Earthquakes, Baby crested ducks, and How cold did you say it was going to be?

8 December 2013

Wow. Another month gone by and I haven't blogged ... again. I guess I had a good excuse this time though. November is Nanowrimo after all.

What is Nanowrimo you ask? Well, it has absolutely nothing to do with our farm or farming in any way. It's a month in which authors all over the world spend a month writing 50,000 words on one novel ... or attempting to write 50,000 words on a novel. I didn't make it. After a week of computer melt down and the Thanksgiving holiday, I finally just gave up near the end and ended up with a grand total of 31,125 words. For those of you who don't write novels in your spare time, that's about a third of a novel ... unedited ...

I was pretty happy with that. I have a goal of 2,000 words a day so I should have made it without an issue but writing is kind of like everything else in life, if you don't do it daily, it's harder to start back up again. I hate that feeling.

So, anyway, down on the farm ...
We've been having earthquakes. Yes, earthquakes. Shake, rattle, and roll right here in the middle of the great plains of the US. I've lived here a good chunk of my life and we never had earthquakes until the last few years since they began deep well fracking in the oil fields. Now the quakes seem to happen quite regularly, and even though they are centered about 80 miles away, we still get shaken up by them.

The animals hate them. Our goats, especially, act like the world is falling down around them. It's wild. And the ducks quack and quack and quack.

Speaking of ducks, we hatched a bator full of ducks sometime during the last month. I think they're about a month old now. We set 21 eggs and had 13 hatch. One of the 13 gave us a clue as to why the other ones didn't hatch though. One of our babies is crested. It has a beautiful little crown right on top of his head.

The crested gene is a funny one though. It's called a blind dominant gene. In other words, the crested gene is dominant and should therefore appear in any animal who has one copy of the gene, however, it doesn't work that say. Only about 25% of ducks with the gene show the crest. So, we can have, and do have, ducks that carry the crested gene that aren't crested at all. We didn't know any of our ducks had this gene.

But the other side to this gene is bad. If a baby gets two copies of the crested gene, it will not hatch. So, the 8 eggs that formed beautifully and were alive and moving until hatch day but never hatched, could well have had this fatal gene.

I'm happy to say though, this little guy is alive and kicking and cute a bug. Who couldn't love that little face? (We named it King, by the way, because it's crest looks like a crown.) It will not be eaten for obvious reasons.

The fact that this little guy survived is nothing too short of a miracle though. Of the 13 we had hatch, 6 more died in the intensely cold weather we've been having. Facts of life of living on a farm and raising animals, sometimes they die ... unexpectedly ... not matter how hard you try to save them ... without cause ... without reason ... without warning.

And every time it happens, I cry.

It's especially hard when we've raised the animals, incubated their eggs, cheered on the hatchlings, done everything we could possibly do to push the odds in their favor, and they die anyway. But I guess that's one of those life lessons no one wants to learn.

Of course we do raise our animals for food at some point along the line. It doesn't matter to us though. They are still our pets and treated well and have the best life they can have right up until it's time for them to go to freezer camp. At least we know how they were raised and that they had a good life unlike what comes from the grocery store.

Right now, we are in the midst of a deep freeze. It was 7 degrees yesterday. 7 degrees. The animal waterers froze faster than we could fill them. I guarantee it gave me a new appreciation for farmers in Alaska and other very cold places where 7 is a high temp some days. How on earth do they keep water from freezing for their animals?

And as always in winter, when freezing temps arrive, comes the fun of sloshing hot water out to thaw frozen pails. Invariably, no matter how many times we do this, someone at some point sloshes hot water down their boot, virtually scalding themselves, then throws off the boot exposing their wet leg and socks to the sub freezing temps. Nothing like being burned twice by opposite extremes in a manner a minutes. Lol.

Not many pics this time, I know. Sorry about that. If my greenhouse makes it through these crazy temps, I'll have more next time around. I do still have lettuce thriving in my greatly reduced greenhouse space.