Thursday, March 01, 2007


Gypsy Zoo Keepers (Part 1!)

To truly catch up on the traveling ruminations, we have to start in Lander, Wyoming, in the beginning of October. Central Wyoming was in one of its worst droughts in history and at the time we showed up had less than 5 inches of rain for the year. Julia and I were walking the goats up onto the tops of steep sandstone bluffs to get to the few grass plants that the cows didn‘t eat.


We had accumulated a ridiculous amount of domestic dependents for our mobile lifestyle. We were awash in Border Collie puppies. Bailey had given birth 6 weeks ago and we had 3 of her little puppies living in a little plywood fold-out portable box under the overhang of our 5th wheel trailer. We didn’t want to give them serious names(we only kept one) and thanks to a flash of irreverence they bore the names Bicycle, Chlorox, and Verizon.

Our newest additions were two little munchkins (both 3 weeks old) that are Bailey’s full brother and sister. We decided, based on how great of a dog Bailey is, that we wanted a few more pups from her full genetic pool. We drove to Arlington, Wyoming and picked out two speckled pups, one male and one female(Sly and Nell), from a breeder who uses Bailey’s parents to manage a herd of 800 steers that graze under a wind farm. Bailey’s full father, we found out, is an exceptional dog. He can walk a single cow with a calf out of a field and into a barn a half of a mile away.

3 week old puppies are almost completely helpless. They can barely move and basically just cry and drink milk. At about 5-6 weeks they start to get a little bit of personality, but before then their entire purpose is to fill their bellies with milk. When we traveled with the puppies we put them in the small bathtub in our trailer, along with our kitten(YES we had a kitten too), and covered it up with a piece of plywood to keep flying objects and a milk goat from crushing them. After a few hours on the road we would stop and heat up some milk to feed them.

For anyone still successfully following this blog I want to quickly summarize our life in October of 06 with a roster of animals:
1. 2 adult border collies
2. 6 border collie puppies ranging from 2 to 12 weeks
3. One kitty of unknown age picked up from a barnyard in Judith Gap, Montana
4. One unusually mischievous milk goat
5. Two slightly insane people (Julia and I)
Housing: One 25 foot 5th wheel trailer
To be honest it really didn’t seem ridiculous to me at the time, and I’m not entirely sure why. Stay tuned for part two to find out how and why we moved back to California with our gypsy zoo.