Seasons

This is a blog post I wrote seven years ago, when we lived on Llamas and Niyamas Farm outside Portland, Oregon. Even though we're spending this October on Camano Island, the essence of the season is the same.

Seasons

It's mid-October and the world is changing. Greens are blending to golds on the trees outside my window. The sun is lower in the sky, sending softer light onto our hillside. The days are shorter, the nights longer. Rain falls regularly on our summer-parched pastures, soaking the llamas backs, and sending the chickens to hunker closely under their overarching tree. The season is changing.

I spend most of my days outside, working on this project or that, and I find that I'm more aware of the season's change than ever before. For one, it's more pronounced than in the Bay Area, so there's more difference to note. But more, I'm blending with my surroundings now, watching the sky and birds, the trees and wind. I'm learning about our hillside, the pond, the new orchard, our llamas and chickens.

The fruit trees are bringing life, an energy of their own to the pasture above our house. I'm taller than them still, but their aura is bigger, richer, softer. They've learned the sun's pattern, and have built their leaves to match, drinking in sunlight to fuel their hard work of growing up. Their roots have taken hold and explored their underground neighborhood. They've discovered water pockets and mineral caches, sending massive supplies of materials upward to the leaf factories breathing in and out, in and out. I spread wood chips and llama droppings in a lake at their feet, gifts to help them thrive.

The chickens murmur softly as they wander about their chores, checking this, pecking that. They scurry to meet me, as I open the gate, running, flying, calling out; I'm an exciting event in their day. I might bring treats or fresh water or mounds of grain. They follow along around me, remarking busily, ready to be a part of whatever I might have in mind.

The llamas watch intently and gather close in, sizing me up, looking for apples or pears. After a leisurely greeting, they turn to graze alongside while I dig or lop or rake. They clomp gracefully along, with an occasional cavort, gleefully snorting.

The pastures are turning green after the summer drought while the trees are turning golden in preparation for the cold; a changing of the guard, trading dormancy for robust vitality and vice versa, a biannual handoff amongst hillside companions.

I wade through this rich tapestry, watching the sky, the clouds, the sunset, and I say to myself, what a wonderful world.

Chickens Are My Favorite Dinosaurs

I've been listening to an audiobook, A Grown-up Guide to Dinosaurs, and it's quite delightful. It appeals to my logical mind, a throw back to my years as a practicing scientist, and I'm learning a lot about things that I didn't understand before.

One of my favorite lines so far is from a series of build-up statements. The book starts by asking children to name their favorite dinosaur, and the variety of answers is impressive. Then as the book continues, the author asks each interviewed scientist to name his or her favorite dinosaur. The answers remain varied, and the reasons given, by children and adults, are soundly logical and sweetly entertaining.

And then we get to the guy who states that his favorite dinosaur is a chicken. It's the launch pad to the presentation of all we've learned (I use the non-royal we here, denoting all of the paleologists around the world, with absolutely no help from me, who have unraveled the jigsaw puzzle, a pleasing mixture of metaphors) that link the world of birds with the world of dinosaurs.

I am not surprised by this revelation.

Farm tour, complete with dinosaurs

When Dambara and I lived on the Llamas and Niyamas Farm outside of Gaston, OR, we had a small flock of chickens. The chickens were a delightful component to the farm, as they wandered around in small bunches, visiting their favorite scratching spots or coming over to see what we were up to. Their little bodies are feathery half-moons that tip forward to peck, then backward to trot, then forward to peck, little pitchers of delight, pouring their cheer onto every nook and cranny of the farm.

They also had a choir. In the morning, the full choir would gather in the stable to take turns in the nesting boxes, waiting for their turn, sometimes impatiently, because out of four nesting boxes, there was one favorite box that everyone preferred to use, and those broody slow pokes could drive the wanna-be-in-that-box-ers to operatic crescendos.

The choir had some notable soloists as well. Most of the ladies were murmurers, chuckling and clucking softly amongst themselves, telling stories and jokes as they sauntered around, but occasionally a soloist would hold forth from somewhere out on the hillside pasture. There was the jungle lady, who parroted and macawed her way through the morning and even into the afternoon.  And then there was the Pterodactyl.

One might wonder how one would recognize the call of a Pterodactyl, recording equipment being rare in the jurassic period. But when that chicken sang out across the valley, it conjured visions of T. rexes salivating, or the odd Stegosaurus lumbering along, brushing aside giant ferns and conifers, and a Pterodactyl (which is actually not a dinosaur, which did surprise me) gliding overhead, its pointy head swiveling this way and that, singing its morning song.

The single artifact that brought the world's paleologists to the surprising connection between birds and dinosaurs was, quite simply, feathers. Feathers don't preserve easily over the eons, so they are a rare find. But found they are, and you can hear all about it in A Grown-up Guide to Dinosaurs, which, I fear, may be an audible.com original, available only there. But it is a delightful listen, and you might learn a lot of thought-provoking ideas.

And your favorite dinosaur might turn out to be a chicken.