Our baby chicks continue to grow like weeds. Look at this lovely little hen:
I love her feathered feet! And, here’s evidence that they love the roost I built for them:
This week I went to work on some elms that were growing too close to my cousin’s house. Elms are an invasive species here, and they can destroy the foundation of your home, not to mention your septic system.
There was a particularly large volunteer elm at the front of Jan’s house that I needed to remove. I lopped off some branches so I could see what I was doing, and then I used a hand saw to cut through the trunk. The tree fell down with a satisfying crash, and I picked up my loppers to trim off the branches and haul it away.
Loppers in hand, I looked at the tree and saw a wasps’ nest! The wasps were mad! They were circling the nest, rising into the air like a vicious cloud. It was terrifying. I dropped the loppers and ran into Jan’s house. “I chopped down a tree with a wasps’ nest in it!” I said. I’m surprised she didn’t just laugh out loud.
She suggested I stay out of the front yard for the rest of the day (whew!) - that we could kill the wasps in the morning, when the cool weather makes them sluggish. Even though it’s still getting well into the 90s every day here, it’s in the low 60s in the mornings.
So, the next morning we went out with the wasp spray. The wasps were just waking up. (OK, I understand that this nest doesn't look nearly so large and terrifying in this photo. In fact it looks puny. But, trust me, with an entire cloud of wasps swirling around, it was plenty frightening!)
Jan sprayed them with some sort of magical potion that instantly killed them all. Truly. It was amazing: she stood ten feet away from the nest, and the substance that came out of the can was like a solid gel that landed on the nest. What a world! I was able to finally clear that elm away.
Another plant we’re dealing with right now is Silver Leaf Nightshade.
It’s lovely, isn’t it? But it’s poisonous to both livestock and humans, although some birds can eat it.
It’s been used as a medicinal plant for hundreds of years. The Zuni used the root for toothaches. Many tribes used it as rennet, which is possible because silver leaf nightshade contains so many enzymes. Rennet is what you need to make cheese, and most rennet used commercially is made from the stomachs of ruminant animals. It’s not easy to find vegetable rennet cheese.
I found an old photo of myself this week. In it, I’m pressed up against a fence, feeding stale bread to a bunch of deer. Apparently I’ve loved feeding large animals since I was a child. But, the photo made me wonder: are goats related to deer?
In looking up the answer to that question, I learned all kinds of things about taxonomy - the scientific classification, in this case, of organisms.
I think we learned this in school: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, Species. I retained none of it.
Kingdom: there are five possibilities: plants, animals, fungi, and two other categories that make my eyes glaze over. They’re, basically, bacteria or one-celled beings. Goats, deer, and humans are all (obviously) in the Animal Kingdom.
Phylum: Wow. In the Animal Kingdom, there are seven different Phylum, and we are not in the largest group. We are chordata. Chordata have a bundle of nerves supported by a spine. So, once again, we share this category with goats and deer. Other phylums in the Animal Kingdom include Arthropoda, which make up 3/4 of the Animal Kingdom. These beings have a crunchy exterior: ants, crabs, and lobsters, for example.
Class: There are five chordata classes, and they (finally) seem familiar: Amphibians, Reptiles, Mammals, Fish, and Birds. Whew!!
Order: Good grief! There are nineteen orders in the mammal class! Humans are among the Primate Order, goats and deer are both Artiodactyla Order. That means even-toed ungulates. Ungulate just means hoof. Even-toed means that they split their weight evenly on two portions of their hooves.
Genus: This is where the categories get split between animals with three stomachs and animals with four stomachs, between pig-like forms and camel-like forms. Goats are in the Capra Genus, which is the root that gives us all our fantastic goat words: capricorn, capricious, and the Isle of Capri. Deer are Odocoileus Genus. Odocoileus is (basically) Greek for hollow tooth. Who knew deer had hollow teeth?
Species: There are over 210 different breeds of goats on our planet.
There are 450 million goats in the world. For purposes of comparison, there are 7.8 billion humans in the world, 30 million deer in the world, and 989 million cows (down from a high of a billion in 2014). I have to restrain myself from googling how many of just about everything there is on this planet. (200-600 million cats - that’s the closest estimate anyone can get).
Thanks for going down this rabbit hole with me. Here’s the photo that sent us off on that journey:
