kedreeva

[kedreeva]

my grandpa was a good man. and it really wasnt his fault - recreationally lying to kids is a proud family tradition - but he told me, once, that cutting a worm in half resulted in two worms.

i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.

point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.

i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.

i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.

i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.

(i think i was...six?)

anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.

(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)

so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?

so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.

the compost pile was full of worms.

and she told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and i would go to heaven, and i would be able to talk to the worms, and i would be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident out of excessive Love, and that they would forgive me, because worms have six hearts and no malice.

at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.

and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.

but because she loved me.

[kedreeva]

I think most of the time when it comes to animals, even cats and dogs, breeders don’t turn a profit

No, i don't expect they do, although it really depends on what they're charging, the local market vs actual value of the animals, and the reproductive rate of the animals vs maternal care time of the animals. Most domestic pet type animals you aren't going to make a profit on because if someone wants "a cat" or "a dog" they've got the fall back of rescues or pet stores.

Livestock tends to be better for turning profit (and peafowl ARE considered livestock), as you pretty much have to go to a farmer of some sort, and rescues that take farm animals are fewer and far between. The mice usually break even, maybe a little more, because you cannot get this quality in pet stores, but the quail? The quail I DO make money on. They breed fast, they grow fast, they don't consume much in terms of resources, and people have to get them from a private breeder because the large scale hatcheries don't do quail (or if they do, they only do one kind: jumbo browns). They are a good livestock bird, whereas peafowl are more ornamental livestock.

[kedreeva]

@teameagleworks visited today to spend some time in the Peafowl pens, because she's scared of them and she doesn't want to be. So she brought a chair and I gave her a bowl of treats and we sat around in the pens for a couple hours.

Of course the hot second she sat down, Bug saw the treat bowl and jumped right up to help herself, startling the shit out of my sister.

She really held it together though, I'm very proud of her bravery. She even gave Earl treats from her hand and everything.

It's hard for me to get a photo of Bug in a way that represents how large the birds get, I don't often have anyone here to compare to and can't get pics of myself. But they're big fucking birds when you meet them up close and personal.

[kedreeva]

Writing isn't the hobby. Being insane about little fake people is the hobby. Writing is just the only outlet i have for that

[kedreeva]

I have a question, how much would you estimate it costs you yearly for the peacocks? Do you generally turn a profit when you sell them, or is it mostly a passion thing?

I almost certainly do NOT turn a profit on them, it's very much a passion for me lol

In a very rough breakdown, feed is ~$22 for a 50lb bag, and they go through around $800-1000 of it a year. Their scratch grain mix typically comes out to..... around maybe $30/50lbs and they go through around $100 of that a year. The bedding that goes into the pens is another $100/year or so (more if it's a cold winter). I have never counted the water/electricity bill for them but it's not zero. And that's the very, very, very basics for them- food, water, bedding. It doesn't include any of the myriad treats and fresh feeds they get, nor equipment replacements (though this is minimal most years), nor vet bills (which varies by year), and it doesn't factor in the initial cost of building the pens for them (over $2k per pen), or any maintenance on the pens, and it doesn't cover the $125-300 charge for becoming NPIP certified, nor the pullorum antigen that's over $100 to do the testing.

The babies typically sell for ~$100-200 each, depending on the color/pattern/sex and how good the year is going (I've definitely had years where the market ends up being under $100/bird), and I normally produce somewhere between 10 and 20 of them a year. I've more recently been selling the hollow eggs on etsy which is usually good for a few extra bucks, but not a lot since I don't push my girls to lay, so I don't tend to have a lot of eggs to hollow out. Selling the chicks can usually cover the cost of feed, and probably the cost of bedding. On a really good year with little vet involvement, I will break even, or even have a little extra to hold onto for whatever the next vet visit will be. On a bad year I am deeply in the hole and continuing to do what I do because I love the birds, not because they make me any money.

With these guys, you don't really "turn a profit" until you start cutting corners (little to no vet care, cheap feed, no extras, etc) and producing more birds than you can reasonably care for to a good standard.

[kedreeva]

A lil compilation of ace pride artwork I’ve made over the past year! 💜

[kedreeva]

The last days of the petition against conversion therapy are FASCINATING to watch. I have been following it pretty closely for almost a year now, and the progress was, above all, steady. There was this jump when some algorithm in Finland picked it up, but even that was local.

And now, everyone is panicking.

Which really shows.

These past three or four days, multiple countries have reached the threshold. Even more notably, the number of signatures in total, the ones that we need to get one million of, are growing rapidly. There are only 400'000 signatures missing. Two days ago, it was closer to 600'000.

You can see the progress here:

Consider joining the fun by making everyone around you sign it!

[kedreeva]

@teameagleworks visited today to spend some time in the Peafowl pens, because she's scared of them and she doesn't want to be. So she brought a chair and I gave her a bowl of treats and we sat around in the pens for a couple hours.

Of course the hot second she sat down, Bug saw the treat bowl and jumped right up to help herself, startling the shit out of my sister.

She really held it together though, I'm very proud of her bravery. She even gave Earl treats from her hand and everything.

It's hard for me to get a photo of Bug in a way that represents how large the birds get, I don't often have anyone here to compare to and can't get pics of myself. But they're big fucking birds when you meet them up close and personal.

[kedreeva]

This storm has been a taste in the air, a weight on my skin, for hours now, and it's finally rolling in hard.

[kedreeva]

I'm very sorry, but they are very smooth. Soft, but smooth.

Hey! I was wondering if you could tell me anything about these birds? They were spotted wild in the UK countryside and I was curious about their colouring/whether this is their final form, or if they're juveniles etc. If not, then I hope you'll enjoy the photos 🥰

They are Spalding hens. The brown one is a wild type blue Spalding, the other is a blackshoulder blue Spalding. Given their coloration and size they are at least yearlings, and should not change much in color

[kedreeva]

It's fine! Fowl are actually highly resistant to prion diseases, it's nearly impossible to cause them in fowl because their prion protein genes are not like those of mammals. In fact birds in general just haven't been found to catch prion diseases (which isn't to say they absolutely can't or have never but science hasn't really found it to be the case that they get it, even when scientists try really hard to give it to them via infected meat). So, chickens can probably eat all the eggs they'd like without repercussions :)

Poor Bug, doomed to lay eggs because she is a bird.

[kedreeva]

Thank you so much for being so prominent in the peafowl community! I've just been entertaining myself looking at all of the different variations and such, and your genetics document is.. so good?? So just, thank you for that!

Are you on the spreadsheet or the website?

I am slowly migrating the genetics spreadsheet to my website, where it will hopefully be easier to read.

And, hopefully will have a whole genetics calculator at some point. There were at least a couple people working on it, but I've been hella busy with Spring Is Baby Bird Season so I have no idea what's happening at the moment. but it's 11pm and I still have a solid hour of work to do before I can sleep and I've been up since 7, and it's been like this most days this last month /sigh

We DO, I know, have a template for the peafowl images, if anyone feels like coloring in some of the mutations for fun for the project.

[kedreeva]

how's polaris doing? you said that he's becoming mean to the bs hens, is he still like that?

He is, but he's chilled out some now that all his adult girls are on nests. It's still not a great trait, and I'm hoping that Cici doesn't express it (he hasn't so far, and his brothers both have, so I expect I would see it), and that he's fertile, because then I can send Polaris to a home where he can have full color girls and not stress about it.

[kedreeva]

every week i wait for my mutuals to bring me news of the firefighters. are the firefighters in love have the firefighters been in love will the firefighters be in love when will the firefighters be in love

[kedreeva]

[kedreeva]

Hey! I was wondering if you could tell me anything about these birds? They were spotted wild in the UK countryside and I was curious about their colouring/whether this is their final form, or if they're juveniles etc. If not, then I hope you'll enjoy the photos 🥰

They are Spalding hens. The brown one is a wild type blue Spalding, the other is a blackshoulder blue Spalding. Given their coloration and size they are at least yearlings, and should not change much in color

[kedreeva]

Hello again, dwarf quail anon here. I did it today when I came home from work. I felt awful, but she was so calm, like she knew she wouldn't have to suffer anymore. Like a fool i forgot to keep a hold on the body so there was a little to clean up after.

I walked out into the woods with her, the ground was too hard for my shovel so I laid her in an off-path blueberry patch surrounded by large stones. I haven't seen any foxes in the area but maybe another bird will take her. On the way back I met a hedgehog that found the packaging I'd carried her in the most interesting smell ever. Probably he would've loved to have her body 😅 But yeah now it's done and my eyes are sore from crying. And now I know the process if I ever have to do it again. Knife + bit of wood as a chopping block worked very well.

Thank you for getting me to do it. Without the encouragement I probably would have let it go way way too long and she would've suffered even more. Now she's no longer in pain ❤️

I am incredibly proud of you for putting her needs before your own, and doing what's best by her even though it's hard and it sucks. I think it's very nice that you were able to return her to the wild to help some other animal get by. The forest will carry little bits of her in itself longer than you'll ever know.

Be gentle with yourself today, and give the others a few extra treats.