The other day, we were standing in front of the pen where Wendell the wether and Sam the buck live. My cousin said to me, “Do you notice how brown Sam’s front legs are?”
Honestly, I hadn’t thought anything of it. Why wouldn’t a goat have front legs a different color from his back legs?
Jan said, “it’s because he pees on his front legs.” Ew. “In fact, goats do a power-peeing thing - they pee on their own faces.” WHAT?!?!? I asked her why on earth a goat would want to pee on his own face. “Because it makes them attractive to the does.” EW!
You can see it best on Sam’s front left leg in this photo. When he’s not in mating season, his front legs are white like his hind legs.
Humans do a lot of bizarre things to make themselves attractive. Plucking eyebrows and binding feet strike me as two particularly odd things. Wearing corsets, bustles, hoop skirts. But peeing on your own face. I don’t know. Words are failing me here.
Goats sometimes get so much pee in their beards (and take a second look at Sam in the photo, and you’ll understand the origin of the word “goatee”) that they completely foul their water bucket. Because their beards dangle in the water while they drink. Just another reason we swap out their old water for fresh water every day.
Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve been hearing this 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.
Here’s one last amazing thing for this week’s newsletter. Jet.
See that cat in the photo below? He’s in love with the chickens! Seriously, he follows them around all day long.
You know, in the morning, we let the chickens out of their coop. We open the door, we put their feed and their milk (yep, that’s one of the things we use the goat milk for - feeding the chickens) in their yard, and then they are able to wander in their yard, and around to our front yard. In the summer there’s a way they can wander all the way to the end of the goat pens.
Jet sticks with them the whole time, just hanging out wherever they’ve gone to forage. Jet was born in the woodpile by the front door, and he was a little kitten, and thought (I guess) that the chickens were amazing, enormous beings, and it never occurred to him that they might be his prey. I think he even chases off other predators who might be inclined to eat his friends.
At the end of the day, all the chickens just go back into their coop right around sundown, and all we have to do is close the door! They make wonderful sounds as they settle, as we’re closing their door to keep them safe and warm for the night.