Mother Nature's Birth Control

Most wild animals have a specific breeding season, while most domestic animals will breed all the time if you let them. I think the breeding season of wild animals is keyed to the weather and the availability of food. Deer breed in the fall, gestate for six months, and have their fawns in the spring. Our spring comes about a month later than yours, and fawns are being born in Northern Michigan as we speak. Our trees are just starting to leaf out now, our grass has been green for some time, but it has just lately started to grow taller. The mother deer need to have good nutrition in order produce milk for their fawns, and the fawns need some time to grow up before they have to wade through the deep winter snow, so May is the optimum month for fawns to be born in this region. Most or our deer breed in November, but not all at the same time. Does may come into heat as early as October or as late as December, causing their fawns to be born either earlier or later than the majority. Early and late fawns have a survival disadvantage but, if the climate were to change, this survival disadvantage might turn into an advantage. I understand that deer in Florida breed all year, but I don't think their does breed while they are still nursing their last fawn. Humans breed all the time, but the females will not get pregnant while they are nursing, which is why nursing a baby used to be called "Mother Nature's birth control". I think it's the same for all the primates, like monkeys and apes.

Chickens originated in Africa, where there is no winter, so that might explain why they lay eggs all year, although I'm sure they have been selectively bred to maximize egg production as well. Keeping a rooster or two with your hens will not cause them to lay more eggs, but eggs laid without a rooster's input will never hatch a chick. Commercial egg producers don't care whether or not their eggs are fertile, so they don't need to keep roosters. They buy their  pullets ( adolescent hens) about six months old from a hatchery, and they usually send them off to the soup factory within a year or so. We kept our laying hens for two and a half years, and they were still laying, but we were tired of taking care of them, and winter was coming on, so we liquidated our stock. Egg production generally slows down in the winter, but you can mitigate that by putting a light in your coop, fooling the hens into thinking that it's still summer, or so I've been told.

When I butchered our chickens, I found multiple eggs inside them, all lined up in a single file, with the largest one at the end, and each successive egg being a little smaller than the previous one. The only egg with a hard shell was the largest one, the rest had soft shells. This leads me to believe that the eggs get fertilized one at a time, just before their shells harden. Shortly after laying an egg, a hen will issue a distinctive call that my hypothetical wife said meant she was bragging about the egg she just laid. I had noticed, however, that they made the same call at other times, usually when they were upset about something, and that the call, whenever issued, caused the rooster to come running. Although roosters are not needed to produce eggs, they are useful for mediating disputes among the hens, and for defending the flock against real or imagined threats. Since we free ranged our chickens in the daytime, we liked having a rooster around. Anyway, my theory is that the hen calls the rooster after she has laid her hard shelled egg so that he can come fertilize the next one before the shell starts to harden.

Like I said, egg production slows down in the winter, but it will also slow down or stop altogether whenever the hens are experiencing some kind of stress like poor nutrition, overcrowding, or inadequate shelter from the elements. Chickens can tolerate a certain amount of cold if they are protected from drafts, but they do better if you can keep their coop above freezing. Often they can do that with their own body heat but, if I was going into the chicken business again, I would have some kind of permanent heat source in the coop. I ran an extension cord to our coop for a heat lamp when our chicks were little, but I took it down when they got bigger. I talked to a guy years later who told me that he left his heat lamp up permanently, but only turned it on when his chickens needed it. He said that, if their drinking water freezes, the coop is too cold. Modern egg factories have computer controlled climate regulation that maintains the optimum temperature and humidity for egg production.

When I was young, I mostly read whatever I found lying around. I don't remember being a fan of any particular genre for very long. My parents subscribed to two newspapers and I don't know how many magazines. I read a lot in the army, everything from Playboy to scientific texts. There were a lot of times when we couldn't go anywhere but didn't have a lot to do. Everybody read something, and then passed it on to somebody else when they were finished with it.

I have only bought a few things online in the 15 or so years I have had my computer, mostly when I couldn't find something I wanted locally. We used to buy most of our clothes from Sears and Penny's when they used to send catalogs in the mail. Once you knew your size, you could buy the same item years later and be reasonably certain that it would fit. Nowadays you have to try everything on at the store, even when you buy two or more identical items at the same time, so we don't like to buy clothing on line.