Welcome to CritterGeek.com. Please enjoy the archived posts on the site. I'm no longer actively posting on this site for the time being, but may continue in the future. In the meantime, please visit my general personal weblog, TerrieMiller.com.
Tour de Coop
Today Steve and I spent the morning touring…chicken coops!
Generous members of the California Wine Country Chicken Chat group opened their coops to others in the group for an informal tour of member coops. It was a great chance to see how other build their coops and manage their flocks of chickens. And we saw lots of beautiful chickens!
I was happy to see that everyone had mixed flocks and not just one breed. We also got to see several “mutts”, chickens of no particular breed that turn out in a nice variety of shapes, patterns and colors.
Two things stood out from what coop owners told us: their hens have plenty of nest boxes, but fight over one favorite, sometimes crowding themselves three at a time on top of one another, laying all their eggs in one box. And many started with a chicken tractor (a movable chicken pen), but found it to be too much trouble and converted to a regular coop.
Click on the thumnails below to browse photos of the tour, or head on over to the photo set on Flickr.
I’m a strong believer in raising your own flock of backyard chickens. It’s enormously rewarding, and it brings a yard to life like nothing else. And you can bet your eggs will be a lot better (and better for you) than the ones from a place like this that describes themselves as a “family farm.”
If you’ve been thinking of getting your own chickens, don’t forget the Critter Geek backyard chicken resources page, with lots of links to tips and information.
Thanks again to everyone who showed us their coops this morning!
Teach your parrot his address
Here’s a beautiful thing…a family in Japan taught their African Grey parrot to say his name and address. When the parrot was lost and came into the care of a local veterinarian, he eventually began talking and gave them the information that lead to his return home. From the SFGate story, Lost parrot tells veterinarian his address:
He kept mum with the cops, but began chatting after a few days with the vet.
“I’m Mr. Yosuke Nakamura,” the bird told the veterinarian, according to Uemura. The parrot also provided his full home address, down to the street number, and even entertained the hospital staff by singing songs.
“We checked the address, and what do you know, a Nakamura family really lived there. So we told them we’ve found Yosuke,” Uemura said.
Teaching your parrot and address or phone number could be a really great hack for helping your bird get home in the unfortunate event of an escape.
Photo by wanderingone.
Short-tailed Weasel
Yesterday I hiked one of my all-time favorite trails, the Tomales Point Trail at Point Reyes Nationals seashore. It’s always a great hike for viewing wildlife, and yesterday I got to watch Tule Elk, Northern Harriers, and even a big Striped Skunk foraging in a canyon. But my favorite was a close encounter with a Short-tailed Weasel (also known as ermine or stoat). Click on the photo to watch a short video:
Anger, Unleashed
I’ve seen them on the trails at Ragle before…sometimes a woman is with the dog, sometimes a man. If they see another dog coming, they pull off the trail and hold the dogs head, bent over, telling the dog to be quiet as it growls because of us. I wondered about this training method…it seems like it’s adding energy to the situation, perhaps even unintentionally rewarding the dog with the focus and attention of its owners. But I figured it wasn’t my problem.
Recently, I’ve seen the dog off-leash, twice. In both cases, the owner saw us and called the dog back, leashing it and going through the same head-holding ritual. I wondered about this, too. Why would a dog like that be off-leash on a leash-only trail? They seemed to have reasonable voice command, but it seemed like risky behavior. But I figured it wasn’t my problem.
Today it became my problem.
Laika and I were doing our normal loop around the trails. I heard a voice around a bend ahead of us, then saw the dog and one of its owners. The owner had seen us and was calling the unleashed dog back, but it was too late. The dog saw Laika, and tore after us, attacking my dog.
I know you’re not supposed to get in the middle of a dog altercation, but Laika and I have a deal, and nothing goes after my dog without me doing something. So I got into the mix. At the same time I managed to grab the other dog’s harness, I dropped Laika’s leash, which let her escape. I’d been afraid to drop it earlier, worried that the dogs would take off and I wouldn’t be able to do anything to help her. The owner also got hold of the harness and got the leash attached.
Both of us holding the dog’s harness, I yelled at her, “What is a dog like that doing off leash?!” She apologized, over and over again, but I did some more yelling anyhow. Laika seemed fine, but I got the woman’s name and phone number anyhow, and thanked her for trying to do the right thing by giving me that.
I’m still angry, though. I’m so sick of hearing dog owners expound, sometimes at length, about why their dogs aren’t leashed on public property where a leash is required. I’ve heard endless inane excuses for this (in this case, “I just wanted to let him get a drink of water in the creek.”) But the fact is, they’re just excuses. If you want your dog to be off-leash, then you’re going to have to find a place to do that; they do exist. Unleashing your dog in a leash-only area is ruining it for the rest of us. That’s why dogs get banned entirely….”We tried allowing dogs on leash, but owners wouldn’t abide by the leash rule, so we had to ban them altogether.” The rules and laws end up getting made for the lowest common denominator, and I’m sick to death of being regulated for the sake of idiot dog owners.
An aggressive dog needs to be restrained while on public property, period. And even a typically non-aggressive dog needs to be on a leash where the regulations require it.
Don’t make your dog my problem.
Eagle Dreams: Searching for Legends in Wild Mongolia
A few years ago, Steve and I attended several lectures about raptors by Alida Morzenti, in preparation for training to handle captive birds of prey. The lectures were fascinating, but one image stuck with me more than any other…the eagle hunters of western Mongolia.
Alida described how the hunters would travel out onto the steppe, on sturdy ponies, with a wooden prop for the arm that held the bird they used for falconry. But this was no ordinary falconry bird…this was a Golden Eagle. It sounded crazy…falconry is one thing, but Golden Eagles are huge, powerful, dangerous creatures. She told us they used them to hunt wolves, but I didn’t believe her. She explained that the eagles live with the families, until they are released back into the wild, a relationship that fascinated me.
I kept thinking about those eagle hunters, and found some photos of them that siezed me. They’ve lurked in the back of my memory, an image I’ve returned to often. Fueled by videos found on youtube and a growing interest in how people connect to nature through animals, I wanted to know more. Should I need to go to Mongolia or Kazakhstan to see for myself?
Fortunately, Stephen Bodio lets us visit them vicariously in Eagle Dreams: Searching for Legends in Wild Mongolia
Bodio had his own vision of the eagle hunters, a photo seen in childhood, and it stayed with him as he grew up and became a falconer living in the mountains of New Mexico. In describing the similarities between his home and the steppe, he expresses something I’ve felt very keenly:
I found something else in New Mexico that I had yearned for in my dreams, something that barely existed in New England: an unsentimental intimacy with, and a life lived among, animals; not a sentimental animal rights view of them, nor a reduction of them to utilitarian automatons, but a kind of familiarity with them that acknowledged that they were not humans but that they were persons…
Exactly what I wanted to see for myself by visiting the eagle hunters! Bodio, however, had real falconry and trekking experience to prepare himself for the trip. He even had some attempted work with Golden Eagles:
I became a falconer in the sixties, and made my first attempt to train an eagle in ‘71. She broke my hand.
Part 1 of “Eagle Dreams” has the full story of that experience, and is mostly background on how Bodio reached the point of boarding a flight from Beijing to Ulaan Bataar. In the authors note at the beginning of the book, he goes so far as to suggest that some may want to skip directly to Part 2…something I don’t recommend. Part 1 reads a bit slower, but is interesting background and includes some great stories of raptor obsession.
Admittedly, though, I really became engrossed in Part 2, with its stories of meeting the eagle hunters and traveling the steppes. And yes, they do sometimes hunt wolves and, incredibly, in some cases even snow leopards, but you’ll learn why my favorite eagle hunter doesn’t. And they aren’t ponies, they’re horses.
You’ll get some fascinating lore about falconry and Mongolian culture. There are even sources for information in case you want to go yourself…though you’ll be warned that “Food and toilets are not issues to take lightly.” The freezing cold of the Mongolian winter…that’s eagle hunting season…is enough to make me grateful for Eagle Dreams
Or do I?
Urban Honey
Via Justinsomnia, we have this sort of peculiar video about urban beekeeping:
This is not the kind of thing I envisioned posting on CritterGeek.com when I started the site, but I’m in a quandry of what to do here. So “odd” works. I’ve been doing more blogging on my personal site, TerrieMiller.com.
Have an insistent fetcher?
Do you have a dog who will try every opportunity to get you to play? This cute ball-throwing device might alleviate some of your pressure to perform:
Mark Pascua has some more information about the device and its maker:
lamgngo, the creator of the machine says it took 2 years of “on and off work.†He says most of his time was spent coding the software to control the machine.
via MAKE.
The Carolina Circus Clowns and Their Delightful Dogs
Aren’t they fun? The signals for the dog’s tricks seem to be very subtle!
Animals at Play
I grew up in a culture where where animals were simply put on earth to be used by people. To perpetuate this myth, corollaries like “animals don’t have feelings or emotions” were also espoused. If an animal “played”, it was simply a process of a young animal learning survival skills, or an older animal being immature or domesticated out of their normal wild behavior.
Thankfully, attitudes seem to be changing (ok, moving to California helps!). But I love seeing things like Why Didn’t the Wild Polar Bear eat the Husky?
Taken by wildlife photographer Norbert Rosing, the photos show a remarkable interaction between a wild predator and a domesticated dog.
You can also see the photos in a slide show presentation narrated by Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play.
Thanks to Natalie for sending me these amazing photos!
