Peter Davies is a dealer in world textiles and kilim rugs, particularly those from Turkey, a destination he knows well and for which he also is a travel consultant. His partner, Mark Scherzer, this week's correspondent, has his own law firm, specializing in health law. For most of the past decade, the pair also have farmed on 39 acres in Germantown, NY. At Turkana Farms, Davies and Scherzer raise heritage-breed livestock—pigs, sheep, cattle, and poultry of every stripe, most famously their heritage-breed turkeys, and grow vegetables and berries, all of which they sell from their farm kitchen and from their New York City loft. This blog is adapted from the weekly e-mail they send to their customers. I’m happy to report that a population explosion is underway at Turkana Farms. Our turkey poults arrived by mail this week and are happily socializing under heat lamps upstairs in the barn, but there’s also been a great burst of births on the farm. We cannot take credit for the fecundity of our flocks but we can take great satisfaction in it. This has been a particularly satisfying period. Eight lambs have been born in the last ten days, joining six born the week before. Those of you in the neighborhood, driving by on Old Saw Mill Road, may notice that 22 little ones are now bounding around their elders, behaving much like a kindergarten cohort at recess. They are black, brown, white, ginger, and sometimes all of the above in the most surprising combinations, with ears ranging from long and floppy to barely discernible. The oldest of our new ewelings will be weaned soon and moved to the front lawn. Even more exciting for us was the birth of a calf a week ago Tuesday. The couple of calves we’ve had in the past were surprises whose mothers we had unknowingly bought in an already pregnant state. But this one is the result of a deliberate breeding effort, for which we acquired a very handsome British White bull, Tommy, last summer. We hope he’s done equally well by our other three cows, at least two of whom, the younger two, appear to be getting close to calving as well.
Portrait of mother and daughter, left, born 4-27-09. These births, even though we rarely need to assist, are tremendous learning experiences for us. They teach us something about the differences among the species and something about the individual personalities of the mothers. Terms like “herd instinct” and “fiercely protective mother” may bring very distinct images to mind, but the reality turns out to be far more varied than one might expect. When our sheep are about to give birth, they generally gravitate to the barn. The other members of the herd tend to leave the lambing ewe plenty of space. Indeed, they usually clear out entirely. We often find the new mother alone in the barn cleaning off her new lamb(s) while the rest of the flock hangs back outside. The cows, in contrast, seem to surround the expectant mother as she gets close to calving, protecting her from encroachment. Sheep and cow behavior diverge similarly after the birth. Protecting the lamb is clearly the job of its mother alone, while the cows seem to continue to look out collectively for the calf. The ewe’s main strategy is to keep the lambs right by her side, while the cow will often hide the calf in tall grass or brush while going off to graze. Maybe this reflects the different capacities of their young. The lambs seem able to bound about and keep up with their mothers within hours, while calves have to sleep off their births for several days. The depth of a ewe’s devotion to her lamb is startling to see. If you take it away, she will drive herself to distraction calling to it and seeking it out. We’ve had a number of ewes whose lambs have not survived. Some of them will call for days, and a few have behaved as if they were despondent for a week or two thereafter. So much for the notion of animals without emotion or memory. Here, the starkest contrast is with our sows. The sows are ferociously protective, chasing us and threatening to bite if we remove piglets from the pen, even piglets other than their own. But within moments of the removal they revert to their normal personalities, ready for us to scratch behind their ears. (Pigs are also quite liberal about nursing sister sows’ piglets, while ewes tend to reserve their udders exclusively for their own lambs, kicking encroachers away. Pigs, of course, can afford to be more generous, having so many more teats to offer.) While our own human instinct is to reduce all these differences to genetics, characteristics of the species, or even to the imperatives of the their physical configurations, the more we get to know our domestic animals the more convinced we become that learning, even “culture”, plays a role in our their behavior. We’ve long noted that certain sheep “families” within our flock relate to us differently from others. Some are more trusting and affectionate, others more skittish and distant, and we never had a very clear idea why. We understand how the lambs we bottle feed learn to bond with us, by associating us with the bottles we bring them every few hours. But why would there be such variability in the comfort level of the others? My conclusion: they learn it.
Sultana and twins, born 4-27-09 How do I know this? Last year, one of our bottle fed ewes, Sultana, who spent a long time living in the mud room and ever since has been torn between the sheep and the human worlds, had her first lamb, Ayse. We never had any direct role in feeding or protecting Ayse, yet we have found that she consistently approaches us to nuzzle and be petted. As far as we can tell the only explanation is that she learned this behavior from mama. The mode of communication is not clear to us (is it simple observation and copying, or secret lessons in bleated language?), but the transmission of knowledge is clearly there. We were therefore particularly pleased this week that Sultana and another of the ewes whom we bottle-fed, Nilufer, each had twins, because we expect that they will teach their lambs to bond with us as well. —Mark Scherzer
