Dear Folks,
What a spectacular time of returnings and openings and loosenings and beginnings is the month between the end of March and the end of April!
When I last wrote you the land was white and frozen. I was celebrating the first muddy spots and the return of the robins. Now the fields are showing green. At the protected front of the house we have drifts of yellow daffodils and blue scylla. The phoebes, song sparrows, chipping sparrows, killdeer, cowbirds, and juncos are back. The forests have turned the delicate red and pink of the maple blooms — a color so unexpected (PINK TREES?) that it makes me catch my breath. I think of it as the other autumn, the second, more subtle color-surprise that the maples spring on us.
Foundation Farm is bursting with babies. The twelve lambs in the barnyard are strong enough now to roister around in a pack, dashing madly from one end of the yard to the other, bounding into the barn and back out again, leaping onto rocks and hurling themselves off, kicking their heels toward the sky. Like the mountain animals they are, they love to perch on high places, which can include, as you can see from Sylvia’s picture of Dahlia and her triplets, the backs of the big sheep. Even Wally the ram lets them get away with this behavior.
I’ve just put the eight Toulouse goslings out on the grass for the first time, to their utter delight. Geese will happily eat grain, but what they really like is green stuff. So the gray-gold fuzzies are parading around nipping at the greening lawn, trilling with satisfaction.
The fifteen Khaki Campbell ducklings are still in a box with a warming light, scarfing down grain and slopping water all over everything. They look a little too small yet to be outside, but they’re doubling every week too. I’ll be glad to get them out. There is nothing messier (or cuter) than a bunch of ducklings.
These birds arrived in the mail from Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa. I don’t know how many of you have seen a chicken catalog, but Murray McMurray’s is a corker. Sylvia and I used to pore over its pages, debating whether to get Blue Cochins or Golden Polish or the more standard and reliable Rhode Island Reds and White Leghorns. You can get pheasants from Murray McMurray, and guinea hens, and peacocks (5 varieties of peacocks, at $20-30 per day-old chick). At first we gave up choosing and just ordered the Brown Egg Layer Assortment, a mixture of everything they have extras of.
From experience with those multi-colored bands of chickens, I’ve settled on a four-year rotation of my favorite breeds — Silver-Lace Wyandotte, Buff Orpington, Barred Rock, and New Hampshire Red. That way I’ll know how old each bird is. This is Silver-Lace year. They’re black chicks that grow up to have white feathers edged with shiny greenish-black. I ordered 25 day-old pullets, but I made the mistake of scheduling them to arrive a month earlier than usual, at the beginning of April, when the airways between Iowa and New Hampshire are still very cold. The package arrived at the Plainfield post office full of chilled birds, half of them already dead and most of the rest too far gone for me to revive. I ended up with only 9 survivors.
I called Murray McMurray, and they agreed to try again a week later. I alerted various post offices along the way. The following Sunday I got a call from our big regional handling center in White River Junction, telling me I could come pick up my peeping package a day earlier than if I waited for it to get to Plainfield.
So I did, and this time all the birds were alive. To be sure, Murray McMurray had thrown 5 extra Wyandottes. And to assure enough body heat in the box, they added 10 Red Star cockerels. So I will have some meat birds. That makes 40 new chicks, plus the 9 from the previous week, plus in the meantime a broody in the chicken house hatched out 11 of the 12 eggs she was sitting on. So I am awash with chicks, just learning to flap their stubby wings and hop around. Like the lambs, whenever one starts up the hijinks, the others all join in.
The ducks and geese also came from Murray McMurray. Why I ordered them is something I explain to John every day, but he still doesn’t get it. Hardly anyone on the farm has ever understood my fascination with water birds, which are, I fully admit, a noisy and uneconomic nuisance. I like to see them on the pond in the summer. I like their hardiness in the winter. I would rather have them than kill them, but when their numbers get out of hand, I don’t mind some roast goose or duck a la orange. I like having their down to stuff into pillows. I like the eggs they lay.
I just like ’em, see?
ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS, DO NOT READ THIS PARAGRAPH. Over the winter the horrible raccoons picked off, one by one, three of the four white Embden geese I had in the barn. I never did figure out how the raccoons got in. I stopped up every conceivable raccoon-sized hole, to no avail. Finally I put a Havahart trap in the goose stall and caught two raccoons, for which, after what they did over the past year to my geese, my corn, my chickens, and my garden seeds, I did not havahart. I leave 50 acres of this farm to the raccoons and beavers, and they are beautiful and amazing creatures, but when they invade my 20 acres, my heart hardens, especially when they mangle my geese.
I was left with one lonely gander, whom I finally, sadly, dispatched, only after I had comforted myself with the thought that I would start all over again with goslings this spring, and with a breed I prefer, the magnificent gray Toulouse.
Now why 15 ducks? Well, I really want only two. I have the idea that they can clear the slugs out of my garden (without clearing out the vegetables). Murray McMurray ships ducklings only in lots of 15. So I plan to put a bunch of quackers down on the pond and keep another bunch up in the garden. We shall see how this experiment works.
In the middle of lambing season Sylvia, Heather, and Don came to farm-sit for 4 days, so I could go to a family reunion in Oklahoma. It was wonderful that I could put the farm in the hands of folks who have lived here for 5 years and know what to do, especially how to keep an eye on very pregnant ewes. I think the Spains had fun visiting their animal friends and people friends in Plainfield, and Sylvia did more sketches for her books. (See John’s cat Kitty at the end of this newsletter.) They took exquisite care of things, while I flew off with an easy mind.
The reunion was at my Mom’s and included her, my uncle, my brother, two cousins, and their significant others, some of whom I had never met. We four cousins grew up together, spending every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter together, and summers up in a cabin on a lake in Minnesota. We hadn’t all been back together since we kids left home — I guess not for 25 years. It was so sweet to see everyone, though bittersweet because some beloved family members are no longer with us, and because my Mom’s second husband Karl is ailing in the nursing wing of their retirement home. We took the party to him in relays.
So is it always, I guess, with families. Many, many joyful memories, and some painful ones. The happiest and saddest memories of our lives are the ones from childhood, because, I guess, they burn deep into barely formed consciousness, and because we experience things so completely when we are children. What a powerful thing a family is! How strong the emotional bonds are, even after decades of separation!
Well, Mom and I cooked up a big dinner, we all went out to breakfast, I played hymns on my Mom’s piano, I tried to play my cousin Eddie’s accordion. We told old stories and caught up on news — you know how family reunions are. It was a treat for all of us, most especially for my Mom, who had been dreaming of this get-together for a long time.
I had one more lightning trip, just for a day, to the U.N. in New York where the preparatory negotiations (PrepCom) for the Cairo conference on population were going on. Island Press has put out a “reader,” called Beyond the Numbers, a compilation of essays on population and family planning, one of which is by me. The publisher wanted to put on a program with authors from the book, and I like to hang around PrepComs, so I went. Most of my impressions are captured in one of the columns included here.
In my talk I practiced for the first time putting forth the idea that the carrying capacity of Earth for people who want to live the industrialized lifestyle is probably somewhere around 2 billion. (See the column about David Pimentel enclosed here.) This is a completely unacceptable idea, especially at the U.N., no matter what the evidence may be. The Cairo conference is centered around how to get the human population to level off at around 12 billion — which I think is a simple impossibility. Long before we get there, nature will tell us in no uncertain terms that we have exceeded our carrying capacity. Nature is already telling us that.
What I tried to say is that once you get over the shock of seeing that there need to be fewer of us, once you see that we might, if we’re lucky, have 100 years to bring the population down, then you see that everything the various factions were pushing for at the PrepCom — female education and family planning and development for the poor and lower consumption by the rich — is absolutely needed, needed urgently, needed at levels far beyond the polite mandates of the Cairo documents. We need to put to the population and development task the same kind of resources and attention that we now put to military tasks. If we did, there wouldn’t be the perception of scarcity that is causing the female education promoters to be at the throats of the family planning promoters because they think any dollar applied to one of those goals has to be taken away from the other.
Well, with practice I’ll get better at saying that. At the U.N. I was instantly attacked, though also applauded. A lot of people came up afterward to tell me how courageous I was. A lot of other people stalked away with smoldering looks in their eyes. One Third World reporter wrote up what I said as if it were the old standard indictment of the poor for having so many babies — she clicked into an old paradigm and didn’t really hear a thing I said.
Sigh. I have to learn to say it clearly and powerfully enough to bust the old paradigms. And isn’t it amazing that it takes courage to say the most obvious thing — that we are overpopulated? If we can’t even SAY that, if we can’t HEAR it, how are we ever going to DO anything about it?
Well, John is putting up the greenhouse and I have a million seedlings to get started, so I’d better head outdoors. Outdoors! Hurray!
Love,
Dana
