Updated: 11-28-0808....................................................................168.
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November 27, 2008.....HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
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Aloha all...
I hope you all have a nice Thanksgiving. Mine will be a little different this year. My ankle is healing well and there is no pain. A lot of time is devoted to it each day...three sessions of a series of exercises plus spending some of the day with my "ankle higher than my heart." I had to go back into surgery so that Dr. Rick could remove the 2-inch screw that was holding two bones together as the ligaments reattached. I have the screw (or someone is playing a joke on me)...
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Most of he photos I have taken this month were of the zebra doves that know 15B's front yard is a feeding and watering place. The zebra doves hang out and keep an eye on me and my car. (Now, I drive the Tercel to Waimea for supplies). The doves have a characteristic pattern of eating the rice that I scatter on the walk. First, the doves that stay close to 15B most of the time approach the food in "dynamic lines" because they trust me. Secondly, other doves "get the message" that there is safe food at 15B and start arriving from all directions, but form those "dynamic lines."
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When there is a sudden noise or one of the new-to-the-scene doves panics, they all fly up in a bunch, but immediately come running back...
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Other kinds of birds come to 15B at different times to check it out for rice. A small group of chickens end up getting cut off from the rest of the scattered rice by the bunch of doves flowing around the chickens to take over the rice field.
One day, I noticed a different feeding behavior of a group of chickens. It left the doves baffled as the rice field was taken over by chickens using a dove-like "dynamic line" while feeding...preventing the doves flowing around the chickens to the rice.
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I observed the learning of this dove-like feeding technique by the mother hen. Those are her five chicks still making peeping sounds while pecking up the rice. She taught them the behavior she learned as a young chick just starting to get her feathers. I called that little surviving chick The Orphan.
The Orphan's mother had four little chicks in her brood when I first noticed her because she didn't look well...she had bubbles coming out of her opened beak. She hid with her four chicks in the lemon grass clump and would come out with her chicks at rice time. The next time I noticed her, she had only one little chick and was looking very sick.
One morning, I saw the sick mother hen, now dead, across the grass near my neighbor's house and the little chick was next to her.
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When I tossed out some rice, the little orphan chick would come running to the rice field. As The Orphan's size was as large as the doves and getting bigger every day. She would sleep by her mother's decomposing body and scratch for food among the roots of the big monkey-pod tree, but would come running at rice time. Other chickens were few and far between because of one of my neighbor's dislike of roosters crowing. The Orphan did not associate with the occasional groups (clutches) of chickens that would come by 15B...she would make herself scarce.
Apparently, The Orphan hadn't learned "chicken language." As she became adult-size, the occasional rooster would take notice, but she did not join any clutches that I could determine. Eventually, she stopped coming around and I assumed that she joined a clutch that didn't have 15B in its territory.
When The Orphan did appear at 15B she was with her feathered brood of five and with a rooster that is still shy of this human at 15B. She amazed me with the way she and her brood approached the rice field with the doves. I didn't bother to get my camera for a day or two to record what they did. Apparently, she learned the efficient way of pecking up rice scattered on the walk from the dove she competed with as a surviving chick. One day, I tossed the rice and saw the brood on the grass, so I picked up my camera and took the following shots from farther inside 15B so as not to disturb the scene. The first image is full size, the others are cropped.
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I tossed more rice and then took photos of both the chicken's and the dove's approach toward the scattered rice.
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Mahalo!
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Pau!
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Discussion: For a later time...I'm still waiting for that brood to mature and leave The Orphan. That will probably be when she decides to hatch another brood. Will that "scattered-rice dove feeding" behavior be passed on by her first generation to other groups of chickens if she is not in the picture?
Three days later, I grabbed my camera and got these shots of their feeding style:
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Now a change of subject, Julie S. a friend of my former student and friend, Tony B, was spending some time on Kaua'i. Tony suggested that she contact me and that I could show her and her brother some of the good sites on Kaua'i. My broken ankle recovery didn't allow for that, but she did drop by 15B to talk story for a while. She lives in Cayucos on the central California coast where he also lives.
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Julie
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That's it for the November photos...next month is going to be extra-special.
Aloha, Art
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