The birds that I assumed were greenfinches are siskins, feeding off the niger seed 🙂  There may also be greenfinches in the garden sometimes, I suspect.   My bird recognition skills are still pretty rudimentary.  There’s a list as long as my arm of supposedly fairly common birds that I have never to my knowledge seen, like bramblings, redpolls, redstarts, all the little brown jobs and all the warblers except blackcaps, (one of which took over one of our dead eucalyptus trees to sing from last year), and I really struggle with the birds of prey (I can do buzzard, kestrel, the larger owls and golden eagles but falcons, harriers and hawks remain an interchangeable mystery).  Pipits get named according to where they happen to be sitting- if it’s on a rock it’s a rock pipit, in a meadow ditto.  Now I have a fully working pair of binoculars again I ought to put some more effort into it.  I like being able to categorise things,  Also a female pheasant under the feeders this morning- haven’t seen her before (maybe Beatnik was a deterrent? I can’t see Sputnik having a go at hunting pheasant), 

Anyway for those who don’t know this is what a siskin looks like (images from Wikimedia);

And a greenfinch (noticeably bigger)

My bug has mostly passed and so has the brief spell of good weather. Tramped three times around the field in the cold rain this morning, on our own.  A contractual obligation walk, I call those. They can’t all be exciting, or even pleasant, Most walks I enjoy; this really is the fag end of the year though. Most of our walks are under water but York isn’t badly affected by the floods, or at least not more than usual- this is a city that knows how to flood.

Kili and I will now go back to bed for a couple of hours until the gas service person arrives. It’s an exciting life.

Surplus males, or the difference between zoos and menageries

A couple of days down with a bug of some sort, haven’t done much except drag myself round the local field with the dog 😦  Still shaky and aching.  Fortunately Kili is very tolerant of my periodic illnesses, and is happy to snooze most of the day away on the bed with me, as long as he gets out every few hours.

The story about the giraffe being put down in Copenhagen Zoo http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/09/why-copenhagen-zoo-killed-marius-giraffe got me thinking about surplus males.  I’m undoubtedly an animal lover in that I find them endlessly fascinating, but with the exception of my own animals, of whom I am extremely fond, I don’t tend to be sentimental about them.  It seems to me obvious that anyone breeding herd animals is going to have an issue with having more males than can join breeding herds. Keeping herds to roughly the same balance of males to females as is found in nature is almost always going to be a requirement if the animals are going to be unstressed, with natural social relationships and breeding properly.  Keeping separate “bachelor herds” sounds all very well, but one of the main purpose of zoos is to maintain a captive breeding programme for rare subspecies. If their space is taken up by animals which are never going to breed then they aren’t doing that. 

The pygmy goats I’m getting are wethers (castrated males).  Very few male kids go uncastrated because it is difficult for most places to keep many entire goats, or any at all, and the number actually needed for breeding is tiny. It is noticeable if you look in the online small ads that people who breed their goats and don’t castrate have trouble rehoming their billys- you can pick them up very cheaply or free.  Fortunately for male pygmy goats there is a market for wethers as pets.  If there wasn’t they would go the same way as male dairy calves and the occasional male giraffe- fed to the lions (or local equivalent). 

I don’t think zoos should have their work handicapped by campaigns that can’t see past a single animal to their much wider responsibility to work towards meaningful goals for conservation. I’m sure the giraffe keepers were deeply saddened by the death of their giraffe, but if you’re not prepared to make those decisions you end up not with a modern zoo but a menagerie like mine, full of random animals kept for people’s entertainment rather than as a real attempt to make a difference to the problems that species face in the outside world. 

The problem of surplus males is one that people must have faced ever since deliberate breeding of animals began.  It’s not, as I’ve seen suggested, somehow a mistake by the zoo or a consequence of irresponsible breeding. Evolution can be very wasteful. The fact that most males never get to breed doesn’t matter because the ones that do pass on genes to far more offspring that the females so as a parent having equal numbers of male and female offspring is the best bet.  It’s dreadfully inefficient on a species level but as Mr Dawkins tells us, evolution doesn’t much care about that. Poor Marius the giraffe is reaping the consequences of the selfish gene, not cruelty or mismanagement by Copenhagen Zoo. 

Now everyone’s been introduced, what’s going on at the moment?

We have had months of rain and everywhere I walk Kili is thick with mud, which is getting quite depressing- we don’t mind the mud so much but very few dogs are let off leads to play in it so he’s missing having playmates. Fortunately he still gets to run around with his best friend Chester the border terrier most mornings.  I have cut his fur short from his knees downwards to reduce tangles and he looks rather like a goat himself as a result- thin white legs under a mass of black hair. As you can see he’s a bit scruffy right now; he needs stripping and his face trimming- his eyebrows have gone wild . When I do that I’ll try to get some before/after photos and explain what I’m doing. It’s nothing like a professional groomer would do but it keeps him reasonably tidy.

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Sputnik the cat is mostly sleeping. He’s become friendlier since his brother died very suddenly a few weeks ago (heart failure, we think) and is now inclined to demand strokes and lick the end of one’s nose.  He yelled the house down late a couple of nights ago- I got out of bed to find out who was murdering him only to find that he’d come in from the rain and wanted towelling down!  To be fair he does have very thick fur. He seems to be rather inactive for a relatively young (5yrs) cat; he spends pretty much all day curled up on the end of the sofa. It may be just the weather but we are hoping the arrival of the kittens in 4 weeks will have a good effect.  He adopted the puppy when it arrived two years ago so there’s a precedent, but one never knows with cats.  The kittens have been brought up with a variety of older cats so hopefully they will have learned that adult cats don’t always appreciate full-on kittenness.

A combination of the awful weather and Spouse being busy at weekends has meant that there’s a lull in the pygmy goat preparations. I’ll post a full report on where we are with those when I manage to take some photos in daylight.  Now my kids have been born and chosen it seems much more real, although I can’t have them until they are 12 weeks old so a very long wait ahead.

Bullfinches on the seed feeders yesterday!  A pair.  I’ve recently changed to bird food from Ark Wildlife (online with free delivery) which is a little more expensive than the garden centre versions but the birds are far keener on it. I’m currently putting out fat balls, peanuts, niger seed, a general seed mix (without wheat which just seems to get dumped) and mealworms and suet pellets in the little hanging table.  There’s a whole flock of goldfinches who queue up for the niger seed- they come in all weathers, unlike the rest of the birds.  I also regularly get blue tits, great tits, long tailed tits, sparrows, chaffinches, robins, blackbirds, collared doves and wood pigeons- nothing terribly exotic but they are fun to watch.  And recently a squirrel which has pleased Kili no end.

An introduction to the animals

Welcome to the non-imaginary menagerie. I have dreamed of imaginary menageries for many years but this is a blog about all the things my real menagerie needs and provides; it’s somewhere to keep my notes and photos as well as my ramblings on all things animal.

The pygmy goats are likely to get the lion’s share of entries, at least to start off with (since I don’t have a lion) because I still have quite a lot to do to get things ready for their arrival and I’ve never kept anything similar before.  They are going to live in a converted shed and paddock in the back garden (despite what people assume I have no smallholding, alas, just a half share in a dormer bungalow in the north of England).

The current menagerie consists of
Kili, a 2 yr old oversized black and silver Miniature Schnauzer and his friend Sputnik, a 5 yr old fat furry grey moggy with three legs

Bob, a 15 yr old corn snake
One tank of Archer fish and Geophagus braziliensis and one nano tank of Bumblebee gobies.

The menagerie will shortly include
Dionysus (red) and Tartarus (black), two oriental x bengal kittens arriving early March
Loki, Jim and Khan,( mainly black, grey and white respectively), three pygmy goat kids arriving late April.

Not strictly part of the menagerie are the wild birds that visit the various feeders I put out but they’ll probably get a mention now and again.