In order to lighten things up here a bit, I want to share a video with you.

On an island off the coast of New Zealand lives a colony of Kakapo. The kakapo is an extremely rare and endangered species of flightless parrot. They have a problem mating. In Douglass Adams' book 'Last Chance to See' he describes it thusly:

The ways in which it goes about mating are wonderfully bizarre, extraordinarily long drawn out and almost totally ineffective.

Here's what they do:

The male kakapo builds himself a track and bowl system, which is simply a roughly dug shallow depression in the earth, with one or two pathways leading through the undergrowth towards it. The only thing that distinguishes the tracks from those that would be made by any other animal blundering its way about is that the vegetation on either side of them is rather precisely clipped.

The kakapo is looking for good acoustics when he does this, so the track and bowl system will often be sited against a rock facing out across a valley, and when the mating season arrives he sits in his bowl and booms.

This is an extraordinary performance. He puffs out two enormous air sacs on either side of his chest, sinks his head down into them and starts to make what he feels are sexy grunting noises. These noises gradually descend in pitch, resonate in his two air sacs and reverberate through the night air, filling the valleys for miles around with the eerie sound of an immense heart beating in the night.

The booming noise is deep, very deep, just on. the threshold of what you can actually hear and what you can feel. This means that it carries for a very great distances, but that you can't tell where it's coming from. If you're familiar with certain types of stereo set-up, you'll know that you can get an additional speaker called a sub-woofer which carries only the bass frequencies and which you can, in theory, stick anywhere in the room, even behind the sofa. The principle is the same - you can't tell where the bass sound is coming from.

The female kakapo can't tell where the booming is coming from either, which is something of a shortcoming in a mating call. `Come and get me!' `Where are you?? 'Come and get me!' 'Where the hell are you?' `Come and get me!' `Look, do you want me to come or not?' `Come and get me!' 'Oh, for heaven's sake.' `Come and get me!' 'Go and stuff yourself,' is roughly how it would go in human terms. [...]

It's not that they're not willing. When they are in breeding condition, their sex drive is extremely strong. One female kakapo is known to have walked twenty miles in one night to visit a mate, and then walked back again in the morning. Unfortunately, however, the period during which the female is prepared to behave like this is rather short. As if things aren't difficult enough already, the female can only come into breeding condition when a particular plant, the podocarp for instance, is bearing fruit. This only happens every two years. Until it does, the male can boom all he likes, it won't do him any good. The kakapo's pernickety dietary requirements are a whole other area of exasperating difficulty. It makes me tired just to think of them, so I think we'll pass quickly over all that. Imagine being an airline steward trying to serve meals to a plane full of Moslems, Jews, vegetarians, vegans and diabetics when all you've got is turkey because it's Christmas time, and that will give you the idea.

The males therefore get extremely overwrought sitting in their bowls making noises for months on end, waiting for their mates who are waiting for a particular type of tree to fruit. When one of the rangers who was working in an area where kakapos were booming happened to leave his hat on the ground, he came back later to find a kakapo attempting to ravish it. On another occasion the discovery of some ruffled possum fur in the mating area suggested that a kakapo had made another alarming mistake, an experience which is unlikely to have been satisfying to either party.

So, anyway, the BBC is filming another installment of Last Chance to See, 20 years after Adams did his book. Stephen Fry and the original photographer went to visit the Kakapo (which is doing much better, by the way). Here's what happened:

Someone commented that they thought it was nice that the parrot returned for a post-coital cuddle. After I sent it to Matt, he called me. He said he'd gotten the video, he liked it a lot....did I want him to get out the turkey wings tonight??

Rain Rain Go AWAY, dammit!

We had ANOTHER 4 inches of rain last night. This is a total of around 12 inches in the past month. The potatoes we have in the lower part of the field aren’t coming up, and at this point I really don’t expect them to, I’m sure they’ve rotted. So. Well. At least the rest seem to be ok, but we still have 200lb to plant. Please check out other gardening-related news in my new gardening blog.

I also will be talking about this in my garden blog, but I went to an event this weekend and Hundredfold Farm in Cashtown, PA. It was really nice, I met Angie at my parent’s house in Gettysburg, then we drove over together. The event was fairly well attended, had house tours, a greenhouse/wastewater plant tour, and many vendors and speakers.

Hundredfold Farm refers to itself as an ‘Intentional Community.’ There was a Christmas tree farm for sale and a group of people bought it out from under a housing developer. They are keeping the Christmas tree farm going, while building sustainable housing (limit of 14 houses) on part of the property. The houses are modular (NOT mobile; one of the young men on my tour was really snotty and referred to it as a ‘glorified mobile home’ and the homeowner icily set him straight), they have solar arrays on the south-facing part of the roof, and all the wastewater from the houses goes to a greenhouse system where it gets broken down by an artificial marsh into usable water, which they then reuse to flush their toilets and they hope in the future to use it for irrigation as well.

I went to three speakers:

The first one was a Penn State professor who talked about the need for solar power, the state of the energy crisis we’re in the beginning of, and was very interesting. He made a good point: as much as we’re complaining about gas prices, we’ve been spoiled by cheap energy for way WAY too long, and he said that the majority of the country would find 30 miles of driving to be worth $6 (as opposed to the alternative, which is not going wherever it is you want/need to go). I also had a great time watching a 4-year-old playing in a mud bog.

The second speaker I went to was Thom Marti from Broad Valley Orchard, a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm north of Gettysburg. He talked on Food Security, which working where I do I immediately thought he was going to talk about the security of our massive food supply. But no, he talked about the security of our micro food supply, as in do you know where your lettuce comes from and how it’s grown? I will talk more about this in my garden blog; he was veeeery interesting.

The third speaker was my coworker’s husband Jim talking about electricity conservation. This was basic stuff I’ve heard before: turn off lights, buy EnergyStar appliances, etc.

My coworker also went to the Sustainable Eating workshop, which I wanted to go to but went to the last house/greenhouse tour of the day instead. I’ll probably get the Sustainable Eating scoop and write about it in the garden blog later. Stay tuned.

Angie and I went to dinner at the Appalachian Brewing Company in Gettysburg. We each had a nice beer (her: Stout, me: Maibock), and some good food. We gabbed a lot, tried to solve the world’s problems, talked about parents, and had a nice time.

I went home and tried to crash but wound up only getting 4 hours sleep.

And on to the Busiest Day of My Life So Far…ok, not really but it was the busiest day I’ve had recently...Mother’s Day.

I got up early (thanks a lot, Max) and drove over to New Oxford to visit Matt’s grandma Mary V. She’d ordered some tomato plants through me and I needed to drop them off. We visited, she’d made coffee cake (of course) and I had that with her wonderful coffee. She makes the best coffee on earth. Matt’s uncle Bobby came by with his two golden retrievers. Bobby is in the middle of a quiet divorce, so he was very scattered.

After a couple hours there, I drove back to Gettysburg to pick up my mom for our annual trip to Isabella’s in Frederick. We just barely made our reservations and had a nice lunch. They’ve taken a few things off the menu and added some new dishes (ATTENTION TIM!!!). The old standby’s we had were marinated eggplant salad, sautéed spinach with pine nuts and golden raisins, melon with prosciutto, French fried asparagus, (I’m starting to drool just writing this), meatballs in tomato sauce. New dishes included a really spicy shrimp with garlic and onions, and my personal new favorite stuffed dates wrapped in bacon then breaded with Panko bread crumbs and fried served with a goat cheese cream sauce. OMFG, they were really good. I think we had a couple others, but I can’t remember right now.

We drove back to my house so I could show mom the veggie garden and pick up Max, then headed back to Gettysburg. Mom did her online registration for our August cruise, Max and I went grocery shopping, then….finally….home. Matt called, I watched TV and had a baked potato for dinner, followed by some vanilla ice cream and a homemade strawberry-rhubarb sauce and a Tylenol PM. I had a good nights sleep last night, much needed.