hedgehog-moss

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The daffodils have finally bloomed! Entire fields are turning yellow <3

My mum pointed out I lose interest in the humble cowslip as soon as flashier spring flowers show up and I felt a bit bad, so I picked a little bunch of cowslips to let them add their own touch of yellow to Daffodil Day, in their unassuming way.

#crawling along

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i love when flowers close in the evening like good night girl i love you sleep tight

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x

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by fantastische_waldwesen

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In my neverending quest to keep Pampérigouste from achieving her dreams, I have launched a formal investigation into her last escape, which I had no explanations for at the time.

I figured it out! At the far far end of her pasture, near the road, a few fence posts have become more or less horizontal (the ground is quite wet / muddy there so they've never been very stable, especially with Pirlouit using them to scratch his forehead)—so instead of a high jump + long jump combo to get to the road, Pampe just had to clear the long jump over the ditch. Which is still impressive.

I also suspect that she chose to escape from this place near the road on a snowy morning as a deliberate strategy, knowing the snow plough would erase any traces of her jump, thus preventing me from discovering where the weak spot in the fence was. Well done.

You need 2 people to fix these fence posts so in the meantime I decided to kill two birds with one stone: cut all the broom and thorny bushes in this corner of the pasture and use them to form a discouraging barrier. I set to work earlier this week, and here's the same place as above, mid-process:

When I texted my mum to tell her about my new thorn-based anti-Pampe plan of action, she said "Like the Maasai who make fences with thorny acacia branches to keep out lions!" and it made me feel even more confident. I mean, I have neither acacia nor Maasai fencing techniques but my thorny shrubs are pretty aggressive, they pricked my fingers even through my thick work gloves—which felt satisfying in an anticipatory way. Excellent! prick Pampe's nose exactly like this. How could a llama not be deterred by a fence material that deters apex predators?

Vexingly enough, she seemed quite supportive of my efforts. At one point she breathed some warm air against my shoulder in a gentle, patronising way.

We were engaged in psychological warfare all afternoon—every time I stepped away from my vegetal fence, feeling like it was now good enough, Pampe would immediately come to inspect it, cheerful and impatient, which sapped my confidence so I would go and add a few more shrubs. (Note that I sort of plaited the first / biggest shrubs with the pre-existing fence so they don't go flying on the road, and so Pampe can't just push them aside.)

On the right: Poldine, looking for little fresh leaves to eat amidst the chaos. On the left: Pampérigouste, thinking.

(At this point the barrier was only 20% thorns, and 80% broom—the fact that she waded through it without a care and didn't prick her belly made me go and add more thorny shrubs, and pack them more densely)

It's kind of fun watching Pampe think, honestly. Can I jump over this? Do I have enough visibility? Can I eat my way to freedom (again)? But these shrubs are disgusting. Am I above exploiting my daughter's lack of culinary discernment to achieve my goals? Maybe I should go back to my calculations re: probability of wild boar destruction. I may have pincushions for hands after handling prickly bushes for two hours but I'm helping stimulate my llama's intellect and creativity and that's so important.

I tried to alternate broom and thorny branches so that the non-thorny broom became tangled up with thorns and brambles to form an impenetrable and incomprehensible wall. I will call it this method the salmagundi-fence.

Poldine is in awe of my vegetal installation.

Can I just say, compared to Pampérigouste who constantly has a devilish glint in her eye, Pampelune's face exudes wholesome politeness and moral goodness. It's still hard to believe they're mother and daughter.

I went home once my fence started looking like Maleficent's forest of thorns and Pampe had long stopped trying to wade through it, but I still felt antsy and ended up coming back one hour later to have my apéritif with the llamas so I could keep an eye on Pampe until nightfall.

... where is Pampe?

Oh. Here. No worries!

Still staring at the road. Still thinking.

...

With all that said, please admire my beautifully delirious Forest of Thorns-fence and let me know what you think.

#crawling along #llama drama #(i am not sponsored by kindle i just had it balanced on my knee) #in the photo where pampe is patronisingly praising my efforts you can see a remnant of the police tape from the jungle fence saga! #i should remove it. She was not intimidated by police tape for very long #if ever at all #anyway i've started planting a few interesting shrubs along the road to form a living fence but it's a very slow process #i'm ages away from reaching this part of the pasture

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Jaguarundis (Herpailurus yagouaroundi), family Felidae, found widely across the Americas, from far South TX and SE Arizona, through Mexico, Central America, and much of South America

This cat is very secretive and elusive, and rarely seen.

While working in Ecuador, with the Quichua people, I was told that they use magical portals at the base of Kapok trees to travel from one tree to another... or to the other side.

photograph by @lucas.18photos

#magical cat portals...

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Look at Pandolf’s scary crocodile face as he approaches this tiny kitten!

It looks like he’s going to devour her!!

But he just wants

to pull on her tail gently to attract her attention.

#i reblogged baby morille the other day so let's have some baby merricat too #she was so small and pensive

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frog chair

#it's the tags of this post that reminded me of the giraffe video #all frogs are girls until proven otherwise....

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That viral video from last month of a giraffe pushing a tortoise was interesting to me because I saw it in French & Spanish corners of the internet and everyone was referring to the animals in the video as 'she' since giraffe & tortoise are feminine words, meanwhile on the English-speaking internet I saw a minority of people referring to them as 'it' or 'they', an overwhelming majority using masculine words, and almost no one use 'she'

Similarly romance language speakers humanised these animals using women's names while English speakers used men's names:

And of course it would have been different had the giraffe been an elephant (masculine word) but yeah I find it interesting that when it comes to personifying animals and things, speakers of gendered languages will go 50% masculine 50% feminine due to grammatical gender, while speakers of a non-gendered language with a neutral pronoun will go like 80% masculine 18% neutral 2% feminine.

It must feel weird to learn a gendered language and have to accept that a door is 'she', but it also feels weird to learn a non-gendered language like English and then scroll down hundreds of comments under an animal video and all the animals are 'he'. I'm reminded of a cartoon I saw on tumblr once with a speaking lightbulb, and all the comments referred to it as 'he' and a 'guy' (in french & spanish, people would call it she.) I wonder how it affects the way you frame the world in your mind? you ask a French kid to personify a spoon or a mouse or a raindrop, it's going to be a female character by default. I feel like that's something English speakers rarely consider—that compared to languages that are 'visibly', officially gendered in a 50/50 way, English is less neutral, and more masculine-gendered. When anglophones learn about grammatical gender they tend to react like "why is a chair a 'she' that's absurd?", but when the context calls for it they'll call a lightbulb 'he' without thinking about it

#language tag #the percentages in this post are not proven statistics they come from the Academy of Scrolling Down Tumblr Notes #(disclaimer)

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I like this time of year when the other trees are mostly leafless and you can see little white dots in the hills here and there—the wild cherry trees in bloom ♡

Also is there a softer light than April evening light.

#i know i previously said it was september mornings #and 4pm in december #it's a contentious question

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So far, only one kitten is bold enough to venture away from the house and meet the other animals. Morille prudently sticks to the rocking chair and chirps after her trailblazing sister with some alarm (then washes her paws of the matter).

#thank you to the person who replied to this post last week and reminded me of these adorable pics of baby Morille :)

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Two of our foremost experts conducted a careful examination of the available data, and pronounced spring to have sprung.

#crawling along #i have no idea where the camera focus is in the first two images. the background trees...? #i think i wanted to focus on the cowslips and the hens felt the focus should be on them and my phone was too cowardly to pick a side

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« True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root, Must let their hands grow knotted as they move With a rough sensitivity about Under the earth, between the rock and shoot, Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit. And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred, She who could heal the wounded plant or friend With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love; I minded once to see her beauty gnarled, But now her truth is given me to live, As I learn for myself we must be hard To move among the tender with an open hand, And to stay sensitive up to the end Pay with some toughness for a gentle world. »

— May Sarton, "An Observation"

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home of french ceramic artist marguerite carbonell (1910-2008) world of interiors Oct 07

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My self-imposed chore for today was to clean the donkey's shelter + 1/4th of the pasture, use the most composted manure that's basically already soil for my potato growing bags, and use the rest to shut down (and fertilise) one of the llamas' bathtubs.

See, the llamas dig these grassless circles with their pointy camelid nails so they can dustbathe like giant gerbils to keep parasites away. I fully accept that it is a healthy and normal llama behaviour but I wish they'd dig one bathtub and stick to it. Instead, every few months they abandon their bathtub and go dig a new one, and never seem to wonder how the sterile moon craters they leave behind end up magically fertile and grassy again.

It's not magic! It's me. I keep moving your (excellent, nutritious, full of plant seeds) poop from one spot to the other so the pasture doesn't become a polka-dotted graveyard of former bathtubs. I understand that if you were wild llamas you would abandon the bathtub and not return for months or years so grass would have time to grow back (I have read Pampe's 600-page manifesto on the health & environmental benefits of wild roaming), but surely you could notice your habitat has changed, and change your behaviour accordingly.

Use your abandoned bathtubs as latrines, for example, so I no longer have to move the poop where it is needed. Or at the very least set up your latrines uphill from the bathtubs? so I can push my extremely heavy wheelbarrows of manure down the slope? 🙏 There are options.

(In the foreground of this video you can see a former bathtub that was covered in manure a few months ago and has begun to heal, and in the background, Pampy happily starting a new one.)

Another thing: there is no need to act like I'm committing a crime when I cover an abandoned bathtub with manure. I only do it once I'm sure everyone has moved on from this one and yet it often prompts Pampelune (Bathtub Administrator) to start digging several new ones like she's convinced I have been gripped by a mindless bathtub-confiscating frenzy and if she doesn't outpace me she'll never get to feel the soft caress of dirt on her wool again.

Sometimes it even triggers protest movements.

Not really—I thought this was a protest involving a lie-in, or maybe a lock-on. In a complex triangle formation around the terminated bathtub (and I was going to say, that's not how this works. You're supposed to glue yourself to the ground of your bathtub to obstruct my work and refuse to budge even when I start shovelling manure on your heads. Protesting after the fact and from a safe distance is pointless and performative)—but then I realised my interpretation was clearly wrong. This was a llama mourning rite to honour last summer's bathtub, and the triangle symbolism simply represents the three stages of life, and the fact that everything, even beloved dust bathing spots, has a beginning, heyday, and end.

#crawling along

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sometimes you just gotta sit on a park bench on a lovely spring day and throw some colors on the page, ya know?