Reading the Signs

After the rain, the first thing I noticed when I walked out the door was that the wild roses had bloomed.

The anthers in the center of the bloom were looking all bedraggled and bunched up, either because they had just now opened, or because they had been rained on.

Little insects that looked  a lot like bees, but were much smaller, began to exploit the blossoms. I was surprised by the appearance of the flowers. Hadn't these been pink last year?

After the rain, the tulip tree leaves were covered with raindrops, and inside the blossoms there was water to drink.

Tiny little insects had gathered inside the blossoms, but I could not tell if they were after pollen, nectar or just water. A bee who was resting on one of the bracts of the flowers backed out and began to approach the blossom.

It seemed to be asking itself: Will all the other insects mind if I join them?

Gingerly, it came in for the landing.

But once it entered the flower, it did not stay long.

Later in the evening, after visiting the kitten in the barn, I was examining some berries in the woods, when I saw a rabbit by the lagoon.

The rabbit saw me, too, but it allowed me to come in for a closer look, before it bounded away.

 I have seen a lot fewer rabbits close to the house this year, and this too might be an indication that the cat is still around.

I wanted to ask the rabbit if it had seen the cat, and this reminded me of the children's book I wrote for Sword many years ago. Wild animals do not snitch on other wild animals, even when they are natural enemies.  That's why the best I can do is just try to read the signs.

The Cat is Out of the Bag

Three significant things happened yesterday.

1.  I saw a new wildflower.

Star of Bethlehem that opened May 7, 2015

                   My friend Krys identified it as a Star of Bethlehem ( Ornithogalum umbellatum ).

1. The tulip tree opened its blossoms for the first time this year. 

Tulip tree flower that opened May 7, 2015

1. And when I checked on the kitten in the afternoon, it greeted me at the door to the barn. It was no longer confined to the stroller.

The cat is out of the bag now! I thought. Of course, it was bound to happen. I could not expect that kitten to remain in the stroller forever. The fact that it decided to explore a little further shows that it is healthy and growing. But for whoever is responsible for it, this opens up a whole new can of worms. How is the kitten going to be kept safe now?

And that's where I have to trust that Mother Cat is going to do her job, as I have too many other responsibilities to be babysitting a kitten all day long.

This moment comes with every baby. It happened with Sword, and it happened with Bow. They went from being totally helpless and dependent to being mobile little walking disasters who had to be kept out of harm's way without crushing their independence.

Sword and I on October 17, 1999 in Taiwan

Sword went  from this helpless being who was not much bigger than the logbook into which three people wrote down everything she ate in three languages -- Chinese, Hebrew and English ....

Sword was six months old at the turn of the millennium

... to this very active toddler when we moved to this property just after she turned two.

Sword and Teyman when we first moved here. Notice how small the forsythia bush is!
You can see a small part of the tulip tree in the top left corner of the photo

And then Bow was added to the mix,

Sword supervises Bow in 2002

He learned to walk early, but Bow, despite this, was so dependent for the next few years that he did not like to stray far from me.

Bow becoming mobile

He stayed as close to me as my fanny pack through the early years.

In the old hammock in the sun room

He had lots of fun, both indoors and out, and did not need to be confined, because he was way too attached to us to go anywhere we did not go.

He stuck very close to us, indoors and out, so we did not have to worry that he would wander away.

Hanging off  the dogwood tree
It's not the fence that kept Bow in the yard -- it's that he wanted to stay close to Sword

I could take him for Easter egg hunts off our property, and there would be no danger that he would wander off and get lost, because he was sticking close to the people he loved,

During an Easter egg hunt on another property
Bow always found the ones higher in the tree

Bow was always careful to keep us within sight, and the best way to prevent him from wandering off would be to walk in the opposite direction of where he was headed. He would make a piercing "I'm about to be abandoned!" sound and scamper onto my back every time he sensed I was getting ready to leave.

Let's go explore without Mommy

If he wanted to go exploring away from Mommy, Bow would recruit Sword to come with him, holding onto her hand tightly.

But the day eventually came when Bow felt confident to do things on his own, things we could not do.

Bow overlooking the yard

And that was the day when my job of keeping him safe got much harder.

Bow hanging off the liquidambar tree

That is the last photo I have of Bow unconfined. I continued to carry him on my back till he was five years old. As long as he was on my back, he stayed out of trouble, But the day came when I could no longer support his weight, and he objected to being left in the pen when I ran errands, so I had to confine him to the pens permanently. Which is how we got to be where we are.

I still have to be with Bow in the pen most of the hours of most of the day, which is why I cannot possibly afford to baby sit a kitten. I will leave that task to Mother Cat.

I left the food and water and scrammed. It would have been nice to stay a while and play with the kitten, but I am allergic, and Mother Cat is watching. So I went to look at the tulip tree, instead.

Several bees share a tulip tree flower

As most of the tulip tree flowers are still closed, the bees were crowded several to a flower.

That works fine for smaller bees, but if you are a bumblebee, it can get too crowded.

The accommodations for a bumblebee are considerably less commodious.

Depending on their size, you can fit at least two wasps in a flower, though.

However, the bigger the wasp, the more room it needs.

So, that was yesterday. Today, we have  a bleak and rainy morning.

The cat and the kitten, the birds and the bees will just have to fend for themselves for the time being.

 Bow is asleep on his blanket, and all is right with the world.

A Gift from Mother Cat

Yesterday  was Wednesday. In the afternoon, Lawrence came to stay with Bow. This week the delivery lady came on Wednesday, too, and she brought her little daughter, who had a gift for Bow: a date (fruit).  I was absent for most of the excitement, because I was running errands. I was also a little late checking on the kitten because of the different schedule on Wednesdays.

The kitten seemed impatient and wanted to berate me for not coming sooner. Nevertheless, in all this time, it does not seem to have climbed down from the confines of the stroller.

I fed it and did not waste too much time beyond just changing the water in the other bowl. The barn is a long walk from the house, and as the grass needs mowing again, I always come back with ticks on my person and clothing that have to be carefully removed. I am allergic to cats, so I never touch the kitten.

In the evening, after I had put Bow to bed, I discovered this on my front porch, right next to the front door.

I got this really bad feeling. Yes, I have seen dead birds before.  But this one seemed so perfect and intact and somehow special, and I had an eerie feeling it was meant to be a message to me.

I went in for a Walmart bag to dispose of it, and before I put it in the bag, I used the bag to re-position the bird so I could get pictures of it from several angles, just the way they do at the coroner's office before an autopsy.

I sent the pictures to my friend Kathy, who is my bird expert, and asked her what sort of bird it was and how it could have come to be lying there on my front porch. Kathy responded very quickly. It was a grey cat bird. They are very shy and their call is like a cat's meow. What a shame!

And she sent me this link: Gray Catbird.

As for the cause of death, there were three possibilities:

1. It hit my window and died of a broken neck.
2. It was very old, and fell off its perch when it died of natural causes.
3. The cat caught it, and it died of internal injuries.

I felt in my gut that it had to be number three. I had handled the bird, and it did not seem to have a broken neck. There are no places to perch on the front porch that would have it fall to the ground of a heart attack to be conveniently positioned in front of the door. And... and anyway, I just knew! This was a gift from Mother Cat. It had something to do with the kitten.

I had thought I heard a mockingbird in my woods for the past week or so. But now I don't hear it. Maybe it had been no mockingbird, but a gray catbird instead. And besides, last year, when that other cat had been hanging around my place, I had received many unwanted presents on my porch of just this sort. Well, not a grey cat bird, but other smaller birds, and a mole, a cream and white colored rat, and last but not least, the legs of a squirrel, but not the rest of the squirrel!

The cat was back! And this was a gift to thank me for looking after the kitten. Or else, if you want to put a darker spin on it, Mother Cat might be saying: keep your hands off my kitten, or I will kill every bird on your property! Either way, it felt a little creepy. 

I have not seen any sign of an adult cat on my property since last fall. No other sign except the kitten itself, whose very existence seems to suggest the presence of a mother cat.

Am I being paranoid? Quite possibly. It runs in my family. I do tend to see events in life as interconnected, and I like explanations that take into account all the circumstances that could have any bearing on the matter. I know other people who are anti-paranoid, and they eschew neat little explanations for events, believing that most things in life are just a coincidence. Dead bird. Abandoned kitten. No connection. Just one of those things. 

There are conspiracy theorists and anti-conspiracy theorists in life. It's not just in politics. I have to deal with the anti-paranoid thinking in linguistics, too. "Yes, these two words share all the same phonemes in exactly the same order. But no, they are not related. It's just a coincidence." There must be some way to prove it, if  it's not!

The truth does not care which camp you  are in, pro-conspiracy or anti. The truth will come and bite you one day. So be careful not to ignore the signs!

I am betting that Mother Cat is still around. And I am planning to tread very softly around its kitten. 

Natural Selection and Its Absence

I went to look in on the kitten, and on the way, I saw birds circling overhead.

It seemed like a bad omen, even though they were probably just hawks hunting for mice.

In the barn, the milk I had left for the mother cat had not been touched. It had curdled. I began to fear for the kitten's life, thinking maybe something had happened to the mother. On top of that, it started meowing at me pathetically.

I cleaned out the bowl and brought it some water to drink, thinking that dehydration would be the first worry.

It drank from the water bowl, but clearly was asking for more. I was worried about giving it milk, as I know if they are too young, they cannot digest cow's milk. I consulted with a friend, and she said that by the look in the photos I sent, the kitten was about five weeks old and could eat solids.

In the evening, I brought is small serving of moist dog food -- dry mixed with a portion from a can -- and it the kitten ate hungrily.

All this while, I feel guilty for interfering. There has been no sign that there is a mother cat, but maybe she is there just out of eyesight and does not appreciate the gifts. I am not trying to tame or adopt the kitten. I just want to give it a chance to survive to adulthood, so that it can begin hunting the mice in the barn. Yes, there are mice. I saw them scurrying away, which is another reason I suspect the mother cat is not there. There are also gigantic beetles, almost as big as the kitten.

I would prefer not to interfere at all, but it's hard to stick to the Prime Directive when you have a  kitten meowing at you. I have not touched or petted it, and I hope it will not form an attachment.
You see, I worry about messing with mother nature and preempting natural selection, because I have seen what this has done to populations.

For the sake the individual cat, I am trying to keep it alive. But for the sake of all feline kind, this might not be a good idea. Is there some reason the mother cat is not here? Did she make some bad choices? Will this cat do the same?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The more care we give to others, the more dependent they can become. Sometimes there is a turning point when all this extra care to a population creates an avalanche of helplessness, disease and disability.

Take dogs. I have two dogs now: Leo and Brownie. And a few years ago, they killed all my chickens. Leo was the one who found the way to open the gate to the chicken yard. Brownie was the one who could not help catching them: he's a retriever. In the end, every chicken had its neck broken. Even the rooster. It was a massacre.

And the other day a friend of mine was reminiscing about how she had free range chickens back in the Philippines. I asked her, if the chickens were free to go anywhere, didn't the dogs kill them? She said that no, in the Philippines the dogs are also free to go where they like, so they don't bother chickens.

My first thought was a kind of:: Huh? You mean, all we have to do is free the dogs and free the chickens and then they won't bother each other? But don't try this at home! Because I think there's a missing step in this scenario: the process of natural selection!

Dogs in the Philippines are not aggressive. How do you suppose that happened? My friend just takes the nature of the dogs in the Philippines for granted, as if they were "created" that way. I believe her about the facts she is relating, because I saw similar dogs in Taiwan. But here's the back story: the reason the dogs are not aggressive and do not bother chickens, I suspect, is that every time a dog did bother chickens, it got shot or beaten or somehow taken out of commission, not just for the purpose of being around chickens, but for any purpose, including reproduction. So in time, there is a whole population of dogs who can be trusted to roam and not harm anything that local humans do not want harmed. Meanwhile, in the United States, with our humane policy toward dogs, we have dogs that have to be walked on a leash, fenced in a yard and kept well away from chickens. By protecting our dogs, we have made them a liability. They could have been an asset. They could have helped guard the chickens!

I know rhere are some dogs bred for herding, and there may be dogs who are bred for chicken work, but here's the thing: the free range dogs in the Philippines were not bred. They just naturally evolved that way. And no, we are not talking about tens of thousands of years, the way the animal rights activists explain dog domestication. You can probably get that result in just a few generations of natural selection with intense selective pressures.

Now look at what is happening to humans in the United States. A friend of mine had this meme posted on her wall: "Legislators want teachers to be paid according to how well their students do on tests. How about paying legislators according to their effectiveness -- as evaluated by job creations and economic growth?"

I could not tell if the meme meant to imply what it sounded like to me: "Teachers can't help it if students are stupid any more than legislators can help it if businessmen are stupid."

I never can understand the context of the other person, but being a free market proponent I just said: "How about we get the government out of both education and all other sectors of the economy and let the market decide?"

She answered something about letting the market decide being a race to the top, and eventually you get just a few wealthy individuals as we do right now.  She sounded as if she thought the free market was operating right now. But I decided to just share with her a concrete example from my family's past about how the free market worked in Palestine, before Israeli independence.

My father grew up in Palestine under the British Mandate, at a time when going to school was not paid for by the government. Some children were denied entry to some schools, even if their parents had lots of money, because they were not bright enough. Other children who did not have lots of money were accepted to those schools because they were exceptionally bright and got scholarships. The best schools got the best teachers, and those teacher did not necessarily get huge salaries, but they were happy to teach the best students. Lesser teachers and lesser students went to lesser schools, which cost less. Those who were not good enough academically got vocational training. Everyone got the education they needed and deserved without government intervention. Of course, all that changed after Israel became independent and education became mandatory.


Then she asked me a very astute question, one that leads back to our original topic here: natural selection. She asked me: What about special ed?

And the answer is that there wasn't any special ed! I'm sure there were some instances of developmental delay, and those people were institutionalized, like the son of an acquaintance of my father one genration later,but by and large you did not have the current situation where almost every family seems to be touched by autism. There was no special education because the demand for it did not exist.

People used to worry about having enough to eat, about war and devastation, about a child not being quite smart enough to go to the top school, but they did not worry that they would have to support their children all the rest of their lives and beyond. And now they do. How did this happen?

One possible answer is  environmental toxins or even preservatives in vaccines. But the medical community is certain it is not that. They tell us that autism is genetic in origin and there is no use looking for a scapegoat toxic substance to explain everything. How could a genetic epidemic become unleashed in less than two generations?  One answer, surprisingly, could be vaccines. No, not in the "poisoned by thimerosal" sense. But in the sense that if vaccines work the way they are designed to work, their function on the population as a whole is to reduce the pressures of natural selection.

One of the ironies of  politics today is that people who champion individualism are actually more open to policies that would allow natural selection to take its course, while people who favor the good of society are the proponents of individual survival at any cost when it comes to public health decisions.

But if we take cognizance of the fact that natural selection is hard on individuals and easy on populations, that it kills innocent little children, but leaves an adult population of healthy specimens, you would think it would be the champions of "society over the individual" who would deny vaccines to children at risk!

Before Olivia Dahl was exposed to measles in Britain in 1962, her parents begged the doctors to be allowed to vaccinate her, but they were only permitted by the government to have the vaccine for her brother Theo, who had suffered a brain injury. (Patricia Neal, As I Am, pp.230-233). Theo lived, and Olivia died of complications from the measles. She had a weak immune system and had struggled through other childhood illnesses. She was a person at risk who was denied access to a vaccine by the State.

As a libertarian, I believe Olivia -- and her parents Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal -- should not have been denied the vaccine that they wanted in order to save their child. By the same token, if another couple wants to prevent their own child from being vaccinated, I think that, too, should be their right.

But what I wonder about is how wrong- headed the arguments on both sides are in terms of "the good of the individual" versus "the good of society." As individuals, the Dahls suffered immensely from Olivia's death. As a nation, though, Britain was untouched by the deaths of the minority of children who died of the measles in 1962. In fact, it is quite possible that the population was made more healthy thereby, at least if it's true that genetically transmitted immune malfunction is the cause of autism. But then again, I don't know if that's true.

A perfectly harmless research project based on this hypothesis would be to follow the next generation of Dahls and of all the other families in Britain who went through the culling effects of the measles in 1962 to see how many autistic offspring they had, and then compare those numbers with the numbers in families just a few years later who had all their children vaccinated for the measles. If the grandchildren of the vaccinated families had many more instances of autism than the grandchildren of the families that lost a child to the measles, then it might be that a genetic explanation for autism based on vaccination could hold true. If not, and there are no other types of selective pressure whose lessening  correlates meaningfully with the rise of autism,  it's probably not genetic, but environmental. This is the kind of reasoning you are not going to hear in the medical community or in the anti-vaxxer camp. In fact, I have not heard anyone besides me say this.

Just in case you are wondering, I went through the measles in Israel when I was about five. My mother thought I was going to die, but I was never hospitalized for it, just seen at home by our family doctor, and I survived. My daughter was given the MMR vaccine in Taiwan. My doctor took me aside, telling me that an unsafe version of the vaccine was available  free from the government, but if I wanted a safer version, I would have to pay out of my own pocket. Naturally, I paid.

It is hard to tell what the truth is. It also seems clear that different institutions have a different stake in the matter. What is astonishing, though, is how the "pro-society" people come out in favor of reducing natural selective pressures, thereby making society weaker, whereas the individualists opt for higher selective pressures, endangering individuals in their family, but strengthening society.

So how about that kitten? Is it wrong of me to try to help it survive? I hope not. It is just one drop in the ocean of feline beings, and I hope it survives long enough so it can learn to hunt and provide for itself.

The Kitten in the Stroller and Other Wildlife

Every day, Bow gets a wide variety of foods, most of them pretty natural, but some more on the junky side of the menu. None of it is food he has grown or hunted for or caught or picked. It's "unnatural", but it is also life in the lap of luxury.

Bow  enjoying a strawberry

Meanwhile, on my ten acre property, lots of other animals are dining, too, al fresco, from things that grow here naturally. Some of them are even feeding on each other, and most of the drama and color of their lives is something that takes place when I am not looking.

Rue anemone growing in my woods

I do patrol my land daily, and I take note of many things, like new flora that I have not noticed  before. Did you know there are wild grape vines growing in my woods?

I will stop and take pictures of little bees as they enjoy the dandelions.

It is harmless voyeurism on my part.

But the majority of what goes on on my own property is not known to me, and that is just as it should be. Should I mourn the passing of every little sparrow? I am not cut out for that. Anyway, yesterday, late in the afternoon, I was chasing a colorful beetle, because I wanted to take its picture, but the beetle got away and it led me to the barn. I opened the door to the barn, and I forgot all about the beetle.

There, inside my daughter's old stroller, a tiny orange kitten was cowering.

As I tried to come in closer, to get a better look, it hissed at me. It was at once so tiny and helpless, yet so fierce. At first, I thought: "An abandoned kitten!" But then I realized it was probably not abandoned at all. Its mother was probably lurking just out of sight.

There is no way that a human being -- of the evil sort we imagine when we think of abandoned animals -- trekked all the way through my tick and flea infested pasture through the brambles and the briars in the dead of night when  no one was looking just to very conveniently dump this kitten in the padded stroller in my barn. It is much more likely that a feral cat gave birth to the kitten on my property and chose the stroller for its safe place. And if I were to even so much as touch the kitten, the mother, who might be watching from the loft, would pounce on me.

I bought that stroller before my daughter was born, in preparation. We took it to Taiwan, where it proved to be way too broad to navigate the narrow, teeming streets without sidewalks. It was built for sturdy  American notions of safety, but it was not practical for a country such as Taiwan. Nevertheless, it was the only stroller I had, so Sword used it for two years in Taiwan, and we brought it home to the United States where, in time,  even Bow got to use it. Eventually, we didn't need it anymore, and it has been sitting vacant in the barn for many years until now, when another mother has found a use for it.

The animal rights activists think that being tame or wild is a genetic issue. The cat is a species that has been "domesticated". The chimpanzee is a wild species that  has not been domesticated. But there are wild cats and tame chimpanzees, and it all depends on how they were raised. For intelligent species like cats and chimpanzees, it's nurture as well as nature, and culture is just as important as biology.

I'm not telling my daughter about the kitten in the barn, because she will want to adopt it. But as long as the kitten has a mother, I think I had best leave it to its mother's care. I put out a bowl of milk in the barn, not for the kitten who probably can't drink it, but for the mother who might like to know that I pose it no danger. As long as it stays in the vicinity of the barn and hunts for mice, I have no quarrel with the cat.

Chinese Food

Yesterday during dinner my daughter and I were talking about our plans for later that evening. We had recently found out it was possible to get Chinese take-out in a neighboring town, so we were planning to do that for a late evening snack on a Saturday night. Meanwhile, we were having our regular dinner in the pen with  Bow.

Bow had already had his red apple and his green apple, and the only things left for him to ask for were a pork dish in a bowl and a banana. Usually when he sees these dishes, he just calls them "meat" and that is good enough for me. But Bow took my little finger and spelled:

 "תני לי אוכל סיני". "Give me Chinese food."

I looked at his choices on the little white table. The only thing that even vaguely resembled Chinese food was the pork dish, which consisted of little pieces of pork stir fried with diced potatoes and onions and some lemon juice thrown into the mix. Admittedly, my recipe is a little Asian inspired, but it was hardly Chinese food.

"Fine, here's some Chinese food,"I said and handed him the bowl. He took it and ate it all, but when he returned the bowl to me, he spelled angrily:  "תני לי אוכל סיני". "Give me Chinese food!" There was only a banana left on the table.

I looked into his eyes, and I realized he was angry that we were excluding him from our late night snack which this time would consist of Chinese food. We always have snacks together in my room on Saturday night after Bow has gone to bed,  if we are not going out, and Bow does not seem to mind. But he does like Chinese food, and I guess we should not have discussed that in front of him.

"Okay, Bow," I said. "If I have any leftovers from tonight, I will share them with you tomorrow." This satisfied him.

We ended up getting "General Chicken", which is what they call  General Tso's Chicken on the local menu. I can only finish about half of a normal serving, especially if it is my second dinner of the night.

Bow liked the chicken very much when I let him have my leftovers today, but he did not eat the rice.

For the really big morsels. he bent low over the food, so as to avoid dropping it.

All in all Bow is a pretty clean eater. And does like his Chinese food!