Here it is almost five in the morning of July 30th, nine months after I left Los Angeles and life couldn't be better. Yes I miss everyone back home but I am so happy with my life and the decisions I've made so far. I just want to write down how I feel because I don't ever want to forget how wonderful it's been so far.
This month I've been living on the farm. Everyday something wonderful and amazing happens on a farm wether it be a happy occasion or a sad one. My friends Jeanie and Doug are the owners of Dojea's Nest and Dojea's Stables. Each have their hobbies and responsibilities around the farm along with the farm hands which keep it operating on a daily basis.
Over the weekend I had been birding out back, and when I say out back it really is the back three hundred acres! As I walked past the hog pasture I noticed one of the sows wading in the furthest water hole and away from the rest of the heard. I noticed how huge she was, she maybe weighs in the four to five hundred pound range. It was a hot and humid day and I just figured she was cooling off in this spot because it was a shady and cool spot.
I continued with my birding and got some more wonderful pictures of birds on the ranch. I had not seen any Hawks or Eagles so far but this day I went to the furthest alfalfa field and got to see this red tail hawk fly away from me.
I had heard it but had not spotted her until it was almost too late but I did get a couple of bad pictures. For my friends in the city that have no idea what I'm talking about. I know you're thinking that it's easy to spot a big bird like a hawk up in a tree. Let me give you an idea of what it looks like when you hear a bird make a call and you try to find it in this field!
This is only a small section of the field. Can you spot the wild turkey running away and diving into the underbrush? The only reason I could see them was because the alfalfa had just been cut and baled a couple of days before. I also saw this white tailed doe running through the neighboring soy field. She must have been a good quarter mile away from me and I had to really zoom in to get this picture.
Sometimes when I'm out on the trails other critters surprise me as much as I surprise them when I come around bends or over small hills. I usually am not successful getting good pictures because they take off into the heavy underbrush.
Here's a white tail doe that we've seen across a hay field down by the house. She's got twin fawns but it's rare that I have my camera ready and when they spot me they dive into the undergrowth.
Here's a groundhog that was eating from the patch of grass in the middle of the trail and as I came around the bend it heard me and took off also. When I zoomed in on him I noticed he had no tail and it must have been lucky because whatever predator tried getting it only got its tail!
Can you spot the baby cottontail running away from me?
Some mornings it's been so foggy I can't go out early because I just know I'm not going to get any birds. This morning Jeanie and I were sitting down in the walkout basement enjoying some coffee after she had fed her baby hyacinth macaw. We had seen a white tail buck in the alfalfa field behind the house, but of course I didn't have my camera on me. On this particular fog filled morning I did have my camera and was just waiting for the fog to lift before I went birding. All of a sudden out of the corner of my eye I spotted the buck through the fog and bolted to my feet. All I remember yelling to Jeanie as I ran upstairs was BUCK! I knew I had to get to the upper deck if I wanted a decent picture. When I got up there I could see that there were two bucks and a doe, or you do buck without horns, way out almost out of range. One was a six point and the other was an eight point. They didn't stay very long but I got my pictures!
Back to the baby Hyacinth macaw. She, I always call babies she before even knowing the sex, is doing great because of Jeanies dedication to her birds. She's the one responsible for Dojea's Nest, an aviary that raises Hyacinth Macaws. Jeanie has raised many species of birds, most of them rare, now she only concentrates on the Hyacinths. The aviary is spotless and every need is met for her pair of breeders. She'd rather have a small number of birds than to overcrowd them with having too many pairs in the space available. This allows her to concentrate on them and give them all of what they need.
There's a full service kitchen area out in the aviary. Including some play gyms for her pets the African Cape parrot and her three year old Hyacinth baby. The aviary is airconditioned and heated depending on the time of year.
Sometimes I get to play with Mya the Hyacinth....
The latest baby Hyacinth is doing great and every day you see changes in its growth and appearance. Here she is at two weeks old. It's so hard to imagine that this little thing that needs 24 hour care will turn into one of the most beautiful creatures in the world.
One of the first questions people ask is why are you raising the baby and not the parents. The answer is that she would rather have the parents raising the baby for at least the first month but that's not possible. Some pairs never learn to sit and incubate their eggs properly. This pair doesn't do a good job and they were given many opportunities to do so. So in order to get live babies their eggs need to be artificially incubated and the baby needs to be hand raised from day one. Hand feeding around the clock every hour to hour and a half for the first week and then gradually extending the time period in between as it grows and you can get more and more volume of food into its crop. It takes tremendous amount of dedication, loss of sleep and love for these magnificent creatures. It's true and dedicated avicultureists like Jeanie that have helped to save them from extinction.
Back to the hogs. I had mentioned to Doug about the one sow in the back that was resting in the back pond and he told me she was probably getting ready to give birth. We had been talking about Doug taking me out into the swamp in the Argo, an all terrain vehicle which takes you pretty much anywhere on the property. So later on that day we went out and he drove by where the sow was and he noticed she had made a huge nest out of fresh field growth. She had clear a twenty or so foot area of all growth and piled it all up in the middle of the clearing.
Sure enough the next day he mentioned to me that she had given birth. So of course I had to go back there and see the babies. I walked up quietly to the area and was careful not to disturb her. She was resting in the shade and a few feet away all the babies were sleeping in a pile.
She was exhausted from the ordeal. As they moved every now and then I think I counted around eleven or twelve. As I moved in closer I also noticed reality, life on the farm also brings you bad news. There was a dead baby behind the sow. One never knows if it was the last one and it wasn't strong enough to live after many hours of labor or if it was trampled by the sow accidentally. Life goes on and you work with what's alive.
It's amazing to me how gentle these five hundred pound animals are with their two or three pound babies. She heard the babies making sounds and she woke up immediately and called out to them. The one baby that was making the noise came over and just rested on her snout and then went back to the pile and fell asleep!
The Argo ride was lots of fun and I wish I had more pictures but it was impossible trying to hold the camera and myself if I didn't want to fall into the swamp! This is the view you get when going through think undergrowth......
Then you come to beautiful scenes like this....
Then sometimes you can get stuck and you have to pull yourself out of it with the wench....
But it's scenes like this that make it so wonderful riding out into the hidden spots of the farm. I was looking at the patch of red flowers when all of a sudden I asked Doug to stop so I could take a picture. There was a baby fawn right in the middle, not moving at all but very aware of our presence.
Yes life on the farm is a lot of hard work but there's also play time in between. Some of the friends that work around the farm come over and enjoy the pool in the middle of the day on hot days.
Then everyone has evening chores to tend to. By the time you get to bed it's been sixteen to eighteen hour days with a meal or two in between and your exhausted. Is it all worth it? I'm not sure because I'm here in only one of the summer months. I can't imagine how this place runs in the winter when there's several feet of snow and an entirely different set of challenges are present. I can tell you that life is very different here from my life back in Los Angeles. People have no idea what it takes to run a farm anymore or what it takes to raise their food. Everyone should take the opportunity to visit rural America and get to see first hand the hard work and dedication it takes to get the food on their table. The current views of farmers would be so much different than what it is.
Oh well, it's now six thirty in the morning and this is one of the sun rises I photographed the other day. Enjoy your day because I know I will, I'm going out to photograph some horses to update the ranches website!
