December 2023

December 18 White egg mystery

For some time now there has been a mystery involving the appearance of white chicken(?) eggs randomly on the place, usually in or close to the northwest quadrant. You see, none of the resident chickens lay white eggs. Their eggs are mostly a shade of beige, but some a light shade of green. Plus, they lay them in the boxes designed for that purpose in the chicken house, not indiscriminately around the prairie.

It is my understanding that hens don’t produce more than one color of egg. The color of a given hen’s eggs stays the same for the chicken’s entire career. So where are these eggs coming from? Mostly the eggs are consumed by something, foxes most likely. A couple of times we have encountered intact eggs, but that’s a couple out of, I don’t know, two or three dozen scattered over the last year.

Where are the eggs coming from? Does someone else in the neighborhood keep chickens? We’re not aware of any. And if they did, how do the eggs get on SA? Any of the night critters that would steal and eat eggs wouldn’t bother bringing them here to consume them. Any such activity during the day would eventually be spotted by one of us so this must be happening at night. No respectable chicken is going to be wandering the neighborhood laying eggs at night. Such behavior would certainly tempt fate and likely result in the chicken(s) being themselves consumed. It is also unlikely a special breed of flying chicken would so consistently bomb SA with their cackle berries. Could be a ghost chicken, some fowl phantom of the night. Goodness knows there have been plenty of chickens come and go on SA. Besides, the eggs are real enough. Maybe it’s Santa Chicken, but the gift eggs aren’t limited to once a year and there is too much naughtyness here on SA to qualify for Santa Chicken benevolence. It could also be the person who regularly drives down our street and throws out empy beer cans also has more eggs than he knows what to do with so he chunks eggs out his car window as well. He would have to have a pretty good arm to lob an egg as far from the street as some we encounter so that doesn’t really work.

The pictures below were taken at Thanksgiving and are indicative of my photographic expertise, sad to say. The subjects and poses were all pretty good but the lighting was terrible. I developed them in black and white to hide as much as possible the noise and lack of clarity from the poor lighting. My apologies to all.

December 23 Rain on the Plain Just when we thought it would never rain again, it did. A few days of sunshine were sacrificed to accumulate 1.11 inches of much needed moisture. It was nice to get a break from constant watering and because the temperature was generally cool, the moisture has lasted a while. Matter of fact it is raining now, lightly, which, even if it doesn’t amount to much, will augment what we got last week. White Christmas?

Turns out we had a white day before day before Christmas this afternoon. No, it didn’t snow. It hailed along with high wind and rain about mid afternoon. There was a rumbling of thunder to warn of what was coming, had anyone heeded it. The chickens did not and, lacking wits enough to take shelter in the chicken house, instead huddled outside the chicken yard. Rebecca, Abigail and Chris raced to their rescue, rain, wind and hail be damned, scooped them up and put them in the chicken house, getting themselves drenched in the process.

Abigail is back in the fold. She livens things up and everyone is excited to have her among us.

Earlier this week tree trimmers working for the power company came by to trim a couple of our trees. Fortunately, they were able to set up the truck with the cherry picker on the street and not come on the place. With the ground soft from the recent rain, their big old rig would certainly have left some ruts, which are such a pleasure to mow over. As it was, the only two trees needing trimming were the two junipers on either side of the driveway close to the well. The tree on the south side had two main trunks and sometime this year, wind, I suppose, broke off the top ten or so feet of one of the trunks. It wasn’t doing any harm so I had put off trimming the dead part out, which would have been mildly challenging since the break was some 12 feet up which would have required the pole saw to reach. Talking to the gentlemen doing the trimming, I asked if they could cut the broken trunk off at the break. At the time, Mike was in the cherry picker trimming in the area of the broken trunk and his boss Ty asked him to drop it. Later after they had finished and left, I examined their work and saw that they had cut down the broken piece as I requested. I was expecting to trim the limbs and cut up the broken trunk for firewood, but found that they loaded it along with all their other trimmings in their truck. What’s more, earlier in the week I had added more trimming from a juniper next to the pond to the accumulation of trimmings I already had started underneath the juniper they trimmed and they hauled that stuff off as well. I wasn’t sorry I didn’t get to harvest the firewood. There is plenty of other dead around I can cut.

My lucky day. And to think, I hadn’t let them bring their truck on the place to trim trees in the backyards of houses along Goliad Street. That should have been done from the easement running between the properties but people have blocked it off so they couldn’t use their cherry picker. People had to climb high into the trees to do the necessary trimming. Lucky for me it was a different outfit, or they might not have been so obliging.

Videos on conservation efforts you might find interesting…

December 27 We celebrated Christmas Eve in the cozy confines of 1911. Delicacies were consumed, apéritif’s imbibed, and presents exchanged. Next evening there was a similar sequence of events in Wylieville. Then the next day we celebrated Sophia’s birthday with a trip to Barnes & Noble, hamburgers at Freddie’s, bowling and other assorted games, cake, ice cream and more presents.

John and Kathryn entertained me in their home one day and Kathryn, Devon and Dennis joined us for a pleasant afternoon at the Dallas Arboretum. Earlier in in the week Sophia expressed interest in visiting the Arboretum for her birthday. Later in the week the weather warned up and we took advantage. We wrapped up the week and year with a round of fondue.