Spring has hit Seven Hills Farm West with a wallop. It
started with the canaries.
I have four of them in a rather large flight cage that takes
up a corner of my bedroom. The birds have a simple job—look pretty and sing.
The two girls look pretty and the two boys sing. A lot.
I don’t expect anything more from them. They are after all,
birds. But recently one of the girls, Rusty developed baby fever. She
spent the last two weeks shredding up the newspaper that lines the bottom of
the cage and ripping her pretty red feathers out to make a cute little nest.
Which would be fine if she actually used one of the little wooden boxes that I
keep in the cage for that purpose. But no…. she decided that the perfect house
is one of the food containers.
It works out well for her. Since she rarely leaves the nest, she can eat where she lives. The other birds are a little bummed
though. It doesn’t matter that they have four other choices for their dining
pleasure. They want to eat out of that
one. So they hover around the nest looking vaguely confused and chirping. I
mean even more confounded than birds generally look. Rusty doesn’t seem to
care. Every few hours she stands up, fluffs her feathers and with a small sigh,
sits down on the eggs again.
I’d be more excited if we hadn’t been through this drill
before. This is the third time Rusty has taken to a nest. The first time I was
intrigued. I don’t’ really care if we have babies—actually I do. Canaries are
such terrible parents it’s amazing that the species continues at all. Their
parenting skills are non-existent. In the past the infants, which look more like
pterodactyls than domestic birds, have survived only days before their moms
have knocked them out of the nest and onto the ground. By the time I find them, there are no more. It’s
a little tragedy every time.
So I’d be perfectly content to have no eggs under Rusty’s
butt. Sadly though, there are always eggs. She does take care of
them—carefully turning them, fluffing over them and only leaving the nest long
enough to eat and drink. Nature is
amazing though. Just when I’ve decided that it’s time to remove the eggs and
let her move on, she does it herself. One morning she’s just over them, and
kicks them out of the nest onto the cage floor. I always feel a little sad. She
doesn’t seem to care.
Hopefully Lucy, the other mother-to-be in our farmette, will
take parenthood a little more seriously. Lucy is my recently retired show
horse.
Our partnership has lasted ten years. We had a good
relationship—I gave her lots of snacks, the best possible care, and she saved
my ass when it was in the saddle and only bit me occasionally. It seemed like a
fair tradeoff.
Lucy is the most talented horse I’ve ever had. Together we
have won dozens of championships and muddled through hundreds of horse shows.
If she had a more capable, more moneyed partner, she’d probably be famous.
Instead she had to put up with me.
Sadly she reinjured her leg at a horse show last year, and
even with the best medical treatment (surgery, rest, stem cells and lasers) she
didn’t heal well enough to return to work. So I decided to breed her.
Breeding a horse, unless it’s Zenyatta, is not a wise
financial decision. By the time you’ve bred the horse, paid for the stallion and
raised the baby, it’s cheaper to buy a trained adult. But for me it was about
emotion. I wasn’t ready to let Lucy go yet. (It's not like she was going far- even if she doesn't get pregnant, she'll live in the backyard with the other retirees.)
Picking a stallion is a little like using Match.com—but
there are no loser coffee dates. And unlike online dating, it’s fun.
I thumbed through the Chronicle
of the Horse stallion issue the way some people look at the Tiffany catalog.
I picked about six prospects. Finally my trainer stepped in and helped whittle
my choices down to the winner. Like many of the nicest guys, he’s Canadian. He
was campaigned by an amateur and is an amazing mover—which is Lucy’s biggest
fault—and almost as good a jumper as she is. All in all a good choice.
Lucy went to the clinic last week to be bred —sport horse
breeding is not romantic. There are no
candles, soft lights, or even another horse in the room. Think turkey baster
and you have the picture.
She goes back for her recheck this week. If all goes well she’ll have a baby on the ground in 2015. And people keep telling me horses, unlike canaries, are great and natural mothers.
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