Second Spring

When I last posted we were on the cusp of spring.

I didn't report this, but we had temperatures of 26 degrees some days, and all our snow was gone. But then on April 17, it was 19 C, and the next day it was .3 and snowing. It snowed for three days, and we accumulated more snow in those 3 days than we did all winter.

Today, spring is coming back, and again the snow is melting. I took this picture of a disgusted looking robin last Tuesday. He and his mate were sunning themselves in the morning, after having flown here from some less frigid clime for many days, to enjoy a day of balmy weather followed by a week or so of blizzards and frozen food. I notice there are a really high number of robins this year -- I see flocks of them now which I don't recall having seen before.

Speaking of flocks, this group of waxwings (there were almost 40 altogether) visited my crabapple tree yesterday. I apologize for the distant perspective, but I had some help from the mastiffs once I grabbed the camera and was only able to take the pic from inside the house.

In farm news, we have fixed the front waterer. I needed to get an appliance switch and a blockheater cord, and after some wiring and fiddling about with innards, the thing is working. Next up will be the waterer in the back, which is a more commercial cattle waterer -- most of the parts are available at the Co-op. But it needs some plumbing repairs and the whole element/heating/thermostat assembly will need replacing. Companies supply thermostats with these units, but after talking to farmers you find that they all disconnect the thermostat because it tends to corrode and fail, and instead hardwire the element to the electrical box. Because these units have a float mechanism to supply water instead of a pump, the heating element (which keeps all the plumbing from freezing) is just turned off at the breaker box when it's no longer winter. I guess these waterers are more popular where the weather is milder and the farmers are taken by surprise by frost.

If you are at all interested in birds or the non-human world, I recommend the book I'm reading: The Mind of the Raven. It depicts the fascinating lives of ravens, which are extremely intelligent creatures with complex social behaviours. More complex for example than a group of teenagers on a sofa playing xbox. I've always found the reluctance to believe that animals think both a blockheaded example of human arrogance and a lack of imagination. I remember first encountering that idea (that animals are incapable of thought or reason) in a philosophy class. But since these academic notions are usually hatched from detached observation, I would invite the philosophers to observe a group of people in a mall and ask them to prove the notion that mallgoers are capable of thought simply by observing their behavior. The chattering masses indeed. The missing ingredient in scientific observation, it seems to me, is empathy and imagination. If a scientist can't imagine that elephants communicate on a subsonic level, how can he or she hope even to observe that?

Next time you want to call your cat, look at him and say, "meeee" in a high voice. "Meeee" is a cat syllable that means "come here". It's always useful to know a foreign language.