I came home from a town run today to the first non-insect, non-rodent birth on the FBR — a chick. This is the offspring of this evidently exotic Asian variety that my generous friend Kat gave me when I started on the journey toward bringing Avian Bird Flu one step closer to my life. All I know is she’s a great layer (the hen, Kat’s married) — good for an egg a day, easy.
Talk about a proud momma. This chicken has not been anywhere in her short, nine month life but two ranches, has no formal education, and knows exactly how to raise a baby. In fact, she and my second brooding hen (what an apt word, as so many barnyard phrases are: it means essentially sitting and meditatively staring with occasional blinks, without eating or drinking, for over a month), seem to be co-parenting. One tends the live chick, the other dances between their two nests. Looks like several more fuffly little future egg-producers mght be comng soon. Between them, they’re sitting on three more eggs.
The real test now will be in the critical thinking skills of my other FBR mammals. I think Sadie the dog (pictured below) can handle the list of regs. now, which goes, “It’s OK to attack rabbits and quail, and to be vicious toward coyotes, wolves, bears, rattlesnakes and mountain lions. It’s likewise OK to bark meanly at first to human strangers until and unless I say it’s OK to go back to your default of Loving Everyone and Everything in the Cosmos, and it’s NOT OK to attack songbirds, chickens of any age, the FBR cats or human babies.”
I’ve also posted the latest aerial photo of the FBR (that is, from the cliff above my canyon), reflecting all 11 solar panels, and the goat pen. Hopefully the summer monsoon will be sufficient both to get my Stitzel Creek running (it’s dry and just out of the shot in the foreground at the moment, and where I do my morning sun salutation stretching), and to bring up area rivers for boating and innertubing. But not too high, so as to flood me in for two months, like last year. That flood started a couple of days after I moved in. Great way to get to know a place: being imprisoned in it. Heck, I could be working in an office somewhere. And at least I didn’t flip my vehicle in the nearby Mimbres River, like several of my neighbors.
As I write, I see outside the sliding glass window, below the hummingbirds, that Natalie and Melissa, the goats, are charging around in circles with Sadie. It’s unclear who’s herding whom. But they can keep this up for hours. It’s all one weird family here on the FBR.
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