10:12 – We’re doing the usual Sunday stuff. This afternoon, Barbara will continue watching season 5 of Glee while she labels bottles. I’ll be filling bottles.
The mailman brought me six flats of boxes yesterday, four of the regional rate A boxes and two of the regional rate B boxes. I mentioned to him that it was annoying that USPS would allow me to order only four flats of 25-boxes of any given size at a time, which means that I need to place multiple orders to keep the boxes in stock, particularly during the summer/autumn rush season. He said that USPS implemented the limit because people would accidentally over-order. He said one of his customers wanted 100 flat-rate boxes and had ordered quantity 100 without realizing that she was ordering 100 flats of 25 boxes each rather than 100 boxes. So he ended up delivering 2,500 boxes, to her horror. He carried the extra 96 flats of boxes back to the post office, which was a several year supply for them.
A day without comments is almost unbearable. I can’t remember a day without comments. Is there a major black-out over there I have not heard of ?
There is an article in ARS that refers to a long study on SSD reliability carried out by TechReport that would seem as good reference information.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/03/consumer-ssds-benchmarked-to-death-and-last-far-longer-than-rated/
“A day without comments is almost unbearable. I can’t remember a day without comments. Is there a major black-out over there I have not heard of ?”
Well, Mr. Marcelo, many of us were simply too gobsmacked to post anything much after the stunning exchange concerning bag storage and sealing up of same yesterday. Dunno about everybody else, but I’m reeling here.
Saw a great saying about evacuation is my latest survivalist book:
http://www.amazon.com/Survivalist-Madness-Rules-Arthur-Bradley/dp/1500208825/
“The golden rule of evacuation is,
get out early or do not get out at all.”
Umm, no.
http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/raising-pigeons-for-food/
Pigeons are rats with wings.
Actually, they’re pretty tasty. Kind of like dark-meat chicken.
I used to hunt doves, which apparently have military-grade threat sensors. A bunch of them will be flying along and you start swinging your shotgun barrel to lead them. Just as you’re about to pull the trigger, they go into evasion mode, swerving and diving. The first time I was out, I went through an entire box of shells and got exactly one.
Much better to have a dovecote.
Shotgunning doves and pigeons is certainly very good sport, but literally rather hit-and-miss if one intends to eat from the day’s bag. Woodpigeon are odd quarry – if they like the look of a potential landing / feeding site, they will flock into it all day, despite the presence of guns camouflaged there – maybe they just think “that’s a rather dangerous bush, but I’ll land on it anyway”. If they don’t like the look of the locale from the air, they will avoid it, but often flock to a – to our eyes -identical landing area nearby.
Pigeon meat is very tasty, though it’s important to separate the young birds from the old. Squab and young pigeon is delicious sauteed, roast or grilled slightly pink, while the tougher older birds really need braising or stewing. There are both large- and small-sized breeds of pigeon kept as domestic animals specifically for their meat.
If one really wanted to raise game birds for meat, I would recommend quail – they don’t require much space, and produce a lot of meat and eggs for relatively little food input.
Quail are good. They are not all VERY small – two can make the basis of a decent meal, one per person plus other bits and pieces will make a filling soup. You can get quail which lay as frequently as the most productive strains of other poultry (approaching 300 per annum), such as chickens or ducks, but they mature enormously young – say 10 or 12 weeks. The eggs are very large compared to the size of the bird, so they are definitely worth eating – four or five quail eggs are equivalent to a chicken egg. You can keep quail at a high density – in a single cage an average space one foot square per bird is plenty – in fact two square feet per three birds is okay. They are quite quiet, so if you want to keep a couple of dozen or a few dozen quail in a small cage in the garage then the authorities will never know. You could run them under rabbit cages, or keep a couple of parrots or finches in the top of the cage, and they’d pass for pets and make some of their living cleaning up whatever falls from above. Feed whatever waste and sweepings there are to a worm bed, then feed the worms to the quails. This enables people to develop a measure of self-sufficiency even if they’re sentenced to life in the ‘burbs. It also lets them get experience with keeping (small) livestock under those conditions, just as a vegetable garden and a home orchard gives them (small) farming experience – both while growing a substantial proportion of their own food. It’s not for everyone – it requires a substantial investment of time (not the quail, but the whole self-sufficiency thing, particularly home gardening as , for instance, our Mr Bilbrey does). However, if you regard it as a hobby that pays you instead of costing big, and makes you feel good as well, then it begins to make sense.
Pigeons… well, you can do it, and a dovecote and some grain, plus letting them fly (they usually come back – after all, that’s what homing pigeons are all about) gets them feeding themselves quite a lot, then they come home for supper – always theirs, sometimes yours. They have their nests and their babies (squabs – your dinner too) in the dovecote, so they usually come home. Not always – that’s why we get feral pigeons – but usually. However, I wouldn’t do it in the burbs, just because it’s very noticeable. However, I would be happy to accept any feral pigeons who offered themselves to my airgun, or a net.
Out in the country, or in a small town – that’s another matter. Pigeons are a good deal there.
“… I would be happy to accept any feral pigeons who offered themselves to my airgun, or a net. ”
Our urban feral pigeons are basically flying vermin – themselves verminous and infested, often crippled and cancerous. Times would have to be hard indeed before I would eat them. On the other hand the suburban parkland woodpigeon where I live are pristine, and look like they would be delicious. Not that I would know anything about that – no sir!
Thanks for all the quail information that I was too lazy to type! I have a half-serious daydream of putting a small quail cage and maybe some beehives in the garden…
Are pigeons worth the effort. Even if you get one per shotgun shell it doesn’t seem time or cost effective.
Pigeons are rats with wings.
If anyone can cite an earlier source I’dbe obliged. I believe it was Herb Caen in his San Farncisco Chronicle who coined that phrase.
Pigeons are rats with wings.
My father-in-law says that. His father worked in New York City as a carpenter from the 1920s to the 1960s. He ingested a lot of pigeon poop dust over that time working on buildings and developed lung cancer due to it (according to the cancer docs). He was about 85 when he passed away after fighting the lung cancer for 20 years. And he was not a smoker.
I’d bet that most anyone would eat most anything if they get hungry enough, particularly if they were convinced it was nutritious and wouldn’t infect them. Lots of people eat rats anyway, and an awful lot eat and relish tree rats, I understand. A pressure cooker covers a multitude of sins.
As for domestically raised pigeons, particularly squabs, they are more healthy than most food sources. They are a month old, they’ve been fed just one food (“pigeon milk” from their parents), and they have never been exposed to the outside world. They are young and tender, adult-sized but not yet putting energy into growing flight feathers or actually flying, easy to cook, and provide just about the right amount of protein for a person for a day – even a teenager. Apparently the return is about 0.8 squabs per month per breeding pair. In other words, about ten breeding pairs will give one person the equivalent of two (moderate) steak dinners a week, or two meaty soups for a family, at almost zero cost, forever.
One other thing I forgot about pigeons before. Almost no municipal jurisdictions have regulations against keeping them, unlike almost every other form of poultry (except maybe fossilised regulations forbidding them from flying free on Tuesday – the traditional day for drying laundry). I still wouldn’t keep them in larger towns or cities unless I could do it on the roof of a multistory building, just because they would be so noticeable.
Personally, I wouldn’t bother about it myself unless I was driven to it, as there are many other things I prefer. Efficiency isn’t a huge worry if you have enough resources (land), and it is the animals doing the work. However, if I was in need, I would jump at the opportunity, particularly as you could gather your foundation stock from those execrable “winged rats” people despise, if you had to. Keep your foundation stock confined, then eat them, and only let their offspring start flying free from their unquestioned home during the day, once they had laid eggs.