I’m so thrilled.
It has rained and rained and rained the past couple of days.
There is a puddle in the little slough out front.
It is cold and windy.
Sleet pings on the window.
The rain barrel is full.
The ground squishes when I walk.
Fire crackles in the log burner.
The cat purrs on the alter of his god.
The seasons are back in their rightful places (at least for now).
Some of the girls, enjoying what’s left of the peas and eyeing up the newly planted broad beans, protected by netting.
I don’t know whether I appreciate my chickens more for their eggs or for their winter garden maintenance.
I turned the girls out into the vegetable garden for the winter today, and was happy to see them rooting around for grass grubs, which were a serious problem this year, and eagerly grazing on weeds.
I used to injure myself every spring when it was time to clear the winter’s weeds and prepare the garden beds. Now I employ the chickens in the garden all winter, and my springtime bed preparation is a breeze (comparatively speaking, anyway).
They keep the weeds down and reduce the pest populations, and the love the rich foraging the garden offers, as their summer paddock is practically bare by now.
Of course, there’s always a risk—now and again the chickens will get into the winter crops—but the benefits are worth it.
The chickens think so, too.
He wants to be a goat and a writer…
My daughter and I have been feeding the new goats by hand every afternoon, to help them become more friendly.
But it seems everyone wants to get in on it now.
Of course, Artemis, my remaining Saanen, is quite jealous of the attention ‘the boys’ get, and feels the need to eat the majority of the food, or at least keep the other goats from getting it. She alternates between gobbling up as much as possible, and beating the stuffing out of the others.
That’s no surprise, really. Artemis is a goat, after all.
But today, the cat decided he needed to get in on the feeding, too. He meowed from outside the paddock for a few minutes, and when we didn’t come out, he came in.
He and Artemis have always had an adversarial relationship—she’s been known to tear after him if he gets in her way as she’s going to the milking stand. But the new goats, after a few rather curious sniffs and head-butt feints, seemed to accept him as just another goat, albeit a rather odd one.
She’s occupied the same plant for weeks. Her neighbour, on the next plant over, is equally predictable.
There isn’t a huge body of research on why people don’t like insects and spiders, but the studies that have been done have concluded that one of the main problems people have with creepy crawlies is their unpredictability. They could jump, bite, sting, run, fly…and most people can’t predict what an insect will do next.
But I’ve come to realise that insects and spiders are, in fact, highly predictable.
For three years (its entire adult life) there was a metallic green ground beetle underneath the goats’ water barrel. It was there every time I looked, and I came to depend upon it to be there for Bugmobile programmes (along with two or three others whose ‘addresses’ I knew).
Until age and winter claimed her, I had an Australian orb weaver who I would pluck from her hiding place in the morning, take to a bug program, and return to her home in the afternoon—day after day, week after week.
A bee or wasp will always be the first insect to fly out of a sweep net, so you can quickly let them go before seeing who else you’ve caught.
If you put two adult male crickets together in a cage, they will always chirp.
A ladybug will always climb up an object, and fly away when it gets to the top.
A bee will not sting unless it feels threatened.
Most spiders will quickly rappel to the floor when frightened.
In fact, because insects and spiders behave largely out of instinct, they are incredibly predictable.
But, of course, you have to spend time with them to know that. You have to pay attention to them, instead of just stomping on them when you see them. You have to learn their ways. You have to behave predictably around them, in order to note that they are predictable themselves.
Somewhere, there is an insect research project going on to try to figure out why insects are so frightened of people. I suspect the bugs will find it’s because we’re so unpredictable.
The lowly barnacle is well-known. Most people can point to one and say, “that’s a barnacle.”
Well done, but how many people know exactly what a barnacle is?
“It’s this…thing…that lives on rocks at the beach.”
“Don’t they grow on whales?”
“Ships get covered in them.”
As an entomologist, I know a bit about barnacles, because they are Arthropods, just like insects, spiders, millipedes, crabs, and lots of other creepy crawlies. In fact, they are crustaceans, closely related to crabs and crayfish.
Wait, you say. Don’t Arthropods have ‘jointed legs’—that’s what the word means, after all—but barnacles don’t have legs.
Or do they?
Barnacles are perhaps the strangest of the Arthropods. The free-living larva is a weird, tiny, spiky creature with one eye. It goes through a metamorphosis, like insects do, in which it changes shape dramatically. In its last larval stage, it finds a nice place to spend the rest of its life, presses its forehead against it, and secretes a calcium-rich cement from near the base of its antennae that permanently affixes its head to the spot.
In its adult form, a barnacle grows a protective shell, complete with a clever two-part ‘door’ that it can snap shut to conserve water at low tide, or to protect itself from predators. Its legs grow long and feathery, and act as tentacles to waft particles of food to its mouth.
As you can imagine, adult barnacles don’t have much of a social life. Most species are hermaphroditic, meaning individuals are both male and female. Surprisingly, though, self-fertilisation is rare. Like other arthropods, most barnacles have what’s euphemistically known as ‘internal fertilisation’—that is, the male has a penis, and he deposits his sperm inside the female. How does an animal glued by its head to a rock get together with another to mate? The answer is a very long penis.
So the next time you feel like your life is rough, be thankful you’re not a barnacle.
Newly sprouted, out-of-season apple leaves.
The weather finally turned last night. After five days of hot, gale-force winds, after seven months of summer weather, we finally got a hard southerly storm. Three centimetres of rain, a bit of hail, and howling winds—a proper ‘winter’ storm.
But it’s too little too late. By yesterday afternoon, half a dozen shrubs around the property had simply given up in the heat and dry. The apple trees, having lost their leaves to drought six weeks ago, had already flushed again with the unusually warm weather. Those leaves will almost certainly be killed by frost, if not tonight, than another night soon. The trees will struggle to leaf out in the spring, because of their wasted effort now.
The lawn is little more than dirt in patches. If anything resprouts, it will be weeds, not grass. And the winter crops in the garden had already bolted from the heat.
I’m thankful for the rain. I’m pleased to have a full rainwater tank, and the early spring crops that are just now putting on growth will benefit from the water now.
But for the sake of the groundwater, I hope it keeps raining, because we need a lot more.
It’s been over a week since we got the new angora goats, and I was beginning to stress because we still hadn’t named them. At lunch today, we talked over the options, and nothing seemed quite right.
Pavarotti, Carreras, and Domingo (the three tenors)? Meh.
Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (the three musketeers)? Too hard to remember.
Larry, Mo, and Curly (the three stooges)? Too dumb.
Well, we named all our dairy goats after goddesses, perhaps the wethers should be named after gods? But their behaviour isn’t godlike, and who can imagine a castrated god?
Bumble, Fagan, and The Artful Dodger? No.
Mars, Neptune, and Uranus? Er…no.
So we sent my daughter out to the paddock to ask the goats what their names were.
She came back saying the goats were giving confusing answers. She said that they claimed their names were Dennis, Darwin, and Dale.
Darwin!
That was it! Scientists!
So out in the paddock there now graze Darwin, 
Einstein, 
and Newton.
Gale force winds and clouds of dust. Power out, and garden trashed. Outdoor furniture thrown this way and that…
It’s a day to focus on the small, smiley things.
A bit of rainbow on the wall. 
A stack of West Coast rocks.
A hand carved spoon. 
A polished slice of fence post.
A handful of perfect pebbles. 
Pseudocoremia leucelaea
“So, I’ve got this bug?”
I grimaced into the phone. It was going to be one of those calls.
One of those calls where the caller expects me to identify an insect over the phone. An insect they didn’t really look at terribly closely and didn’t bother to collect.
“It’s sort of brown, with long feelers. What is it?”
I try to help. I try to tell people where and how they can get their bug identified, but sometimes I think I’m just talking into the wind. Most of the time I’m sure they hang up thinking, “Well, she didn’t know much, did she?”
Here’s the thing.
Even in New Zealand, which has a very limited number of insects, compared with other places in the world, there are 10,000 species of insect to choose from.
Some are iconic, to be sure. Some are easily recognisable.
Many are not. Many look different as an adult than they do when young. Sometimes males and females look very different. Colours and markings can vary from individual to individual. Some features are only visible under a microscope. And verbal descriptions are less than useless.
So when a person says an insect is brown, I wonder whether it is a dark chocolate sort of brown, a reddish brown, a light brown…because “brown” could be anything.
When they say it’s “about a centimetre long” I wonder whether it is closer to 9 millimetres or 11 millimetres, because it might matter.
When they say, “It looks sort of like a huhu grub” I wonder what features make them say that. Is it legless? Is it a creamy white colour? Or is it just that they’ve seen pictures of huhu grubs and it’s the only thing they can think to compare it to?
When they say it’s got long feelers, I wonder whether those antennae are filiform, moniliform, pectinate, capitate, or serrate.
When they say it has clear wings, I wonder whether it has two or four. And whether those wings are fully clear, tinted, or partly covered in scales.
I wonder how many tarsal segments its legs have.
I wonder whether it has setae on its tibia. And if so, how many, and what size they are, and how, exactly, they are arranged.
I wonder what the shape of the marginal cell on the front wing is. Or whether the wing venation is reduced, or whether the wing is fringed at all.
Sometimes, someone can describe an insect in detail to me over the phone, and I am baffled. Then they bring me the insect, and I can immediately identify it, and it looks nothing like I imagined from the description they gave.
I’m always happy to try to answer people’s entomological questions, but sometimes I feel like one of the three blind men trying to identify an elephant by feeling just a small part of it’s body.
The cat declared the stack of straw bales an excellent napping spot.
I ordered pea straw a couple of weeks ago. I told them there was no rush. They took me at my word.
The straw arrived on Sunday. I happened to see the ute as it came down the road, and guessed it was my straw. Finally.
The old blue truck was piled with bales, but it wasn’t nearly as crowded in back as it was in front. Three men, the youngest not a day less than 68, were squashed into the cab and rattled like bottles up the gravel drive. A little dog scampered back and forth across their laps, eager to jump out and explore.
“The men grinned at me as they drew up to the house.”
“The usual place?”
“Yes,” I said, “But we’ll just stack it next to the shed—I’ve got to do some organising in there before I can put the pea straw in.”
The driver pulled the ute across the lawn and into the rough paddock, bouncing over ruts and hillocks I was sure he’d bottom out on. He stopped just beside the little hay shed.
“That’s the closest we’ve gotten yet!”
The dog leapt out of the cab, and the three men unfolded themselves and stumbled out. They began hefting bales as they took them off the truck and stacked them beside the shed.
“One, two…So, when’s it gonna rain again, eh, Robinne?”
“I don’t know but any day now is fine with me,” I answered.
“That’s five, six…”
“Sure is dry.”
“Seven, eight… Oh. We don’t know how to count. That’s only nine.”
I’d ordered ten bales.
“Aw, all I’ve got is sixty dollars,” I joked. “Let me see if I can come up with fifty-four.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it. We’ll bring round another bale some day when we’re coming by.”
“Yeah, we’ll be coming past at some point, we’ll just toss one out the door.” The old farmer grinned, but I know he was only half kidding, and I reminded myself to keep an eye out for a bale of straw on the verge.
So the men and dog squeezed themselves back into the truck and backed out. I watched in fear as they did so—last year, they’d nearly gone over the metre-high drop onto the kids’ playing field. But they managed to back out without flying over the edge or taking out any of the plantings along the way.
“Thanks!” I called, waving as they rattled back out the drive.
I smiled. Every pea straw delivery is sort of a James Herriot moment. Even if I didn’t need it, I might still order straw every year, just to see those guys…
Robinne Weiss 