peaceable kingdom

it appears to matter none that my cat and chicken are vastly different creatures. typically, while the laws of nature more or less dictate the food chain, somehow the spirit of edward hicks exists between these two in my back yard.



cluck has been molting for what seems like forever; she's on egg making holiday. molting means fewer or no eggs and sometimes completely naked and chilly chickens. truth be told, her feathers do look a little scrappy, but she's kept a good number, certainly plenty to make her fluffywarm. still, the gazillion that have come out litter the yard, mixing in with the fallen cypress needles, nearly indistinguishably, soft rust on soft rust. i feel a haiku coming on.

we've bought eggs from anonymous donor chickens for many weeks now, but i'd never confess that to her. just yesterday, in fact, we were at newflower market and mason was wow'd by the red "EB" inscribed in a dotted red circle near the skinny end of Eggland's Best eggs. so sad he's such a dupe of marketing this early in the advertising game.

p	q	~p	~q	p q	p · q	p q	p q
T	T	F	F	T	T	T	T
T	F	F	T	T	F	F	F
F	T	T	F	T	F	T	F
F	F	T	T	F	F	T	T

it may be foolish, ok it is, to infer cause and effect here, but no sooner did i pass on those commercially available ones than cluck laid her first egg in ages. was i being rewarded for my unwavering love for and confidence in her? my unconditional positive regard? surely she is aware the cliche' "publish or perish" is not how i operate when it comes to her egg production, quality of life and longevity in general. still, i do appreciate her contribution to the breakfast menu.



for some time now dragon, our black kitty, and cluck essentially have shared the same outdoor spaces. since cluck's recent run-in with a very uninvited opossum interloper, she's less and less inclined to spend any time at all in her fancy schmancy a-frame coop w mezzanine level and easy access backdoor for egg retrieval. so she roosts on the back porch. sure, at this point it is pretty much covered in chicken excrement, but i do a fairly good job (well, sorta), chiseling, sweeping and hosing off the strata.

chilly as it has been these days, the back porch is now enclosed, thick plastic staple-gunned over the screened sections as well as the back door. and instead of logging on to heifer international to buy our friends bee hives or a zebu for their holiday gifts, or sending in that envelope to unicef to feed a few thousand children, we bought cluck and the kitty a space heater to ease my conscience that they are outdoors. deergawd, yes, animals forced to live outdoors, the way they were born.


flak tower

there's a metro shelf out there, a most perfect roosting spot providing a good view where she can survey the land and alert us to any approaching undesirables, sometimes mason and jeremiah fit that description, and in the past, dragon did as well until those two creatures somehow miraculously came upon détente within the last couple months.



but it goes beyond that really. a few times i've found them nuddled up (nuzzle+cuddle, it's mine but feel free) on the roost. it would not at all surprise me one iota if they have already discussed cross pollination possibilities, the days being short and nights long and cold, et cetera. they'll groom one another and even share food, getting along better than a lot of people i know in long term committed relationships. they both like whole wheat penne w parmesan equally well. cluck loves meow mix so i buy the variety w/o chicken in it (wouldn't that be gross), and dragon regularly and excitedly dives in to her lay pellets and scratch with no shame or remorse, but if the other neighborhood cats only knew...

so, cluck laid her first egg today in many weeks! i say it's cluck's, but being the empiricist i am, can't really be sure. because it was under the cat when i shoo'd him out of the her winter-towel-turban-nest. you know, male sea horses make fine incubators. and if by some biological miracle this jobbie hatches, i bet you anything i become a trazillionairre for having successfully, if not unwittingly, genetically engineered the first kitty/hen hybrid.