Howdy. Today, we’re talkin’ farm animals.

We’ll start with a story I enjoyed in this morning’s paper about a couple of Vermont dairy farmers who changed what they feed their cows, thereby reducing the amount of methane their cows emit via burps. (I guess that whole cow farting thing is overplayed; according to this article, most of the gas actually comes from the front end.)

Also according to this article, the Coventry Valley Farm “has reduced its cows’ belches by 13 percent.”

I hate it when news stories leave out the stuff I really want to know—in this case: How do you measure cow belches?

I found a couple of good chicken stories in the paper this weekend.

One is about a guy who is studying the language of chickens to see what all their clucks, chortles and squawks mean. I’m astonished this hasn’t been done before, considering how much chicken we eat. The UConn researcher, Ebenezer Otu-Nyarko (and what a grand name that is) points out that figuring out when chickens are stressed will help increase egg and chicken meat production. (OK, that’s kind of a sad sentence. But we farmers are very matter-of-fact about such things.)

The other story is a biggie if you happen to be in the poultry industry: California has passed a law that egg-laying hens must be able to stretch their wings without touching walls or another chicken. It’s a big kerfuffle, but apparently, what animal rights people are really pushing for is free-range chickens. Personally, I think that’s great. Free-range chicken tastes so much better than the tortured kind. The eggs, too. Look at this photo. The two eggs on the right are from my friend Michelle’s chickens. The anemic little thing on the left is a regular supermarket egg.

And since I’ve been hanging around Michelle and her chickens, I’ve grown to really love the sight of them free ranging.

Chickens are, in many ways, pretty revolting. I had a friend who grew up on a farm and as an adult refused to eat chicken because she had grown to loathe them so. I mean, they’ll eat anything, including each other. But Michelle’s chickens are so pretty and fun to watch—little dinosaurs bustling around the property, living in their little chicken alternate universe. Every now and then, something will spook them and they’ll all run this way or that way, then it’s over and they get back to their scratchin’ and peckin’. And, as night falls, they all take themselves home to their roost and tuck themselves in. Endearing, even if they do eat their young.

I can’t wait to learn what they have to say.

Labels: bird watching, research

I left my comfort zone this weekend and spent it with a bunch of hard-core birders at the Lesser Prairie Chicken Festival in Woodward, Oklahoma. Because I’m a wee bit of an idiot, I didn’t realize until I’d committed exactly how hard-core the event would be. It was the kind of event where I met people for whom seeing the prairie chickens dance was the culmination of a lifelong dream. No, really. Sometimes, I sat in on conversations in which I had no idea what people were saying. Imagine sitting in on chitchat with a bunch of rocket scientists. That’s what it was like, except the topic was birds.

I had to rally all my powers of interpretation every time Bird Chick (a k a Sharon Stiteler), the keynote speaker, talked about birds in casual conversation. Once, I just turned to her and said, “I have no idea what you just said,” which made her laugh and she explained. It had to do with banding raptors.

Artist and speaker Debby Kaspari, whose topic was sketching nature, was more my speed in some regards—art talk I understand—but she, too, knows more about birds than I know about anything. When she talked art, I was with her. When she talked birds, I was lost.

Fortunately, these were very nice people who never laughed at stupid questions and took the time during bird watching excursions to actually point out birds to me as I flailed around with my low-rent binoculars. If I asked, they let me peek through their real binoculars, and Bird Chick set up her scope for all to look through. Wow. Our guide also brought a scope, so from time to time I actually got to see what everyone was talking about, as opposed to the blurry silhouettes my binoculars provided.

For the most part, I walked around all weekend feeling kind of bumbling and clueless.

Which is OK, actually. Sometimes it’s good to get in over your head. It’s kind of like lifting weights. When your muscles start failing, that’s when the muscle building occurs. I learned a lot about birds this weekend. (And bees, actually, since Bird Chick also is a beekeeper. Really fascinating stuff. Bees lead complicated lives.) Plus, I enjoyed immersion in a subculture.

And most important, I got to see the dance of the endangered lesser prairie chicken.

This was my kind of bird watching, even though it involved getting up before dawn and sitting in tiny blind for hours. But you couldn’t miss the birds—as I so often do.



They were right there, just a few feet in front of us, doing their dance, singing their song, making every attempt to propagate their species. (I didn't even try to capture on film. Click through to Debby's and Sharon's sites to see images far better from anything I could have produced.) I found the whole thing genuinely moving. Dance, little chickens, dance. Stomp your little chicken feet and keep on keeping on!

Among the pressures on the fascinating little fellas’ survival are barbed wire and windmills--this was a close encounter, for me, with the implications we have to consider before we hoist T. Boone Pickens on our shoulders as the savior of the environment. Not that wind power is bad, but it needs study before we plunge right in.

And after we spent the morning watching the chickens dance, we spent some time tromping around on the glorious Oklahoma prairie, marking barbed wire fences to help the chickens out, which just involves clipping little pieces of plastic onto the fences. Evidently, dead prairie chickens are rarely found on fences that have been marked, unlike unmarked fences. Good enough for me.






Dance for your lives, little prairie chickens. There are a bunch of people who care whether or not you survive. And, entirely by accident, I’m now among them.

Labels: bird watching, oklahoma, prairie chickens, travel