Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,35
in a stiff mass, like it was matted from the pillow. She looked startled. Her mouth opened and he thought she might scream. He dropped the bucket and ran.
If a cow is empty after two attempts at bulling (or artificial insemination) the best place for her is the butcher. A cow is full for two hundred and eighty-three days before she has her calf.
The udder of the cow is made up of four glands or sections, each with its own outlet or teat. The orifice of each teat is controlled by the purse-string muscle. How the cow controls this muscle determines if she is a hard or an easy milker.
If a cow aborts, due to contagion, the calf and membranes should be burned, buried where they lie, and a fire lit over the whole area. Unslaked lime should be spread over the charred calf before the hole is filled in. The cow is now a carrier. On aborting she will have licked her mucus-stained hindquarters and then her shoulders and sides. Other cows will lick these areas. The whole herd is now infected. Expect heavy losses.
An easy milker in the flush of her first lactation may need milking at lunchtime. A drop of collodion applied to each teat will prevent leakage.
Mastitis: prevention is better than penitence – be vigilant, follow the gospel of hygiene.
Rumen inoculation: take a partially chewed cud from the mouth of each mature cow and place it in the mouth of each calf; when it is swallowed the calf will ingest the correct germs for rumen digestion.
The milker should be encouraged to consider his hands as an extension of the udder. The same scrupulous standard of cleanliness applies to both.
A quality milker demonstrates a calm authority. He milks the herd fast and dry. The atmosphere is of relaxed arousal.
Two huntsmen spiders prowl Harry’s bedroom ceiling. They’ve been hanging around for weeks in their opposing corners like boxers waiting on the bell. Both of them are dark and plump, the size of bread-and-butter plates. When he wakes up one of the spiders is on his pillow. ‘Frankly,’ Harry says to it, ‘this is going a bit too far.’ Edna’s favourite cup tips off the draining board and smashes in the sink, his bootlace snaps in his fingers as he is tying it. Leaving the house to go out to milk he traps his thumb in the fly-wire door.
But here comes Pauline; her pleated feet, her thriftiness, the bunched flesh behind her knees, her pudding chest, her liquid eyes. The shy way she has of dipping her head as she steps up into the shed each morning, as if she thinks she must push against the dimness to be let in. He reaches for her udder. The first milk spurts over the back of his hand and drips between his fingers. It’s as warm as blood.
The first egg was laid on Sunday,
by Wednesday
there was another.
It takes only a few days to make an egg,
and comparatively it is much smaller,
and no doubt easier
to birth,
than a child.
*Mues assisted with the mirror stick.
He’s not much chop at holding it still.
And looking through binoculars
is dangerous at height
– all of your weight seems held
in the eyes.
I nearly toppled off
the dairy roof.
September 10
4.50 am – just after dawn.
A few stars still linger as I climb.
Mum is absent.
There are two white eggs
of roughly equal volume
on the floor of the hollow.
The eggs are warm and the air too,
her body heats the hollow
– makes a woody oven of it
so the eggs continue baking
even when she is away.
I don’t pick them up,
just mark them with the crayon,
one, two,
and climb down quickly.
The day feels a bit special
and I keep thinking back on them,
the family clutch
– two pale moons baking in a tree.
Club-Toe is a poor incubator;
sloppy,
reluctant even.
She hops inside dutifully at the change of shift,
but once Mum or Dad
have flown away
she’s off;
loafing,
preening,
falling into a mid-afternoon torpor
on some distant branch.
When the parents return
she darts back in again,
pretending
that she never left.
September 26
5.10 am
Mum leaves the nest
just as I climb.
There’s a decent breeze;
the threat of rain later.
The noise of the wind in the leaves
sounds like washing on the line.
I suppose the egglings
can hear it all
– maybe a little muffled through the shell?
They are grubbier and moved in position,
all in good nick though.
Did you see the morse code lightning
when that storm came in last night?
I worried that the nest tree
would be struck,
and when Sip finally stopped howling
I fell asleep
and dreamed the eggs were in my bed.
October 7
I climbed mid-morning
with Dad on duty
– watching from