Farm Families in July
Posted by Ted Hopton on July 5, 2008
I’ve been in my cottage on the farm for less than a month, and nature is clearly at work. First, the sad news: my little bird family is gone. “Nature, red in tooth and claw” was in evidence, as the farm cats found the nest and appear to have reached in and dispatched the two cheeping chicks. Whether they got the parents, too, I don’t know, but I suspect the parents abandoned the nest afterward.
My initial reaction was anger at the cats. I’m not a cat person, anyway, and I wish the cats would just hunt vermin and not cute baby birds. However, in fairness, the wrens were not wise to select a nesting hole that’s within reach of cats. So, natural selection was at work, and these not-so-survival-minded wrens failed to pass on their genes this year.
On the positive front, I have another bird family now: woodpeckers. It sounds like someone knocking on the door, but I quickly figured out that was just the woodpeckers feeding on bugs in or on the wooden outside of my cottage. I’m not sure it’s a good thing that this house is such a full cupboard of bugs for them, but I’ve always thought woodpeckers were pretty cool. And this morning I saw one of the parents feeding their offspring, a rather fluffy and puffy little guy.
In fact, as I write this, the juvenile woodpecker and parent have flown to the tree right outside my window. The little guy is tentatively probing for bugs. Looks like he doesn’t quite have the hang of it, yet. I wonder if his beak is hard enough at this age to pound into the trunk. But mama or papa is right there to feed him what they’ve caught.
The highlight, however, was yesterday’s arrival of two pairs of mares and foals. They are sooo cute, and I can watch both pairs from my living room. It’s funny how the foals mimic their mothers so closely. Everywhere mother goes, the foal goes in parallel. Mother swings her head up and down, and so does the foal. The babies are about two-thirds the height of the mothers, and in each case appears like a “mini me” with the same coloring and appearance.
One more observation is not strictly about families, but swarms of swallows. I watched as Manuel mowed one of the fields the other day, and saw many birds following the tractor. They were swallows, and they swooped and dived repeatedly in the tractor’s wake. I surmised that the mower must have stirred up all the insects in the field, the swallows were enjoying an all-they-could-eat buffet.
