News Of Fin And Feather

There is pathetically little to say on the fin front.  About ten days ago, I bought two shubunkin (a kind of multicolored Japanese gold fish that looks like a small koi).  I let them float in their plastic bags on the surface of my pond for an hour, to get them used to the water temperature.  Then I cut open the bags and they swam out and disappeared into the murk.  I have seen neither fin nor scale of them since.  I don't think they've been eaten by a bird, since anything that would go fishing would be pretty big, and the dogs would have noticed.  And if they'd died, they would have floated to the surface.  So I can only conclude that they're lurking in the depths, indifferent to the fact that I bought them so I could rejoice in their flash and sparkle.

The feather news is more exciting.  A couple of days ago, worried that their mental development was being stifled by their close quarters, I moved the chicks out of their metal tub in the basement and into the chicken house.  Not, however, in the same space with the hens, who would have pecked them to death in two minutes. 

Fortunately the shed has three separate rooms, one where I store feed and tools, and two which are occupied by the chickens.  I moved the hens to the end room, where they have access to the outside, and carried the chick paraphernalia into the middle room, shutting all the doors.  I set up the mother hen/heat lamp, filled the chick waterer and feeder, and sprinkled clean wood shavings on top of the hay bedding.  Then I  gently decanted the chicks into their new home.

There was much bewildered cheeping at first.  And no wonder--how would you feel if you'd been living all your life in a studio apartment with seven other people and were suddenly dropped into the middle of the Astrodome?   A couple of the chicks went to sleep right away, they were so overwhelmed.  Pretty soon, however, they all started moving around, finding the waterer, pecking at the feeder.  Although during their tub days they had only seen my head and shoulders, they seemed to take the rest of me in stride, and the boldest one came over and gave my shoe a tentative peck.

Two days later, they are masters of their domain.  They roam all over, and every now and then they take off running and flapping their tiny wings, just for fun.  Their feathers are coming in fast, so in the middle of the day I have started turning off the heat lamp.  They look a little scruffy, with their mix of down and feathers, kind of like second graders who are losing their baby teeth and growing big ones.

When the chicks are fully feathered, I will retire the heat lamp and open the wooden doors so they can get plenty of air and natural light.  But before they can go outside, we'll have to undergo a lengthy process of chicken acculturation.  For each wooden door there is also a door made of livestock wire, which I will keep closed but which will allow the chicks to see and be seen by the hens.  After about a week, I will open these doors...and hope for the best.

On the wilder side of things, yesterday my husband saw, from the kitchen window, not one, not two, but three pileated woodpeckers making a big racket at the edge of the woods.

April Fish

That's what they call today in France, and it's been a fishy kind of day here.

Yesterday, the women in my yoga class, each of whom has been through a lifetime of tribulations, were the most upset I've ever seen them: "Can't stand it; not another storm coming; worst winter in my 25 years here; so sick of it; need some sun!"

This morning, as forecast, it was snowing heavily when I woke up. The ground was white. Same old, same old. But by the time I came back from feeding the hens, the snow had started to melt into the brown and muddy ground. And that's what it did all day long--snow and melt, snow and melt--until evening, when the air cooled and the snow started sticking again.

There is nothing gloomier than leaden skies, a plunging barometer, and snow on brown ground. Even the dogs seemed resigned to staying indoors. As for me, this was a "count your blessings" kind of day. The kind of day where your very eyelids droop with languor, your mind feels wrapped in cotton wool, and all you can do to keep despair at bay is to repeat the litany of blessings:

I have a house.
I am not hungry.
I have three dogs.
I have six hens.
I got a handwritten letter from a school friend in which she said, "Can you believe that we are the elders now?"
The state of Vermont is not at war.
The  rosemary bush is still alive.

I remembered  my  mother's old admonition when I used to moan about teenage woes:  "You have nothing to complain about.  Just think, you could be a quadriplegic."  But that only used to make me feel worse, thinking about all the quadriplegics.  So I don't add that to my litany.

I'm doing my best to be Zen about this, to acknowledge my mood and observe it impartially, as I would observe a school of fish passing by in an aquarium.

Post script to yesterday's post about Pileated Woodpeckers:  here is a photo my husband took a while back of a tree sculpture made by a Pileated W., with Lexi shown for scale.

Rites Of Spring

Two chicken-sized birds appeared on a tree behind the house this morning and sent the dogs into a frenzy of barking. They were clinging upright to the trunk of a nondescript tree (all trees are nondescript these days, without their leaves), going round and round by making little sideways hops, but always keeping the trunk between them.

They had long beaks and black-and-white plumage, and bright red caps shaped like those silly pointed bikers' helmets. They kept on opposite sides of the trunk, so it was hard to compare them, but one did perhaps have a tad more white on the wing than the other. So, according to the bird book, that one--the one with a bit more white--was a female.

In which case, the coyly peeking and chasing around the tree trunk was a prelude to mating. Or, if they were two males, they were establishing territory, as a prelude to ditto. It's also possible that they were two females, but if so, the books are silent on the reasons for their behavior.

In any case, in between shushing the crazed dogs and adjusting my dusty binoculars, I did establish that the two birds were Pileated Woodpeckers, the largest woodpecker species in North America if you don't count the mythical Ivory Billed W.

I looked up that weird word, "pileated." It comes from "pileus," a felt cap worn by Roman soldiers. But wait. Didn't Roman soldiers wear plumed helmets, and those little leather skirts? Perhaps that was their summer outfit, and they reserved the felt caps for the colder seasons. If so, what was the rest of their plumage like?