Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Happy Earth Day!  How do you celebrate the Earth?  I tell Mosquito and Cob-weaver that everyday is Earth Day and we celebrate her by listening.  Remember our story about listening to the plants?

Today, we are listening to flies.  Lots and lots and lots and lots of flies.  Flies of all sizes, shapes and colors, inside the house, and outside, everywhere flies.  Why?  Because chickens and flies go together like mustard and ketchup.  Remember this before you get your own chickens. Flies love poop and chickens, especially 8 chickens, poop A LOT.  Flies do us a great service in that way, cleaning poop, and dead and rotting things. Someone has to. On hot days like today, they are everywhere.  We are trying to clean the poop before the flies lay eggs in them.  We are raking, we are mulching, we are cleaning the coop daily... and still flies.  Our house is like that character in Charlie Brown, Pig Pen, next to all our neighbors.  I tell myself these adult flies are from eggs hatched before we were cleaning the chicken yard daily and that no new fly eggs are hatching.  I hope that is true.  I wonder how long an adult fly lives?

Mosquito and Cob-weaver are fly experts.  This is not the first time we've had lots of flies. We've had our home chickens for quite some time.  They have discovered at least 5 kinds and given them names.  There are the barn or manure flies I wrote about before, which are tiny and fly in circles in still areas, like inside the house, at the front door and the back door.  There are also greenies, blueies, zebras, and mini zebras.  The thorax of a fly is beautifully iridescent, a color hard to describe and hard to capture in a drawing.  We found a that Crazy Aaron's Super Fly and Super Scarab Thinking Putty matches their amazing colors.  Zebra and Blueies are the biggest.  Their buzzing flight is louder than a bee.  Mosquito and Cob-weaver know the flies so well because they've been catching them for years.  They make frozen treats for the chickens with them and put them in observation jars among other things.  They have nets but now can catch them by hand.  In the last year they've begun marking their backs with our queen pen.  This is a special red pen used to mark the queen bee in the bee hive to make her easier to find. They put red dots on the flies backs and then let them go.  We often find red-dotted flies around.  From this evidence, we can tell that adult flies live for quite some time- at least a month or more.  Although we aren't doing this scientifically, scientists often use this technique to study animal populations.  It's called mark-recapture.  I used it when I was a scientist banding song birds and tagging monarch butterflies.  Using mark-recapture you can find out how old an animal is, it territory or migration path, how long it stays in an area, how much it eats, and many other interesting things.

Flies have incredible eyesight and because of their metabolism, or the rhythm of their bodies, they live in accelerated time, or hyper-motion compared to us. This is why its so hard to catch them.  Our movements are in slow motion. We move like slugs from their viewpoint.  Their eyes can see in all directions using a greater color spectrum, including heat-sensing and from multiple vantage points. By the time we even think to start moving to swat them, they are gone.  Now that is what I call a super power!

Garden Math:  Chickens poop, like all birds, is a mixture of poop and pee, called urea.  Because they are birds, their bodies are designed to move waste very quickly through their digestive tract to make them lighter for flight.  Conservatively, a chicken will poop 10 times a day.  I have 8 chickens, each pooping 10 times a day.  How many total chicken poops do I need to clean each day?

Mosquito and Cob-weaver still want to have a party for Earth Day, so we bring our sleeping bags to the trampoline and watch the bats and stars come out.

Farmer Ladybug 🐞