Yesterday was an Ultimate Tomato day!! Our first baby bred and born here appeared. Yes, that's right folks! Arpee has produced offspring! Blucinda has not left the nest for even a minute yet so I think more will be making their way out of their eggs today. Meanwhile the incubator eggs are not looking very hopeful though I still have a few days to make that final call.
This brings me to something we discover anew as each season unfolds. Humans unnecessarily complicate natural processes so often. We throw this that and the other fertilizer on plants in neat little rows to accomplish what scatter planting and mycorhizal fungi can achieve. We second guess the natural instincts of our animals and become helicopter moms to our chickens (side note...we don't have chickens, people keep asking me about my chickens?). We apply human logic and emotion to animal interactions and behaviors.
We lost our other blue slate hen this spring to predators and it was 100% my fault. She laid a sizeable clutch under a tree just outside of our yard. "Well that's not safe!" I thought with my human brain and removed the clutch and put a decoy "egg" where I thought would be a safe place in the turkey pen. Blucinda decided to take over that spot but Blusephine was having none of it. She wandered farther into the field and selected a tree about 100 yards away from the turkey yard. Well obviously that wasn't safe either so this time I took her four eggs and put them into the nesting area I had chosen. She apparently was tired of this game and took off into the woods to find a place I wouldn't mess with and...well...that was that.
Now during all this moving around and finding of eggs Arpee the tom was ALWAYS with Blusephine. With my human brain I equated his constant presence with concern, that he was accompanying her so he could keep track of his flock. After her final disappearance Arpee started going into the hut where Blucinda was brooding. I started noticing more slate gray feathers than there should have been and even a couple of crushed eggs! So I looked up whether or not toms should be kept with brooding hens.
Big.
Fat.
Nope!
Turkey toms will continue to try and mate with the females on the nest often crushing the eggs and sometimes even killing the hen herself. This explained Blusephine's wandering behavior. I was actually putting her nest in immediate danger rather than possible eventual danger and she was trying to tell me.
So we built Arpee a bachelor pad and I sat down outside of Blucinda's hut and promised her I wasn't going to mess with her. Eventually she rolled a few dud eggs out and I cleaned those up for her but that was it. Even on snowy sleety icy days I trusted her and her instincts, and look how well she did! With no other female turkey to show her how to do it and actually she herself was hatched in an incubator somehow she still accomplished this staggering feat of stamina.
Currently we also have a red golden pheasant named Artemis sitting on a clutch of eggs. Both breeders I got my red goldens from said there was no way a hen would ever sit her eggs. It has now been over a week and I have not seen her leave her post even once. She is not a cuddly bird and she startles up when anyone gets too close, but for the sake of those eggs she will huddle in and stare me down now if I approach the nest. She's not leaving that spot! So I will trust her as well and patiently wait to see if she keeps at it.
The coturnix quails are another bird that I have been cautioned over and over that they will not brood eggs but I'm beginning to doubt that. Yes, the majority of the eggs are just popped out and sit where they drop but Liam (my awesome bird loving six year old) has now discovered three or four eggs grouped together three times. They get nestled into a little cup shaped depression in the straw and have a few pieces of straw covering them up. This seems like nesting behavior to me so the next time I see it I'm going to leave them alone and see what happens!
I'm going to get out of the way. I'm going to apply this to so many other areas in my life. How many opportunities have I worried away? How many discoveries have I limited with my intrusions? Most importantly, when has my meddling interrupted the growth or exploration of another being (be it human or not)?
The message in the cautionary tale of Blusephine the turkey is this: when our best efforts are just not panning out, when something just doesn't seem to be clicking I believe this is a message for us. A message that reads simply "get out of the way."
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