Chores

Born smack dab in the middle of the Baby Boom, I grew up during the Golden Age of TV Westerns. By the end of the 1960s more than 100 westerns had aired on the networks and I probably saw most of them. Before I was out of grade school I could sing the entire theme songs to dozens of cowboy shows. Unfortunately, I still can.

     Cheyenne, Cheyenne, where will you be camping tonight?
     Lonely man, Cheyenne, will your heart stay free and light?

     Have Gun - Will Travel reads the card of a man
     A knight without armor in a savage land

     Sugarfoot, Sugarfoot, 
     Easy lopin', cattle ropin' Sugarfoot

My favorite shows were the ones with the youngest, handsomest cowboys, like Bronco (1958-62), Sugarfoot (57-61), and Cheyenne (55-63), but I also liked Maverick (57-62) and Bat Masterson (58-61) because they were funny. Rin Tin Tin (54-59) made me fester with jealosy because the star was just some dumb kid who had the great good luck to be orphaned and adopted by a cavalry troop. My Friend Flicka (56-57) was even worse because the dumb kid lived in Wyoming and had his own horse. I wanted a horse like Flicka and a dog like Rin Tin Tin. I also wanted a father like Lucas McCain in the Rifleman (58-63).

I didn't realize it at the time, but the vast majority of these series were set in the 1870s and early 1880s, as though the great American West had only one good decade. Many of the protagonists were Civil War veterans starting second careers, like Paladin in Have Gun Will Travel (57-63), a Union officer who became a mercenary, or Lucas McCain, a Union officer who became a rancher, or Seth Adams on Wagon Train (57-62), a Union officer who became a wagon master, or Reese Bennett on Laredo (65-67), a Union officer who joined the Texas Rangers, or Gil Favor on Rawhide (59-65), a Confederate officer who became a trail boss. Bonanza (59-73), an exception, was actually set during the Civil War, which occasionally contributed to the plot, as when Little Joe stirred up trouble by dating the daughter of a Confederate sympathizer.

We may remember TV westerns as shoot-em-ups, but in fact, unlike western movies or contemporary crime shows, the genre generally eschewed violence. The need to resort to force showed a failure of wit, and if fighting was necessary, guns were the last resort. Good guys preferred fist fights to gunslinging. Even the Rifleman, who according to Wikipedia managed to dispatch 120 bad guys during its five year run, preferred to solve problems peacefully. Westerns were also intensely moral. Cowboy ethics included justice, fairness, racial tolerance, honesty, integrity and courage. You could do worse than be a cowboy.

I absorbed a lot from watching westerns. By the 3rd grade I knew I wanted to ride horses, live in Wyoming, and right wrongs wherever I found them. But most of all, I knew I wanted to have chores. There were not a lot of children on TV westerns, but every single one of them had chores. Every morning young boys and girls gathered firewood, lit the hearth, pumped water, milked cows, tended livestock, gathered eggs, and generally made themselves useful before stuffing a chunk of bread in their pockets and walking several miles to school. I knew I could be a better person if only I had chores. I begged my mother, who struggled mightily but failed to come up with anything satisfying. She said I could set the table for dinner, but we rarely had family dinners and that wasn't a before-school chore anyway. Neither was emptying waste baskets or cleaning my room. A real chore had to be necessary, it had to be physical, and it had to be done before breakfast.

Half a century later, I still don't ride or live in Wyoming, but here at Itchy Dog Farm I finally have chores. Every morning I feed the dogs and cats and fill their water bowls. I free the chickens from the Chicken Palace, toss out scratch for their breakfast, and check their water. I feed and medicate the equines, fill the water trough, and make a slurry of moistened alfalfa cubes and beet pulp to supplement their next meal. Only then am I free to make my own breakfast and get to work.

I'm not saying that's why I love Itchy Dog Farm, but it doesn't hurt.

Spidering

Craig and I went spidering today. We took a guided walk through the Prairie Creek Preserve led by local spidermen Jon Reiskind and Mark Stowe.

Jon Reiskind was for many years chair of our county Democratic Party, and the handful of people on the tour that I recognized ranged from left-leaning to left-flat-out-fallen-down. Somebody should study this. Is arachnophilia a marker for progressive political views? Or is it only tree-hugging liberals that will happily spend a Saturday morning tromping through mosquito infested woods looking for spider webs? Maybe Republicans do their spidering online with their smart phones while waiting for stock prices to update.

I have always respected spiders. I will not kill one, and I let them live in my house at the corners of the ceilings, catching anything that flies their way. On the other hand, I am not a big fan of fangs and hairy legs. That tension makes spidering more of an adventure than, say, going birding or painting the dining room. It makes me feel vaguely virtuous.

Spiders are among the most ancient of creatures. The first true spiders have been identified in Carboniferous rocks more than 300 million years old and apparently they were quite similar to the most primitive spider order today. Jon told us rather sadly that no spider webs have survived in the fossil record. All spiders have 8 legs and abdominal spinnerets for silk-making. Most have 8 eyes although a few species have 6 eyes. Spider blood is pale blue because oxygen is bound to copper rather than iron, and they use hydraulic pressure to extend their legs.

The first thing Mark showed us was the tube of a purse web spider. The female makes a tube out of silk and disguises it with bits of leaf and mold so it looks just like a tendril or bit of vine. The spider stays inside the tube and waits for her prey to alight on the outside. Then she stabs it with her fangs and pulls it into the tube for dinner. Mark said once we recognized one tube, we'd be surprised how often we'd see them all around us. I haven't stopped staring at the bases of trees since.

The wolf spider is one of my favorites. They do not build webs but hunt on the ground. When my kids were young we used to go outside at night and shine flashlights across the grass. The spiders' eyes reflect the light, and the lawn lights up with hundreds of glowing pin-points. The wolf spider is the official state spider of South Carolina, the only state to have an official state spider.

The most common spider in these parts is the golden orb weaver, called banana spiders in Florida for reasons I have never understood. There are a godzillion golden orb weavers and no banana plants in Florida that I know of. They build beautiful yellow webs and will eat and reweave half of their webs every night. When you look at a web there is always a neater and a rattier half.

The spiney spider, also called they spineybacked orb weaver, is also common. These are compact little guys that are white with black spots and have either black or red spikes on their backs. We have a spiney spider right by our front porch. In fact, we have all the spiders that we saw at the Preserve right here; perhaps the next spider tour should be at Itchy Dog Farm.

There is, however, something to be said for the field trip. Prairie Creek Preserve, managed by the Alachua Conservation Trust, is home to the Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery, a green burial ground. Our group was supposed to meet at a trailhead some distance from the cemetery but we missed the sign and ended up in the cemetery itself. The cemetery is maintained as conservation land and any proceeds from the burials go to purchasing and conserving more land. Nothing but a message board marks the cemetery grounds; there are no fences or paths or headstones, just woods and grassland. Looking for more purse web spiders, I almost literally stumbled upon a grave. It was new enough to still be mounded and covered on top with fresh pine needles. Someone had lovingly planted native pinecone ginger around the perimeter. A marker about the size of a silver dollar recorded the occupant's name. I have up until now been enthusiastic about green burial, but I thought this grave seemed lonely and vulnerable out there in the woods with the spiders and bugs. Craig, who does not much think about burial, said it looked quiet and peaceful. We will go back there sometime soon to bird.

(I did not take these photos, I got them off the Web.)

Andrea's story, or, How we came to have a House Chicken

There are many mysteries at Itchy Dog Farm, but what everybody wants to know is, how did we come to have a House Chicken? This is actually a story of suffering and triumph. I thought it would be a good way to start off The Blog at Itchy Dog Farm.

Craig and I have had backyard chickens for several years now. Our custom is to get day-old chicks, or "peepers" as I call them, at the Feed Store each spring. Even in Florida its too cold for them to be outside, so we start them in a galvanized tub with a heat lamp in the living room. In the evenings we socialize them by holding one or two while we watch TV for an hour or so.

The Feed Store gets three or four different breeds of chicks every week, and its fun to study the schedule and decide which we want to try out. This year we selected four Brahmas, two light and two dark. Brahmas are heavier birds than most, good for both meat and eggs, and one of only a few breeds to have feathers on their feet. By coincidence, we had also discovered Breaking Bad years behind everyone else in the world, and were watching our way through a marathon of Netflix episodes. We named the four peepers after female characters in Breaking Bad -- Lydia, Andrea, Skyler and Holly. I would have named one Jane, after Jesse's girlfriend who Walter White allowed to OD, but we already have a Rhode Island Red hen named Jane.

When our peepers get big enough we shuffle them between dog crates in the yard and in the Chicken Palace, and finally they graduate to free range chicks that sleep in the chicken palace with the big chickens at night. Tragically, one night some varmint got into the Palace (we still don't know exactly how, although now it is sealed up tighter than a can of spam) and ate (most of) Lydia, Skyler and Holly, leaving very disgusting carnage behind. Everything likes chicken.

Our rooster Big Red and the larger hens were unscathed, as was Andrea, who we found tucked under a board against the opposite wall from her sisters' bodies. All the chickens were spooked, but Andrea was super-spooked and refused to return to the chicken palace at night. We couldn't think of anything else to do but move one of the dog crates onto our screen porch at the back of the house. Andrea moved into the dog crate, retiring there every night after the other chickens settled into the palace.

At dusk Andrea and the other chickens would gather just outside the Chicken Compound, until some chicken signal was given and all but Andrea would go through the Compound yard to roost in the Palace. Craig would go out and latch them in, and Andrea would follow him back to our own front door where she'd cluck around until it was time to pick her up and take her around back to the screen porch. At some point we figured, might as well just let her in the front door. So we opened the door, and she strutted in, looked around, and hopped up on the back of the sofa.

So that's become our nightly routine. We tuck the other chickens in to roost, Andrea struts in through the front door, and we all have quality family time together until its time to take her to her crate and go to bed.

And that's how we came to have a house chicken.