when I was living in Chicago, “I’m off to put out fly predators!” I shot back, “What, you’ve bought a bunch of frogs?” But, no, fly predators are tiny parasites, relatives of wasps. She gets them in the mail! She subscribes to a series of shipments all through the summer!
The fly predators come in the form of larva in a little plastic bag filled with what looks like wood shavings and mouse poop. When we're expecting our fly predators, I have to be careful to bike to the mailbox down the road right when the mail has been delivered so that the larva doesn't bake in the afternoon heat. Jan puts the little plastic bag in the garage and waits for the predators to hatch. Then she sprinkles them all around the farm - wherever there’s poop. Which is pretty much everywhere. Once all of the larva are hatched, they seek out the cocoons of flies, and they take the cocoons over, killing the flies before they mature. Wow. Grizzly. I wish we could get some tree swallows. They are the type of swallows who eat flies. But, New Mexico is fly-over territory for the tree swallows. They breed further north - as far as Canada - and winter in Mexico. Sigh.