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Weird Eggs and Syrinxes

The sandhill cranes have left New Mexico - they’re probably in Nebraska by now. I miss their weird whirring calls, flying over every morning and evening on their way to and from their nesting and feeding places. I miss their bizarre presence in our neighbor’s fields.



Just this week a friend sent me a link to a nature program that revealed that birds don’t have vocal chords. Or, rather, they have a rudimentary larynx, but that’s not what they use to make sound. Instead they have something called a syrinx. Nearly all birds have a syrinx, although vultures don’t - they make a hissing sound in their throats. But birds as different as ducks, sandhill cranes, parrots, and chickens all make their distinctive sounds with their syrinx.


When humans speak, we use very little air to produce sound. We make the folds of our larynx vibrate. It takes a lot of air for birds to use their syrinx - the action is very much like whistling. Their syrinx is located right where their trachea forks into their lungs.


Aside: as I was researching whether or not all birds have a syrinx, I stumbled across a “piece of information” on the internet that said that giraffes have no larynx. I thought, that explains why I don’t know what sound giraffes make. But, in researching further, I discovered that giraffes do indeed have larynxes. That “piece of information” on the internet was just plain wrong!


According to the journal Science, a giraffe larynx is 13 feet long, and it takes a lot of air to get it to vibrate, and when it does, the pitch is so low that it is almost out of the range of human hearing. But, says Science, researchers are discovering that giraffes hum together at night. I love the idea of a group of giraffes in the moonlight, their necks loosely entwined, crooning an earth-vibrating song.


Back to the birds. Sandhill cranes, like chickens, start life making cute peeping sounds. Cranes’ voices change after they’re ten months old. Once they start making the deeper whirring sounds, they will soon leave their parents and begin their adult lives.


Our chickens are now laying more than two dozen eggs every day. My concept of eggs has really changed since I’ve come here. I thought of eggs as much more standard before I lived on the farm. I think the eggs you buy in a store have been sorted for homogeneity.


This week, one of our chickens laid a pretty unusual egg:



See how large that egg is? And it’s a kind of lumpy shape. Here it is again, in the context of the egg tray: (second to the top, second to the right)



We haven’t cracked that egg open yet, but we’re betting it has a double yolk. I’m kind of concerned about the chicken who had to pop out that enormous egg!


And while we’re on birds, here’s a quick photo of a roadrunner in the tree next to my front yard:



I love the roadrunners. But they’re mean. I don’t know where Warner Bros. ever got the idea that roadrunners are shy and self-effacing underdogs. Sure, they avoid others when they can, but they are vicious killers when they need to be. I think a group of roadrunners could’ve easily taken down that wily coyote.


Our goat kids are growing! Our first six babies are already old enough to be separated from their mamas overnight. That’s how we begin to wean them and encourage them to shift from living on milk to eating hay. After we feed everyone in the evening, we shut the gate between the two halves of the milkers’ pen, leaving the babies on one side (with Mothra and their favorite Aunt Molly) and the mamas on the other side. They can still lean against each other through the fence, so it doesn’t stress them out much. Then we milk the mamas first thing in the morning, before we open the gate to release the babies.


Here’s Maria with her babies (on the left) and Lezlie and her babies (on the right) relaxing in the shelter:



And here’s what a lot of the babies do during the day - they hang out together underneath the shade cloth:



My niece, Kat, has arrived, so the soap business is now undergoing a transformation. We are beginning to make beautiful bars - with landscapes! Kat has an eye that I simply lack. I’m excited about this new phase. I can hardly wait to be able to post photos.


She is also helping to socialize the baby goats. We have to cuddle each baby every day. If we’re scrupulous about this, they’ll be easy to milk when they grow up - because they’ll be used to being handled by humans. Last year, I was so excited when the babies became friendly that I let them climb all over me while I was socializing them. The result was a bunch of really obnoxious, full-grown goats who jump on humans when we enter their pen.


This year we’re trying to socialize them, but also let them know that jumping on humans is not good. We’ll see how that works out.

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