We are living in paradise. The weather is exactly what I would want if I were creating the perfect planet. It’s in the 40s at night, in the 80s during the afternoon. When we let the chickens out of their coops in the morning we can see our breath. When we feed the goats in the afternoon we are in our t-shirts. I don’t know how long this lasts, but I love every single day. When we walk into the hay barn to load up our cart, the barn smells sweet like molasses, spicy like trees, and rich like earth. Our wonderful bales of alfalfa exhale this aroma all night long, filling the barn so that the scent rolls out when we open the door in the morning.
I spent some time this week digging out gates in the back pen. The goats scatter their hay all over their pens, and then they pee and poop on the hay. This mess, together, turns into new soil. Given enough goats and enough time, I believe the planet would expand in size infinitely. But, in the short term, what happens is that the gates become mired in new soil and can no longer be opened or closed. Hence the digging out.
Digging gates is pretty aerobic, and takes a while. The photo below is of a gate I spent nearly two hours digging out. Note how the goats immediately stood in the newly cleaned spot. Diligently replacing all the pee and poop I had so painstakingly removed.
Also, the way these goats are standing, I almost expect them to start singing, "When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette, to your last dying day." Maybe that's just me.
Big Red continues to fade, but I feel as if she’s still enjoying being alive. She can no longer make it in and out of the chicken coop. But, she gets out of her nesting box every day, scoots to the door of the coop, and spends the day in the sun, looking out over the yard. Then she flaps her way back to her nesting box for the night. We bring her food and water and scratch several times a day. I wonder what she’s dreaming about?
The goats continue to live in the land of lust. We got two more of our does bred this week. Maria:
And Lezlie (if she were a human she'd object to this photo with her mouth open):
Getting these two bred was gentle and delightful. When Jan noticed that they were in season, we put a leash on them and walked them back to the pens where the bucks live. We just watched them to see if they were interested in the bucks. This was particularly sweet with Lezlie.
The first time we walked Lezlie back to see the bucks, the bucks both went crazy. Lezlie, however, was only interested in eating leaves. So we took her back to her home pen. The second time we took Lezlie back there, she was interested in Leroy.
Lezlie is genetically unrelated to any other goat in our herd. So, we could actually allow her to choose her buck. Most of the other goats can only be bred to someone specific. But Lezlie came to us from Michigan so she could have her pick.
Just like all the other goats that we’re keeping, we let her into the pen, watched while she got bred - which happened immediately - and then brought her right back to her home pen. If this particular coupling isn’t going to produce kids, she’ll cycle again, and we’ll walk her back there for another try. Maybe she’ll pick Jordan. Or maybe she’ll still pick Leroy. Who knows?
All the crazy goat mating energy is loud and raucous. And on top of that, our neighbors are breeding their cows. Cows are different than goats. Our neighbors rent a bull for their cows, and he comes to live with them for a month. They get the same bull every year. I guess all those bovines just live together for the month and everyone hopes for the best. No one ever sees them do the deed. But, there is a lot of posturing and a lot of bellowing going on. It feels as if the goats and the cows are egging each other on. The cows are just on the other side of the fence of Jordan's pen.
The woman who trims our goats’ hooves came this week. I had thought, prior to living here, that goat hooves were like bone. But they’re not. They’re more like really extensive calluses that need to be trimmed every month or so.
The hoof-trimming woman also knows a lot about chickens, and we have two chickens from the batch that we got in the mail this summer that we suspect are roosters. They’re bigger than the other chickens, and they’re more aggressive. We asked our hoof-trimmer to take a look, to see what she thought.
She took one look at our light Brahma and said, “That one’s a rooster.” We said, “How can you tell?”
She said that roosters have tail feathers that go up, and then curl down at the end. Like this:
Hens have feathers that kind of just go straight out. She pointed to the tails of our other light Brahmas. In the moment, Jan and I both thought we saw what she was talking about. But, afterwards, neither of us were sure about it.
Here’s the suspected rooster:
Here’s the hen:
You tell me. Can you see what she was talking about? It’s going to be abundantly clear when they start crowing. But for now, we remain mostly mystified.