Egg Ideosynchrasies

One year into their residency in our backyard, our ducks and chickens continue an improbable output, with the ducks laying daily and the Aracana chickens somewhat less productive. Most of the duck eggs are only slightly larger than the chicken eggs, but now and then the large Pekin duck lays a double yolk whopper, like the one on the left in the photo. Next to it is a chicken egg (more pointed), and a miniature duck egg perhaps laid by the mother mallard whose chicks are nearly grown. The red oak acorn is included for scale.

The duck eggs have thicker shells, which may owe to the ducks' great interest in filtering through dirt and mud with their beaks, which no doubt increases their consumption of minerals. We try to keep the dirt in the backyard as clean as possible, for their eating pleasure.

The miniature egg laid by the mother mallard--the first since she had ducklings--had no yolk at all.

A friend tells me that duck eggs "taste like other eggs only more." In a frying pan, the duck egg on the right is barely distinguishable, with only a slightly larger yolk than the chicken egg.

Once we found a cache of eggs in a tight spot in the coop that was out of sight. Since eggs slowly dry out over time, with air displacing some of the eggwhite, the older ones will angle up or become completely vertical in water, depending on their age. The eggs we found make a series, with gradations of tilt and, presumably, age, starting at ten o'clock and going counterclockwise.

The large influx of eggs crowding our frig causes us, counterintuitively, to eat fewer of them, much like the spectacular production of sunchoke tubers can reduce the desire to eat them. It's a reflex that has to be consciously countered.

Ducks in Snow

We didn't have tracks like these in the backyard last winter. What could they be?

No, not the robins, who paid a visit to the water tray the day before.

Not the wild turkey that surprised us with a visit last year.

Here they are. Not snowy owls or snowy egrets, but the great snow ducks of the notsonorth, heading for ...

minipond heaven, or at least haven, courtesy of the recent rains.

The ducks show far more courage than their coopmates, who are playing chicken in the warmest corner they can find.

Ducks Visit the Backyard

A pair of mallards visited our backyard this morning. The male stood in the middle of the lawn while the female strolled down the garden path, presumably in search of a nice pond to call their own. Were they checking out nesting options? If so, I can't imagine they were pleased. The only standing water is the fillable-spillable tub that catches water from the downspout.

The most appealing interpretation of their surprise visit is that one of them might have been born here five years ago, back when through the luck of the draw we ended upt with a pair of mallards among our fine feathered pets in the backyard. Being a male and female, they soon had five ducklings to call their own. As the ducklings grew, the yard seemed to shrink, overfilled as it now was with ducks and chickens. There were times when we'd hear the nasal call of geese flying overhead, or one or another duck would fly in an impressive arc around the boundaries of the yard, and I'd think for sure they would respond to the call of the wild and venture off into the big world beyond our fenceline. But they never did.

The mallard family eventually ended up at a farm outside of town, whose owners were kind enough to take them off our hands. I read that mallards live 5-10 years in the wild. How lovely to think that they might have come back to have a look around at their old haunts.

For some posts about the ducks we had behind our house on busy Harrison Street, type the word "mallard" into the search box for this blog, or follow this link.

Cooper's Hawk Pays a Holiday Visit

Yesterday, I looked out the back window to see our Pekin duck, Daisy, rotating her head to look skyward (haven't managed to capture that in a photo). Usually, that means there's something interesting up there.

This time it was a Coopers hawk perched thirty feet up in a silver maple tree near the back fence. The hawk, who I assumed was not auditioning for the role of Santa Claus, appeared in no hurry to take any action, so I decided to take some photos before bursting out the back door to scare it away.

The ducks had already gone back to foraging,

but our chicken Buffy continued to stand stock still under a bush. A female duck, with its sizable bill, is much more confident about defending itself than a hen. Buttons, our other chicken, was nowhere to be seen.

Only after I stepped out back, and the hawk flew away, did I notice Buttons, hiding behind Buffy. The Pekin duck may have been sufficiently intimidating in size and manner to give the hawk pause, and my entry on the scene will hopefully discourage the hawk from returning for awhile.

Egg production lately has been an egg each day from each of the ducks. The chickens are laying off egg laying, probably because we haven't given them supplementary lighting.

The ducks and chickens require no heating in their coop, though the watering can freezes up if there's no heating plate underneath it.

Shad, Wood Ducks and a Reptile

I would love to report that shad are running in my minipond, which I dug where a small tributary of Harry's Brook once flowed, before my backyard was a backyard. The brook is connected to the Millstone River, which flows into the Raritan River, which empties into the ocean just south of Staten Island.

Who knows if shad ever made it up to my neighborhood, but the blooms of a solitary shadbush in the backyard tell me that somewhere the shad are running. The shrub is also called serviceberry, and will have delicious berries later in the season.

Migrating fish have lost my ecological address, but a lot of other wildlife have found it. Though the shad didn't make the walk up to my miniponds, I was surprised and flattered by a visit from a couple young wood ducks the other day. That was a first.

There was also a return visit from another wild creature who did make the walk, and whose presence doesn't so much flatter as cause the heart to flutter. Just beneath the reflection of trees on the water's surface, a reptilian presence soaked up some afternoon rays.


A snapping turtle, some 14 inches long, though who's going to try to measure. I thought he had left last year, but is back, bigger than before. We may take him for a short ride back down to the creek.

A Duck Gets a Taste of Spring

Our Pekin duck has been finding more reason to venture out of the coop this week. There's mud to probe with its beak, and the luxury of a bath in one of our backyard ponds swelled by snowmelt from neighbors' yards. She had no problem breaking through the thin layer of ice left by last night's freeze.

Earlier in the month, finding water in its liquid state was more of a challenge, as she took sips from the fillable-spillable minipond catching water from the roof.

She keeps a sharp eye out for hawks, turning her head to get a better look at the sky. Usually, that turn of the head means something's flying over, be it a vulture, crow, hawk, or a jet headed into Newark Airport.

Meanwhile, the duck's companion, a chicken of similar feather, was laying another robin's-egg-blue egg. We often get two a day now, as warmer temperatures and longer days have broken the winter drought.

Ducks and chickens made multiple appearances in movies this weekend at the Princeton Environmental Film Festival, particularly in the excellent documentary on permaculture, "Inhabit". The ducks were said to be excellent at keeping the slug population down on an outdoor shitake mushroom farm, and the chickens happily batted cleanup in one of the crop rotations, eating any seeds that eluded harvest.

August Bird Disappearance Solved

Two weeks ago, I received an email with the news that the water birds had disappeared from Mountain Lakes Preserve. Might something have been applied to the water to remove algae, with unexpected results, or were geese, ducks and herons simply imitating the general human exodus from Princeton in August? My contacts at town engineering and Friends of Princeton Open Space knew of no chemical applications.

Carnegie Lake, too, was empty of waterfowl, other than a couple great blue herons. One heron flew across the lake, flushed another near the opposite shore, chased it a short distance, then returned across the lake, flying low, its wingtips touching the water.

Smoyer Park's pond also was clear of geese. Had they finally taken note of the signage?

Maybe the fisherman's dog had scared the geese away.

The dog, upon closer inspection, turned out to be 2-dimensional, a metal dog profile placed there by the company contracted to periodically (futily?) scare the geese away. The fake dog looked to be faking out the geese, but the fisherman was skeptical, and told me the geese will soon be back.

Some responses from people in the know, plus some internet research, helped make sense of it all.

Plainsboro Preserve director Nancy Fiske forwarded a response from Scott Barnes, head of New Jersey Audubon's All Things Birds division:

"Most waterfowl tend to molt in late summer and are flightless for a brief period of time, during which they are secretive. I've seen typical numbers of geese around locally in the last few weeks; it may just be they've moved of a particular water body in Princeton. Geese will often change habits and feed at night around the full moon. As for herons and egrets, late summer is a time of wandering, where both adults and juveniles will move about from place to place taking advantage of local food sources and concentrations of fish at ponds/lakes with lower water levels."

Stephanie Fox, naturalist with Delaware and Raritan Canal State Park, added, 

"as for Herons, I believe they are still able to fly, but just not so efficiently, so they also try to hide out in less conspicuous areas until they have their full set of flight feathers."

That could explain why the great blue heron seemed to be struggling to stay above water, and perhaps it was acting territorially towards a young whippersnapper encroaching on its part of Carnegie Lake.

For those uninitiated in the ways of birds, like me, some general info about molting is at this link. The distinction between the "sequential molt" that most birds undergo, and the "simultaneous wing molt" characteristic of ducks and geese, can be found here. 

Thanks to Elliot for alerting me to this seasonal exodus. It would be interesting to find out where the birds go to be safe during molting, and whether it's one place or many.

Hosting Chickens in Princeton

Even though it seems like spring just started, the window of opportunity for buying chicks to grow as backyard egg layers and pets is quickly closing. They need enough time to grow up before cold weather comes. We bought our chicks two years ago at Rosedale Mills in Pennington, and get our feed either there or at the Belle Mead Coop up 206. Rosedale Mills told me they have a wide variety of chicks right now, and are expecting one last additional batch of chicks to arrive in a couple weeks.

The legality of having chickens in Princeton has been disputed, but I researched it and learned that it is considered legal as long as the neighbors don't mind. Our chickens (no rooster needed) have been very quiet, and though the two ducks we have speak up now and then, the neighbors say they enjoy the sound. Pre-made coops can be pricey, but a coop makes a nice project to fashion out of spare wood.

You can find lots of posts on this blog about the chickens and ducks we have, by typing "chickens" into the search box, which gets you this group of posts. Our Aracana chickens each produce an egg every day or two, are very approachable and holdable, need no supplementary heat in the winter, and get the run of the fenced-in backyard during the day. Read various posts here and abundantly elsewhere online to familiarize yourself with issues like hawks.

The ducklings came via the mail from California. They are messier birds than the chickens, but are real characters, and lay even more eggs than the chickens. Duck eggs, with their larger yolks and somewhat drier characteristics, are handy for baking.

Most people keep their chickens in a fully enclosed run, but we find letting them all run free is worth the risk, particularly when we have a "guard duck" of the Pekin variety that seems to intimidate the hawks. Care is a matter of keeping them in food and water, closing them in at night, cleaning the coop regularly, and retrieving the eggs.

Poultry Policy in Princeton

Start asking around if chickens are allowed in Princeton, and you're likely to get a different answer each time. I worked my way from friends to township and borough zoning officers, and finally to Princeton's animal control officer, who seemed to have the most definitive answer.

The quick answer is that they are allowed, but for anyone considering having them, it's worth knowing some of the background.

What little is written in the ordinances is not very encouraging. Even though the borough and township have consolidated into one Princeton, their respective ordinances still apply until a unified ordinance is worked out.

For those living in what was the borough, the most relevant ordinance reads: "Keeping domestic animals as pets; provided, that not more than five animals over six months old shall be kept on any lot, and that no animals except dogs or cats shall be housed or penned within fifty feet of any street line or lot line, except within the principal building." (Boro Code: Land Use, XI:Zoning, 17A--228 Uses permitted as of right, C--accessory uses, 3)

Staff I spoke to do not think of chickens as "domestic animals", and interpret the ordinance as not permitting, or at least not relevant to, chickens.

I'm told that the township ordinance says that chickens can only be kept on lots of three or more acres. An internet search led to this item in the township ordinance: Sec. 10B-276 states: "Farm buildings such as chicken houses and stables and barns, and educational buildings such as classrooms and laboratories which are difficult to convert to dwellings may be so placed without zoning lots." (I think this means that you don't have to subdivide your lot to have a coop, which makes sense.) There may be some regulations about the type of coop one constructs. A structure that is affixed to the ground may come under some restrictions, whereas a mobile coop (coops with wheels, like a big wheelbarrow) does not.

Even though the ordinances appear to discourage having chickens, the informal, unified policy according to the animal control officer allows them. The informal policy, which I was told is okay to post, is this: Anyone can have chickens, in township or borough, without having to register, but if neighbors complain then some sort of action has to be taken, either to correct the problem or to remove the chickens. There is no particular number restriction. There was no mention of how close the coop could be to the property line.

For example, someone on Linden Lane, who has since left town, had chickens, but a rat problem developed. The animal control officer advised the owner on how to clean things up, and she was then able to continue to have chickens. Someone else had ducks, which the officer says are messy birds. They were making too much noise and were frequently flying over the fence into the neighbors' yards. The ducks had to be removed.

Everyone I spoke to in town government was fine with the public schools having chicken coops, as long as the relevant principals and the superintendent buy in to the idea and consistent care can be worked out. Princeton Day School has had chickens housed next to its expansive garden, and has found them to be a wonderful education tool. The kids love them, but only some high schoolers who have been trained are allowed to touch or care for them.

Though I had thought of lobbying for an ordinance that would make more official the policy on chickens, the experience of Hopewell Township gives pause. They anguished for three years to develop a chicken ordinance, suffering worldwide ridicule over the rule about visitations by roosters (roosters are not needed for egg production), and then only had two applications in the years since the ordinance has been in place. The Hopewell staff person I spoke to suggested that a better route is to go with a variance--people wanting to have chickens get the support of neighbors and then request a variance.

But what Princeton apparently has is even more flexible. My understanding is that there is no permit required. To avoid the trauma of losing the chickens, one checks with one's neighbors, maybe even gets support in writing, and then proceeds with a modest number of chickens, knowing that the town could make one give them up if they become a nuisance.

My experience is that chickens make wonderful, quiet "pets with benefits" with care requirements somewhere between a cat and a dog. So, if you're considering it, study up, consult with neighbors (bribery with eggs can help), and my sense is that if you run into any problems the animal control officer's first response will be to help try to work things out.

Then Came the Duck Eggs

More eggs began showing up in the nest lately, signalling that the ducks had "come on line" after six months in our backyard. Before, with just two Araucana chickens laying, it was easy to tell which eggs were whose. Now, with about four eggs of subtly different shapes and colors showing up every day, it's a bit of a guessing game.

Chances are, these three eggs correspond to the three types of ducks in this photo, with the outsized egg being the work of the big white Pekin, the more numerous mid-sized eggs being the Runner Duck's, and the miniature variety being an early effort by the mate of the male mallard in the photo.

The two eggs on the right in this photo have no shells, but instead are more like water balloons that slowly deflate as they dry out. Sometimes, the presence of these shell-less eggs means the birds aren't getting enough calcium, but they're getting the standard feed for egg-layers, plus whatever they forage for in the garden. More likely, it's taking each bird a few egg-laying tries before they get it right.

Here, the deflating of a shell-less egg is more obvious. A similar process of drying out occurs within a normal egg, though much more slowly because the eggshell has an outer coating, or "bloom", that keeps the egg inside fresh. It's recommended to delay washing of a homegrown egg until just prior to using, so that the coating can help protect it during storage. In fact, refrigeration is not necessary for unwashed eggs if they'll be used within a week, or so I've heard and read. Store-bought eggs tend to have been washed.

Related to this, you may have noticed that some hard-boiled eggs are easier to peel than others. As an uncooked egg sits around, the membranes between shell and eggwhite loosen. Using older eggs for hard-boiling will increase the chance of the shell easily coming loose from the eggwhite during peeling.

This "deflation" of the egg inside the shell also makes it possible to tell whether an egg is fresh or older. As my neighbor Pat pointed out, a fresh egg lays flat at the bottom of a bowl of water, while an older egg will tilt upward at one end because air has gotten trapped inside where the egg has slightly deflated.

Chickens and Wildlife

Introduce poultry into your backyard, and you may find yourself starting to scan the treeline with something beyond mild curiosity. Chickens and ducks are just about the most edible pets you could ever own, as the local wildlife are well aware. Predators can come by land or by air, by night or by day.

Vigilance is key, as this Pekin duck well knows. Any time I see it tilt its head sideways, the better to train a keen eye on the sky above, I will follow its glance upward to find a hawk, vulture or plane passing over.

When our 12 year old finally talked us into getting chickens, and then ducks, I wondered how all the undomesticated nature we'd been cultivating in the backyard would react. Would the poultry intimidate the mourning doves that had hung out next to the minipond at various hours? Would the chickens chow down on beneficial insects as well as the ticks?

Though having these birds in the backyard may be reducing visits by wild birds, their presence has heightened our awareness of wildlife in other ways. Recently, noticing the Pekin duck training an eye skyward, we looked up to see the tiny speck of a hawk hovering high above. Suddenly, the hawk folded its wings and began a slanted, accelerating straight-line dive. As with lightening, we were relieved to see we weren't the targets. It disappeared into the trees several blocks over. None of this we would have seen if not for the duck's signal.

By Night
A year ago, we started with four chickens, and now have two. The first was lost during the one and only night we forgot to close them in the coop. It was very traumatic for my daughter, who had named all four and been giving them loving care. But she worked through the trauma and the sense of responsibility, and the next day was able to channel it into making a beautiful grave with the shape of a chicken fashioned out of bits of rock.

Raccoon or Fisher?
We thought a raccoon had likely done the deed, in part because I found the head of the chicken far from the body. But in ten years I've only seen one wayward raccoon in our yard, and my neighbor reported she had seen something that night that she thought moved more like a fisher than a raccoon. I associate fishers with large tracts of north woods, but an internet search yielded news of their return to New Jersey. They are large members of the weasel family and one of the few predators smart and agile enough to take on porcupines. Princeton's animal control officer, however, offered no encouragement to this speculation that fishers might be afoot in the area.

By Day
Having lost a chicken in the night, we thought they'd still be safe if allowed to run free in the yard by day. This illusion was shattered late in the fall, when lack of foliage had made the yard more exposed, by a Coopers hawk in a mid-afternoon attack. That, too, was traumatic, all the more so because it seemed to sentence the remaining chickens to perpetual confinement in the coop and a small fenced-in run. It didn't help to find a big red-tailed hawk perched fifteen feet above the coop one morning, patiently awaiting breakfast. Word had clearly gotten out.

Since then, however, we've slowly relaxed our vigilance and shifted back to letting them out during the day. A friend with chickens in Kingston said he decided that the happiness of his chickens exploring the yard is worth the risk of an attack, and he's never lost a chicken that way. We've gravitated towards that philosophy, despite an unnerving visit one day from a coopers hawk that brazenly perched on our fence, just forty feet from where we stood, to check out the scene. It flew away before I could take a photo, and hasn't come back.

A couple fish crows also took an interest for a day or two, lingering in the trees above, conversing, trying to make sense of our backyard poultry scene, seeming to look for an angle that would benefit them. Fish crows are the sort of crow that says "uh-uh" all summer, as if telling you that whatever idea you just had is a bunch of hooey.

A week later, still wishing for a photo of a Coopers Hawk, I saw one land on the Westminster Choir College driveway.

It was carrying a small bird, and posed long enough on the pavement for a bit of point-and-shoot documentation,

before flying off in the direction of the crossing guard.

By chance this photo caught the shift in perspective that comes from having chickens, from the urban environmentalist's cultivation and observation of a benign nature to more of a rural farmer's awareness of nature as both magnificent and threatening.

Chickens in Joyce Carol Oats' Upcoming Memoir

Yesterday, the gravitational pull was felt strongly in nature. Oak catkins and spinning maple samaras fell pell mell to the earth, as if on cue. Our chickens and ducks too offered a unified response by each laying an egg. A "four eggs day", I like to call it, with each egg different in size and color--a reminder of what life was like before industrialized agriculture taught us to expect uniformity. Left to right, we have the fine creations of Buffy, Buttons, Molly and Daisy.

Later in the day, at the Princeton Public Library, famed author and local resident Joyce Carol Oats offered some fresh creations of her own. Though the reading was to be focused on her recent novel Carthage, she quickly turned to the memoir she is currently working on. It doesn't sound quite right to say that chickens loomed large in her childhood, because even as a little girl growing up on a farm, she would have risen well above them. But an extended portion of her reading described the special chicken she developed a deep connection to and called "Lucky Chicken". At a very early age, she believed that the rooster's call opens a crack in the world through which the next day can enter. She told of that special feeling a child can have, never to be found again in life, of the chickens rushing to her as she approached with their feed.

A child can learn a great deal about the emotional dimensions of life from being around chickens, experiencing love and loss, and even evil. She had said during her reading that probably no one in the audience had ever fed chickens, so I felt obliged during Q&A to announce that we have chickens and ducks and that Princeton allows this, as long as the neighbors are happy. She said that she'd be worried about foxes and other predators, and I explained that we have a "guard duck" that seems to intimidate the hawks, which are the main daytime threat. "But do you have a rooster?", she asked. No roosters allowed in town, I replied. "You have to have a rooster.", she said, speaking perhaps more metaphorically than literally. She went on to say that her sense of evil lurking in the garden of life came from roosters. She was a shy girl, and treated the chickens well, but even so the rooster would peck and claw at her, drawing blood.

With that, they segued into the book signing portion of the evening, at which point I headed home to make sure the chucks and dickens were safely in the coop for the night.

Ducklings Born in Princeton!

In a humble coop behind our house on busy Harrison Street, a mallard named Swee' Pea found herself sitting on five ducklings this morning, where five eggs had been the night before. She had been patiently sitting on the nest of straw, feather down and eggs for several weeks. Yesterday, my daughter noticed Swee' Pea becoming increasingly territorial, hissing and thrusting her beak at anyone who came close. Now we know why.

Buttons the Araucana chicken checked things out from a safe distance,

while the father, Ronnie, lacking cigars, took a dip in the tippable duck pond that gets fresh water from the roof gutter every time it rains.

The other ducks normally don't go back in the coop in the middle of the day, but today they did, apparently out of curiosity.

Congratulations, Swee' Pea!

Meanwhile, the owners of said ducks and coop are sent scrambling to the internet to ask a recurring question in animal husbandry, "Now what?"

Metaphor Camp

Recent rains swelled our backyard miniponds, making a mini-heaven for the resident duck brigade. During the dry spell, they had wandered about the dessicated landscape as if transported to the moon. That's Daisy (a Pekin), Molly (a runner duck), Ronnie and Swee' Pea (male and female mallards).

Sometime I would like to conduct a Metaphor summer camp, in which the happy campers sit on the fence inbetween balancing acts and periods of toeing the line. They will learn what it really feels like to have a long row to hoe, or to herd cats, or, lacking cats in sufficient number, then how to save nine by stitching in time.

If they balk, then the resident fowl can show them how to take to a task like ducks to water, and shed life's setbacks like water off a duck's back.

And when they've thoroughly mastered their metaphors, they will leave camp at the end of the week

with their ducks all in a row.

Astrov in Uncle Vanya

Up until a few months ago, a photo of the playwright Anton Chekhov would have seemed the last image to include on a blog about nature. But this past fall, after theatrical scenes for a tragicomedy on climate started coming to me, I decided to enroll in an acting course at the adult school in town. Though the experience was completely different from anything I had tried before, the character I was asked to play, Astrov in Chekhov's 1897 play, Uncle Vanya, bore an uncanny resemblance to a modern day environmentalist. He's a doctor who loves forests and struggles to save them from wholesale destruction.

In the quotes below are prescient mention of climate, the beneficial effect of a healthy natural world on people and culture, the satisfactions of restoring woodlands, and the unending conflict between the human power to create and the economic imperative to destroy for short-term gain. As remains common today, Astrov's pronouncements about nature and its value are met with a mix of praise and skepticism by the other characters.

From Scene 1:

SONIA. No, the work is thrilling. Dr. Astrov watches over the old woods and sets out new plantations every year....................He says that forests are the ornaments of the earth, that they teach mankind to understand beauty and attune his mind to lofty sentiments. Forests temper a stern climate, and in countries where the climate is milder, less strength is wasted in the battle with nature, and the people are kind and gentle. The inhabitants of such countries are handsome, tractable, sensitive, graceful in speech and gesture. Their philosophy is joyous, art and science blossom among them, their treatment of women is full of exquisite nobility——


ASTROV: ........I don't object, of course, to cutting wood from necessity, but why destroy the forests? The woods of Russia are trembling under the blows of the axe. Millions of trees have perished. The homes of the wild animals and birds have been desolated; the rivers are shrinking, and many beautiful landscapes are gone forever. ....................Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make? Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day. [To VANYA] I read irony in your eye; you do not take what I am saying seriously, and—and—after all, it may very well be nonsense. But when I pass peasant-forests that I have preserved from the axe, or hear the rustling of the young plantations set out with my own hands, I feel as if I had had some small share in improving the climate, and that if mankind is happy a thousand years from now I will have been a little bit responsible for their happiness. When I plant a little birch tree and then see it budding into young green and swaying in the wind, my heart swells with pride .......

From Scene 3: (spoken to his love interest, Yelena, who has her mind on other things)

ASTROV. I have my own desk there in Ivan's room. When I am absolutely too exhausted to go on I drop everything and rush over here to forget myself in this work for an hour or two. Ivan and Miss Sonia sit rattling at their counting-boards, the cricket chirps, and I sit beside them and paint, feeling warm and peaceful. But I don't permit myself this luxury very often, only once a month.

[Pointing to the picture] Look there! That is a map of our country as it was fifty years ago. The green tints, both dark and light, represent forests. Half the map, as you see, is covered with it. Where the green is striped with red the forests were inhabited by elk and wild goats. Here on this lake, lived great flocks of swans and geese and ducks; as the old men say, there was a power of birds of every kind. Now they have vanished like a cloud. Beside the hamlets and villages, you see, I have dotted down here and there the various settlements, farms, hermit's caves, and water-mills. This country carried a great many cattle and horses, as you can see by the quantity of blue paint. For instance, see how thickly it lies in this part; there were great herds of them here, an average of three horses to every house.

[A pause] Now, look lower down. This is the country as it was twenty-five years ago. Only a third of the map is green now with forests. There are no goats left and no elk. The blue paint is lighter, and so on, and so on.

Now we come to the third part; our country as it appears to-day. We still see spots of green, but not much. The elk, the swans, the black-cock have disappeared. It is, on the whole, the picture of a regular and slow decline which it will evidently only take about ten or fifteen more years to complete. You may perhaps object that it is the march of progress, that the old order must give place to the new, and you might be right if roads had been run through these ruined woods, or if factories and schools had taken their place. The people then would have become better educated and healthier and richer, but as it is, we have nothing of the sort. We have the same swamps and mosquitoes; the same disease and want; the typhoid, the diphtheria, the burning villages. We are confronted by the degradation of our country, brought on by the fierce struggle for existence of the human race. It is the consequence of the ignorance and unconsciousness of starving, shivering, sick humanity that, to save its children, instinctively snatches at everything that can warm it and still its hunger. So it destroys everything it can lay its hands on, without a thought for the morrow. And almost everything has gone, and nothing has been created to take its place.

(translation from http://www.gutenberg.org, photo of Chekhov from Wikipedia)