Wild Things: The ritual of morning chores

The goats, from left, Buck and Kicko.  Ed Kanze Photos

The ducks, from left, Mango, Peaches, and Coconut.

By ED KANZE

My wife, Debbie, and I are recently arrived at the station in life where the kids have gone off to make their own ways in the world, and we are stuck caring for all the pets. Life is shaped by deeply etched rituals in our empty nest. Morning chores in winter make a good example.

While we start each winter day with a mug of coffee or two, preceded by a generous feeding of the woodstove, we soon march outdoors to feed our animals. Later, if there’s time before work, we try to squeeze in a bowl of oatmeal, generously garnished with fruit.

First up, if our heads are on straight, are the wild birds. We feed modestly, not wanting to inflate blue jay numbers in the neighborhood, which is not to say we don’t like blue jays, but rather because blue jays raid the nests of other birds, when the time comes, and we don’t want to encourage that behavior to excess. Mainly we put out black-oil sunflower seed. We fill a small heated birdbath, too. The birdbath also supplies water to squirrels.

Next it’s time for the ducks. It’s sheer madness, but we acquired ducks not only for pets but also for the eggs they lay, and three out of our five ducks are males. One of the females lays water balloons (eggs without shells), which can be risky to eat, so we don’t. This leaves one duck, our favorite, Mango, more often called Menge, who lays edibles. She gives us an egg every other day, but none in winter.

The ducks live in two pens because the two youngest males must be separated. They would assault their mother in ways our sensibilities cannot tolerate. Our “upper ducks,” as we call them, live in a pen near the house, where we are able to plug in a heated water bucket. The “lower ducks” are nearly 200 feet from the house. We learned the hard way that voltage drops off in extension cords over that distance to the point where it destroys heated buckets. I worked out a solution a few years back. I found a big outer bucket into which I injected insulating foam while the inner bucket that holds drinking water was propped up inside on cylinders of cardboard. Now, if we fill the inner bucket with warm water garnished with dehydrated mealworms as a breakfast treat, the liquid remains a liquid all day, if, that is, the temperature remains above 10 Fahrenheit.

On to the goats. We have two. We acquired them because Debbie has severe dog and cat allergies. Our kids wanted big hairy tail-wagging pets, and goats provided a close to ideal solution. We acquired ours from our friends Rhonda and David at Asgaard Farm, a goat dairy. Son Ned chose Buck, a pure-bred Alpine who is mostly black. Daughter Tas chose Kiko, a mixed Alpine-Kiko cross. Had we not adopted and neutered our goats, Buck would likely have enjoyed a career as a stud while Kiko would have been sold and raised for meat. Our goats, much-loved members of the family, are now almost 11. No longer can we hold them in our laps and feed them from a bottle. Now each weighs, we guess, over 200 pounds.

Morning goat chores consist of hauling them a bucket of warm water filled in our bathtub and also bringing a jug of vitamin-rich oil. The water bucket is black. Even on a day near zero, the water stays unfrozen or mostly so because sunshine heats the black plastic. 

Next, one of us opens a door that lets the goats spill onto a ramp. The ramp leads to a spacious pen. Here we serve Buck and Kiko their al fresco breakfast: a generous handful of sweet goat feed mixed with balancer, plus a scoop of sunflower seed. A squirt of oil stirred in completes the meal. 

That’s it — unless the mesh hay bag and iron manger in the pen need filling, which they sometimes do. I won’t even mention the regular need for barn mucking. Debbie and I generally give the goats a vigorous rubdown to help them warm up and get moving. Buck and Kiko aren’t kids anymore. Neither are we.

Debbie and I perform these rituals day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, with seasonal variations. End-of-day chores fill out the picture, not to mention the care of indoor guinea pigs and fish in two tanks. Debbie does most of the indoor work. She does plenty of outdoor chores, too.

At present, our horse, Dakota, and pony, Cupcake, board at a sleepaway camp near our daughter’s college. When the mares come home, the chores quadruple. Horses eat a lot. And drink a lot. And what goes in must, after a fashion, come out. But perhaps the biggest job in our climate is keeping the horses in not-too-cold water in a liquid state, around the clock. Accomplishing this in a home-built barn without electricity requires jumping through hoops, big ones. 

Life is never dull at our place. The animals give back in affection and interest and manure and the occasional egg as much as they receive, and we are never short of exercise or purpose.