USA: Murder in the chicken shack

Email from America 3: the rural dream, and bloodstained reality

A decade ago, our second son had just been born and I was settling quietly into middle age. My wife had other ideas, and decided that we should move to the country. We bought 9 acres with a house and a barn, our own well and sewage system, and neighbours who leave us in peace. We cut our own wood for winter heat, breed goats for meat and milk … and raise chickens.

It started innocently enough with a call from the main post office on a Saturday afternoon, letting us know that we could pick up a package of live animals. What we got was a small cardboard box, stuffed with 50 fluffy chicks. We cooed over them, moved my car out, and installed them with a heat lamp in the garage. Within a month, they had some real feathers, and looked like badly-dressed inner-city schoolboys. One more month, and they were fully-fledged chavs – pushing, pecking, shoving, and occasionally killing each other.

They were so nasty that I didn’t feel really guilty when we drove them to the processor. They returned neatly wrapped and ready for the freezer, costing only 2-3 times what our local supermarket would charge. But they tasted better, or so we told ourselves.

We are now 8 years into our hobby, and have learned a lot. For example, give a rooster 10 hens, and he will hump and torment all of them. Put 20 hens with two roosters, and the dominant one will fight the other for all of them. It isn’t just the males. Remove all roosters, and one hen will take over, like a bad lesbian prison movie. It is distressingly human.

With selective breeding, we now have roosters who will defend their hens, but (usually) not attack people. In our microcosm of social engineering experiments, that may be the best that we can do. At the very least, it has given our children an appreciation for the convenience of grocery stores, and survival skills that rival those of an Eagle Scout.

Tim is a math professor in Ohio.

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Greenland: Accelerating ice melt?

Jason Box's Meltfactor blog reports that albedo (ability to reflect light) of Greenland's ice sheet was significantly lower in April than it has been since before 2000.

If there is a self-reinforcing feedback system here we may have to reconsider our scepticism on climate change.

We don't necessarily accept that it's all the fault of humans, though it's still possible (as reported earlier) that the additional melt may be influenced by a light-absorbing darker layer on top of the ice, of atmospheric particles from the burning of forests and fossil fuels.

UPDATE: The Guardian newspaper has caught up with the story (12 June 2013).

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy.

UK (Cornwall): Shelterbox

Once a year, the Tregothnan Estate near Truro, Cornwall, opens its gardens to the public. Aside from being being a botanical safe haven for many rare plants and trees, it's the only tea-grower in England. So we visited.

The charity they sponsored this year was Shelterbox. This is a truly brilliant idea, the brainchild of Rotarian Tom Henderson OBE. It's a survival kit packed into a sturdy plastic box, and the stroke of genius was to work backwards from external constraints: what was the most weight two airline baggage handlers would be prepared to carry, and how many boxes could be fitted into a standard steel shipping container.

For £590 a pop, you get this:

Contents can be varied according to need, but the basics include a waterproof tent with raised door (protects against floodwater and creeping creatures), stove with cooking and eating equipment, and most importantly, an ingeniously designed water filter. The filter is to help prevent the outbreak of disease that tends to decimate the survivors of the initial disaster, and it can be flushed out and reused in case of prolonged encampment.

Thousands of these boxes are stored in places around the world, for maximum speed of delivery in emergencies. But the stores need topping up and you can not only sponsor a box but track where it's gone.

Fabulous. I'm contacting them to see if a local Rotarian can do a show and tell for a school; maybe you can do something, too.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy.