The Wilde Life

Lotte and Booger Tiger need a new home

admin — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 21:24:59 +0000

We’re trying to find a new home for our cats Lotte (aka Peanuthead) and Booger Tiger (aka Booger Toes), a mother-daughter duo we rescued in Marfa a few years ago. The catch: I’d like to find them a new home together, since being a mother-daughter duo, they’re quite inseparable (see photos below). Lotte is very sweet, a great lap warmer, and a devoted mom. Booger Tiger is adorable, amusing, quite chatty, and has one of the finest senses of humor I’ve encountered in a feline. Both are fixed, current on shots, and around 4- or 5-years old. They get along fine with our fourth cat Frisky Sweets, so they can peacefully co-exist with the right personalities, just not big bopper, dominant types like our senior cat Critter.

Why we’re having to part with them: Critter is developing a serious intestinal problem with a dire long-term prognosis (“megacolon”). Critter and Lotte have always had hostile relations, and Lotte and Booger Tiger gang up on Critter and ambush her on her way to the litter box. This is now making Critter’s condition much worse, so we’ve separated Lotte and Booger Tiger by keeping them outside during the day and the garage at night. I feel this is really unfair on them though, because they’re lovely cats and HATE being exiled. Plus I really don’t like having cats outside so much, where they can murder wild critters and are at risk of being murdered by wild critters. Lastly, with a baby on the way, keeping two separate cat populations is going to become more and more tricky for us.

So, it’s very, very sad for me to give them up, but I think everyone would be better off if they found a new home where they’d be appreciated as the good buddies they are.

Miss Lotte

Booger Tiger

Snuggly and inseparable

The buddies

Booger Tiger as we first discovered her in Avram's art shed

SBGR looking for hens to guard and party with

admin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 18:40:58 +0000

As just posted to brewstercountyswap:

Meshugas and Calamity are two very handsome Australorp/Ameraucana roosters who need new homes (SBGR = single black-and-gold roosters). They clean up horse poop like it’s going out of style, gobble up grasshoppers, and are fiercely protective of their lady friends. We’d keep them, but they’re about five months old and starting to fight with each other and our senior rooster. These guys were raised by lily-livered vegetarians, who think of them as pets and want them to go to a home where they won’t be dispatched to freezer camp or a soup pot (i.e., won’t be eaten). Email miss.megan@gmail.com for pictures or more information. We’re asking $5/each, but for the right home, that fee could be negotiable.

The sweet potato harvest

admin — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 20:05:17 +0000

They’re here! Sweet potatoes are now my favorite vegetable to grow here. We bought ourselves a dozen beauregard slips from George’s Plant Farm and planted about nine or ten in a big mound back in May or June. I think I added one bag of compost to the whole rock-infested bed and watered them only once or twice before the summer rains arrived. Then last week, for my birthday, we harvested them in what felt like an exciting archeological dig. Those couple of tiny slips had turned into a table full of sweets, some of which were obscenely large and quite voluptuous. This one, my favorite, looked like a chunky seal to me:

I washed them, dried them in the sun for a few hours, and now they’re all hanging out in boxes in the garage, where hopefully they’ll last several months.

Some of them looked a little more like russet potatoes, with tough brown skin and dark green splotches. I learned from my buttery gardener friend Mark that this could be either a fungus or simply due to “all the immature top soil around” (i.e. rocks).

Monarchs

admin — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 19:54:45 +0000

About two weeks ago, I began noticing a lot of monarchs fluttering around our yard. One afternoon, just as I was rushing off to a meeting, I happened to raise my arms, and out of the mulberry tree above me exploded a cloud of dozens of monarchs. In a few minutes, they’d settled back into the tree, dripping off the branches like I’ve seen in photos of them in Mexico.

Needless to say, I decided to be a little late for my meeting and spent a good while watching them. It was difficult to count, but I’d say there had to have been at least a hundred.

I asked butterfly enthusiast Cathy Hoyt at CDRI what they might have been doing, and I learned that they were roosting, which is apparently a new phenomenon in our neck of the woods. We’ve always had a smattering of monarchs come through during their fall migration, but not in the large numbers that typically pass through their migratory flyways in central Texas and Arizona, both a hundred or so miles away from Alpine. Last fall though, a mass of monarchs was spotted roosting in Balmorhea. This may mean that their migratory pathway is shifting or expanding into Far West Texas.

So much for that tactic…

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:17:15 +0000

Our attempt to control the sexes of the new chicks by calling them “she” has failed. This morning when I went down to let everyone out, I heard what sounded like a tiny dinosaur roaring. Only roosters roar. Now we just have to hope there’s . . . → Read More: So much for that tactic…

Big little chicks

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:24:44 +0000

Last night we integrated Ugg, Bubbs and their babies into the main coop. The babies aren’t so little any more, and we wanted to move them in before their mom’s lost their protective mama hen instincts. So far, so good.

False advertising

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:19:36 +0000

Snuggie Penguin can lie. I just watched him call all his ladies over to him by using his “Yum! Yum! look at this tasty goody I found!” sound. But all he’d found was a dead twig – certainly not a treat worth talking about. He tossed it around until they gathered around him. Then he started doing his love dance and tried mounting a few of them. Tricky little bird.

Dog update

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:58:50 +0000

Sadly Sadie, aka Gussie Moran, attacked Frisky Sweets a few days ago. It was a nasty attack, and my hand got mauled by the Sweets when I tried to pull her away. Thankfully the Sweets is okay, and some great neighbors of ours offered to take Sadie for a test drive. It would be a perfect home for her – they’re dog lovers with no cats, an understanding of herding dogs (particularly abandoned herding dogs), plenty of space, and one of them is home most of the time to be worshiped and adored. So we’re keeping our fingers crossed that she’s polite with their older dog and that they decide they’re up to becoming a two-dog household. I felt awful leaving her since she’d gotten so attached to me and has already been dumped once by humans. But I know this is best for all of us in the long run.

The Sweets says, "No more dogs allowed."

Unwilling subjects

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:51:56 +0000

I realized today I haven’t posted anything yet about Penelope and Ranger. I’d meant to write about Penelope after she foundered at the start of July. Thanks to the lovely Dr. Burbach and a very expensive pair of orthotic donkey boots, she’s doing fine and has been back on her feet for several weeks now.

Mostly I haven’t written about them because, with all the rain and green goodies growing in the pasture, this is a very busy time of year for equines. That and they’re very camera shy. This is unfortunate, seeing as I originally justified having (and paying for) a horse and donkey because they could be subjects for Avram’s art. He’s been able to get them to pose maybe twice in the past year.

I did manage to take this picture of Penelope during breakfast one morning recently, hoping to catch them before they went to work in the pasture.

As soon as the camera clicked though, Ranger spooked, so much so that he even danced away from his food. I retreated to the far side of their corral to snap this shot of the old man. He’s obviously quite suspicious.

Mantis Time

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:36:26 +0000

Lately I’ve been spotting a lot of praying mantises around the yard. Last night Avram and I found the coolest one yet. At first I thought I was seeing a new rose bud:

Then we spotted the trickster:

Last week I found this mantis looking rather out of its element on the barn door. I realized it had probably been snacking on the spiders that like congregating under the door handle, a place I’ve always wished spiders wouldn’t congregate.