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Revenge of the Kangaroo Rat, guest blog by Chris Laning
As I’ve mentioned in previous guest columns, as a college student I volunteered as part of the staff of the campus museum. The professor who ran it was a zoologist, and anyone who volunteered there picked up a fair amount of knowledge about small furry animals just by hanging around. We also had the opportunity to go along on collecting trips, and there was often one scheduled for the week of spring vacation.
One year a couple of dozen of us piled into the college vans and took off for a week in western Oklahoma to visit one of the prof’s former students. The Black Mesa area in the Oklahoma “panhandle” is an interesting place to study small animals because it’s a meeting point between outliers of the Rocky Mountains and the shortgrass prairie.
There are also abundant dinosaur bones in the area.
Another lure was some species of bats we hadn’t seen. Besides all our old friends from Indiana we had the possibility of seeing Mexican free- tailed bats and two types of long-eared bats (Plecotus and Antrozous).
We did catch some of these in the mist nets we set up. The long-eared bats were especially admired: their ears really are amazingly big and delicate.*.
What I found particularly charming is that when long-eared bats are asleep, those large, pleated ears curl up and lie flat along the sides of the bat’s head, looking rather like a pair of ram’s horns. These bats also tend to wrap their wings over their ears when sleeping, which is pretty darn cute too.
Besides the bats, there were lots of other small animals we didn’t see back home: deer mice, pocket mice, gophers, packrats and so forth. But the most intriguing were the kangaroo rats.** Kangaroo rats are rodents, but only very distantly related to house rats. They have highly developed hind legs and hop like kangaroos, hence the name.
They also have very large furred pouches on the outsides of their cheeks and an efficient metabolism that enables them to get along with almost no water to drink.
Kangaroo rats come out only at night and usually don’t wander into traps. So we did a certain amount of cruising the back roads: that part of the state has unimproved dirt roads every mile or so, marking off the edges of surveyed sections.
The way you catch kangaroo rats is to drive v-e-e-e-e-ry slowly along these dirt roads with your headlights set on high beams, and watch for kangaroo rats hopping across in front of you. This sounds improbable, but we actually did see quite a few of them this way, at least eight or ten in an evening.
Actually capturing kangaroo rats once you see them is a bigger challenge. They move very fast for a small animal, almost faster than you can run, and are masters of evasive hopping, zigzagging and ducking behind bushes unpredictably. You need to be quick on your feet with a flashlight in one hand and a long-handled butterfly net in the other, and results are still not guaranteed. They are sand-colored and you often don’t see them till they move, so they have a head start on you.
So there we were, five or six of us squeezed into a car with flashlights and butterfly nets handy. We’d drive along, spot a kangaroo rat, the car would stop and we would all pile out and run after it, trying not to bash each other with the butterfly nets meanwhile. The Keystone Kops had nothing on us.
After few tries, some successful but most not, we decided that having to take the time to open the car doors and get out was slowing us down too much. So a couple of the guys volunteered to ride on the hood of the car so they could simply take off after any kangaroo rat we saw.
They sat on either side of the hood like gargoyles with their knees drawn up and their butterfly nets propped up next to them. The visibility for the driver wasn’t good, but the car was just creeping along. We were giggling because it looked so ridiculous.
A kangaroo rat popped up and the driver hit the brakes, and before they had a chance to jump, both guys found themselves sliding off the hood, landing in a heap and with one catching the other’s head in his butterfly net. They untangled themselves and got up, but by this time we were all laughing so hard that pursuit was useless. We tried another time or two, but gave up and went back to the piling-out-of- the car method.
We were staying in an old farmhouse that night, and since there were only two girls, we got the floor in the back bedroom to ourselves while the guys laid out mattresses all over the living room. We also got the animal cages, since we had more floor space. We’d brought along several of the bat cages for the smaller animals, but since we weren’t dealing with bats, we tried to put something heavy like a book on top to prevent anything pushing its way out through the slit in the rubber top.
In the middle of the night I woke up. I was sleeping on my stomach, and something was going hippedy-hip, hop, hippedy-hip, hop, up the back of my leg. I poked Deb sleeping next to me, we both sat up, and proceeded to re-enact the Keystone Kops routine with two of us trying to catch a kangaroo rat in a dark bedroom. A couple of the guys heard the commotion and came to help; we eventually cornered it and put it back in the cage with a heavier lid.
A few days later we got back to campus and were telling this story; I’d just barely started when one of the guys who had been with us on the trip said, “Oh, you mean the time the kangaroo rat tried to climb into bed with you? Smart rat!”
I blushed.
* * *
*photo here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/madridminer/3777280926/
**A nice article about them here: http://www.birdandhike.com/Wildlife/Mamm/06Rod/04_Het/Dipodo_mer/_Dip_mer.htm
Ringing Bats*, guest post by Chris Laning
What attracted me to the college I attended — a small liberal arts college in Indiana — was its excellent biology department. This was well before the days when there were actually jobs in environmental science, and it was one of the few schools I looked at whose biology department did not assume that everyone wanted to go to medical school. Since I wanted to study “natural history,” that was a big factor for me. And when I got there, I soon volunteered to join the student staff of the small natural-history museum on campus. (Which had, among other things, its own mammoth skeleton.)
The museum was run by a zoologist who specialized in bats, so all of us who volunteered there picked up a fair amount of bat knowledge, and we all got drafted to go along and help on bat expeditions. This was especially the case when the project involved banding large numbers of bats: the extra pairs of hands were really helpful and we were cheap labor.
As with birds, catching and banding (or in British, ringing) bats was a way to track their migrations and population trends. In birds the band goes around a leg; for bats, the band was clamped onto the front edge of a wing where there is a sturdy bone (the equivalent of your forearm). This permitted the band to be seen by observers when the bat was hanging head downward from the ceiling. (You can’t read the numbers on a band unless you get really close, but you could at least count how many bats had bands, which helped with population estimates.)
What we didn’t know when I was in college is that research has shown that there’s a substantially higher injury rate for bats that are banded than for birds, who seem to have much less trouble with the bands. As a result, today bats are no longer being banded for routine research. If banding is bad for the bats, of course that’s the right decision, but as far as I know there really isn’t a good, durable and harmless identification method to replace it. And it makes me sad to think we were probably responsible for injuring bats without knowing it. Researchers today do catch bats (without banding them), weigh them, measure them, evaluate their health and let them go. The information’s useful even if we can no longer track individual bats.
In the US, bats (unfortunately) are among the animals known to carry rabies (less than 1% of bats carry it, but still). If we wanted to be able to handle bats without gloves — and bats are so small that handling them with gloves is pretty awkward — we were required to get the preventive rabies shots. The preventive series is only three shots; they weren’t bad. (You will be glad to know that the days of 14 or 21 daily shots in the abdomen are long gone: now it’s just 5 shots, which are simply given in the arm like any other shot.) Because I’d had the shots, at summer camp then and in later years I was always the counselor called on to get rid of bats and other little furry things.
When we went out to band bats, pipistrelles (Pipistrellus subflavus) and Little Brown Bats (Myotis lucifugus) were overwhelmingly the most common bats we saw. “Pips” and Little Browns are cute li’l things when you are holding them. They are clean little animals — they groom themselves all over, like cats.** These small bats actually can’t bite humans very well — if you let one get hold of a fold of skin on the back of your knuckle, they will pinch, but their jaws are so small and weak that they really can’t get the leverage to actually pierce your skin.
I found myself wishing that they weren’t so terrified of being held — we tried to handle them as little and as gently as possible. We were also careful not to disturb hibernating bats unless absolutely necessary. Repeatedly waking up hibernating bats can use up energy that they really can’t spare, since they often have just enough fat stored to get them through the winter.
Our usual procedure was for the prof and a handful of students to pile into one of the college vans, with equipment, and head off to a known bat roost. While mist nets do work to catch some bats — apparently their radar isn’t good enough to detect the very fine strands of nylon — you have to be quick to get them out of the net if you want to catch them before they chew themselves loose. During cooler weather it is fairly easy to collect large numbers of bats by hand, since they are very sleepy and slow in the daytime. (Nothing is cuter than a tiny bat giving a b-i-i-i-i-g yawn.)
Our professor had devised temporary holding cages that were quite clever. They were open-sided rectangular boxes with the edges made of 1×1 inch wood, about eighteen inches tall and 8 inches square. They had wire mesh on four sides, a wooden top and bottom, and a rope handle over the top. In the center of the top was a round opening; over the opening was tacked a piece of heavy rubber with a slit in the middle. You could easily push your hand through the slit to put a bat into the box, but the slit would close when you took your hand out, and the bats aren’t strong enough to push their way out through the opening. Once the bats are awake, they crawl around cheeping and can make quite a racket if you get enough of them.
Besides the “pips” and Little Browns, we also saw several other kinds of bats.*** The Indiana Bat (Myotis sodalis) is an endangered species and one that our professor was particularly interested in. It’s a close relative of the Little Brown, but it was rare then and is even more so now. We were asked not to say anything in public about the locations of the caves where we found it roosting.
Other characters we encountered included the so-called Big Brown Bat (Eptesicus fuscus) and various “forest” bats. Big Browns are up to twice the size of pipistrelles and have correspondingly bigger teeth — they are rather aggressive and can and do bite and draw blood. They don’t form big colonies, but we found quite a few of them in the same places as the smaller bats.
The “forest bats” were generally our favorites. There are several species that fall into this category, including the Hoary Bat (Lasiurus cinereus), the Red Bat (Lasiurus borealis), and the Silver- Haired Bat (Lasionycteris noctivigans). These bats are solitary and mostly live in wooded areas, not caves, so we didn’t catch them often. They roost in dense foliage, hollow trees and underneath loose bark, and some of them migrate south in the winter rather than hibernating.
They all have beautiful fur. In contrast to the other bats, most of the forest bats we saw were quite tame and unafraid. Once or twice someone kept one as a pet for a day or two and carried it around in a front shirt pocket, where it would hang by its feet from the top edge and go to sleep.
Bats were declining in population even when I was in college, and are still declining. In addition, just in the last year or two, a number of U.S. bat populations have suddenly taken a nosedive, possibly due to disease. Hopefully continuing research will be able to discover the causes and halt the decline.
* * *
*There has to be at least one ghastly pun lurking somewhere about bats, ringing and belfries, but I can’t come up with one at the moment.
**Bats, by the way, are not rodents, although their body shape looks superficially mouse-like. They eat mostly insects, and they don’t have the two big front teeth: all their teeth are small and needle-like. Their closest relatives are currently thought to be small carnivores such as hedgehogs, cats and shrews.
*** http://www.batmanagement.com/Batcentral/batspecs.html
and a nice article at http://www.nature.org/magazine/spring2009/features/index.html
Ringing from the trenches, guest post by southdowner
It all started so well. Sunday ringing, service ringing, is what bell ringing is FOR. It is the reason that bells were attached to ropes and we (well, I can’t take the credit here, but I am a member, if the least, of generations of campanophiles) began to work out mathematically organised knitting (Robin’s shown you the lines, and I know some of you knitters out there have taken to making socks out of them, which sort of proves the point…) umm, I mean the patterns which grown up ringers call methods and principles; I’m not letting them pull the wool over MY eyes – it’s knitting, and it’s only too easy to tie yourself in knots.
Come practice night and you can stand outside our tower and hear clanging aplenty – how else can we improve? But Service ring is sacred; we owe a duty to ring our best, and our Tower Captain only asks us to ring well within our competency on a Sunday.
So it’s Sunday again. As I reach the church car park several ringers loiter purposefully in the heat of a late summer afternoon. We straggle up the spiral stairs (and I spare a momentary thought for the agility in climbing while turning which I have acquired as a by product of ringing; it is a pretty non transferable skill [any suggestions?], but essential for bell ringing).
In our tower the bells are left in a down position , and need to be rung up in order to make music (hmm – it is still a matter of opinion whether ringing bells creates music… just ask some of the people who live next to bell towers). And ringing up, especially musically, in peal (that is, keeping in order) is a hard won skill (and in some cases never won at all!) Often only 6 of our 8 bells are rung up simultaneously on a Sunday as there might not be 8 ringers present who can be trusted to ring their own bell up AND stay in the right order of bells 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 (called “rounds”) during the whole process.
I sit out the ringing up – I can think of few things currently more likely to cause me grief than attempting to ring up in peal. Bells up, the ringers tie the rope into the prescribed knots, making them safe – stray ropes have been known to cause burns, lift people several metres high and worse – and sit down. Jean looks around sizing up the strength of her team; her eagle eye alights on me and “treble to Grandsire” she cries.
I take my rope and wait for the rest of the band to be appointed, each taking hold of their rope ready for the off. “Look to, Treble’s going… and gone” (it’s usually called as “she’s gone”, and ringing for centuries was a solely male activity – draw your own conclusions…*) and we’re off in rounds. On the treble I’ve struggled for months now to get the precise speed at both hand and back stroke (hand stroke and back stroke together are called a “whole pull”), and now I start slowly but feel my way to what I think is a good speed within 3 whole pulls, trying to keep steady once I reach it. Ringing the treble as a learner feels a bit like riding a horse with your arms crossed and no bridle, or driving a car without holding the steering wheel… Arrrgggghhhh!
The treble leads the whole procession; it’s the 1 of 1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Ringing “between” two other bells gives you a snug place to be, and twice as much information about where you should be, in relation to each of your neighbours. On the treble you are out there on the prow of the ship and it can get lonely out there in stormy weather.
Today it all starts swimmingly – my speed is right, the ropes rise before my eyes in a clear order and my bell goes where I place it, without fighting me or falling out of the sky when I want to hold it up over much larger slower-rotating bells.
Counting places I work slowly to the back of the order, letting bells move ahead of me
12345678,**
12345678…
Finally I reach 7th place and turn for home, passing bells in the same order as going out but ringing faster to get back to the front place; when I’ve gone back into the lead I remember to slow up slightly and lead steadily. I spare a moment to feel pleased with myself, but not too long – I have so MUCH to think about, and not much time to spare.
Off again, a different order taking me up to 7th place, shorten my grip on my rope and quickly back to leading again. I’m enjoying this. And then it all goes pear-shaped. I look for a first bell rope to follow and see two – no time to hesitate, I ring steadily and then look for the next two bells. Eeek!! Another pair of ropes rise together and I try to remember to breathe and to ring steadily again, hand and back.
Only 2 more bells – these are considerate and separate themselves so I can follow first one and then the other. OK. I know where I am, I’m at the back, and though I know pairs to follow, I’m not sure which is first or second… which at this instant is making me very confused. I try looking at two bells at once, which just happen to be on my extreme right and my immediate left and keep ringing at what I hope is a good speed. (They never told me, but good peripheral vison and a supple neck are VITAL for bell ringing . )
Counting away to remember where I am (7, 6, 5 …) and “BOB” shouts the caller. Bobs (where most of the bells do a 3 point turn and swoop off in a new direction) are only called when the treble is about to reach 1st place, at the prow of the row of bells, and ready to lead.. Noooooooooo!!!!!
I’ve been good. I’ve counted, I’ve rung at the right speed, I haven’t even indulged in my favourite habit of dropping my rope (not to be emulated!); most important of all no one is shouting at me! I keep the faith and try to believe that I’m right, and I count down again (…4, 3…)
… and the world and its whippet shriek at the caller (..2, 1 ) Phew! Back to lead and start all over again. Things get worse, then the fog clears and I can see individual ropes again – a slight ruckus just before the end of the “Touch” (this is what a short piece of ringing which includes those 3 point turns is called) and we make it and back into rounds.
“Stand!!” and we all knot ropes and step away. I’m disappointed. Trebling to Grandsire isn’t a hard skill as ringing goes and I so want to ring “perfectly” – chimes which are balanced and equally struck; sounds which lift my heart. The captain (“Our Leader”) has a quick word with me about clipping the large bells and leaving too much space among the smaller bells and then it’s time for a different group to take hold for another method.
I stop at the end of ringing and wait until it’s only the captain and I. I have to ask her how I did. The answer is heartening – my speed was good, I kept ringing (this is a cardinal rule and is to be seen printed in LARGE capitals on many tower walls) and she explains that if all she has to tell me is about fine tuning of my bell placement that’s good news; best of all, it wasn’t me that went wrong and I rang well to stay in the right place despite some degree of chaos and disorder around me – “be positive” she cries with enthusiasm, “ringing takes YEARS!” – and I’m too old to wait that long – I may well expire before I reach the glories of Bristol and the grandeur of London – and I want want WANT to ring Wangaratta surprise major .
It will take me years to become a ringer – it will take me years and YEARS to get ropesight AND bell control AND memory AND rhythm AND listening skills co-ordinated, but I’m not sure whether it might take me even longer to remember what dyed in the wool ringers know – if no one says anything about your ringing, that’s high praise and you’ve done exceptionally well!!!!!***
* * *
* ringing is replete with “ooh err! missus!” phrases and expressions, which strike the beginner’s ear oddly; it seems to me a measure of bell immersion that these same phrases now run smoothly past the acoustic oddity-filter they were so recently snagged upon.
** and for those of you who like the full explanation, imagine Bell 1 moving to 7th place -
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
2, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
2, 3, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
2, 3, 4, 1, 5, 6, 7, 8
2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 6, 7, 8
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 7, 8
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 8
- and that’s the simple version where none of the other bells move or swap places :)
*** ringer’s joke:-
1st ringer – “When I started ringing there would be a queue of 3 people waiting in line to tell me where I’d gone wrong once I finished”
2nd ringer “Only 3? You must have been ringing Minimus!”
(Guess how many ringers it takes to ring Minimus?)
Two Recent Adventures: guest post by Tamsin
The first story involves my car, a slick country road, and a (presumed) coyote. And soon, a replacement license plate because Illinois is a two-plate state and Rita’s front plate will never be anything near flat again.
Last Sunday morning I left the farm and headed north, as I am wont to do when going to Metropolita and wishing to avoid the everpresent road repair and construction crews. About two miles from home, and just as I was remarking to myself that everything looked amazingly WET – not just the actual pools of water here and there, but the trees, crops, roadside flowers and grasses, and the road itself – SOMETHING largeish and black-and-tan-ish and possessed of pointy ears and a long tail came leaping out of the flowers and grasses and crossed just in front of my car, or rather just in front of where my car would have been if I hadn’t reflexively stomped on the brake pedal and caused myself to (a) fishtail (from which I could recover on a dry road) and (b) hydroplane (oops, dang, it’s a wet road…) and then (c) spin madly and slide sideways until we (Rita and I, that is) came to a stop with Rita’s rear end in a ditch and her hood – covered with mud and weeds- pointing towards the road.
I got out to have a recce and found that Rita’s rear fender was approximately one inch away (whew!) from the first row of my neighbour’s corn, that all of the books, magazines, garden tools, horse-related junk, etc. that had been occupying various containers in Rita’s back seat and the cargo area was now – along with the upside-down containers – one big jumbled pile in the cargo area, and that Rita’s rear wheels were buried in very wet, deep soil. There was also a big pile of similarly wet, deep soil under her midsection, and her front tires were resting on a whacking great pile of crushed weeds (brome and chickory mostly) with (you’ll never guess) wet, deep soil underneath.
It was a very low-impact event; the airbag didn’t even deploy (probably because I didn’t bump into the steering wheel). It was a VERY hot day (this was several hours before the big storm). So I sat in the car, made a few desultory and useless attempts at rocking it out, and sat some more.
All of this took approximately two minutes. That bit of road is NOT particularly well-traveled, so I was very pleased when a nice red truck came along. I was even more pleased when the occupants turned out to be my boarder Sandy and her husband Joe (“he who is mighty and strong and can do everything”). Joe left Sandy with me – in case I was upset or damaged, I suppose – and drove back home to get a chain for pulling purposes. Sandy said “Wow, if we hadn’t come along you’d still be here in two days!” I was just pointing out that NO, after all, my farm was all of two miles away, half an hour’s walk or a little more, even in the heat… when cars began appearing – FOUR neighbors came by, saw us, stopped, and asked if we needed to be pushed, pulled, given a ride somewhere, brought something to drink… So much for quiet country backroads; I obviously took the road MORE traveled by. And – I have nice neighbors.
Joe returned with his magic chain, managed to get it hooked to Rita and then got her out of the ditch, yay Joe! He was very dirty. I think he had originally been on his way to church… so I pointed out that he still got church points because even on a Sunday it’s okay to get one’s ox out of a ditch, right? so all he had to do was think of Rita (or me?) as his ox. I think I make quite a nice, presentable ox.
Days later, I am still pulling weeds out of various odd bits of Rita – between the tires and the rims, for example, and inside the draw bar for the hitch, and around the headlamps and EVERYWHERE in her undercarriage. And her tailpipe. And of course the word gets around very quickly here, so the next morning at the gym at least five people asked me whether I was okay. I was. I am. I’ll have Rita checked over by my mechanic but I expect – I hope – she’s okay also.
Just, you know, all wet and muddy and weedy, like Ophelia, or the Lady of Shalott. Only, of course, not dead.
* thus endeth Adventure Story The First *
The second adventure story is much shorter and not at all outdoorsy or even physical. Now that I think of it, it’s not even particularly adventure-y, but no matter. It’s a story. It involves two highly amusing telephone conversations with a New York attorney (who sounds suspiciously like a New Jersey attorney, but whatever). I’m trying out an agency that is supposed to provide experts to lawyers in search of experts. We’ll see. They basically double my charges and pay me half, so clearly it’s quite profitable for them if any work actually comes of our association. So far, I’m monumentally unimpressed, because the only attorney who has rung up is this New York fellow who told me several times exactly what conclusions he wanted me to come to, what statements he wanted me to make in court, and what my specific expert opinions needed to be. I said “That’s fine, I understand everything you’ve said, and you’re welcome to retain me. If my review of the case materials and my interviews with interviews with various authorities and other experts lead me to exactly the conclusions you’ve suggested, then of course I’ll be happy to say so.” He hemmed and hawed for some time, and finally said “I have to discuss this with my partner before I can retain anyone.”
(Translation: “You are NOT getting this, and you probably will NOT do!”)
I send a short e-mail to the agency suggesting that they should add a question or two to the information sheet filled out by attorneys, because it would save us all a lot of time if the attorneys were asked to specify whether they wanted
a) a consultant for behind-the-scenes work
b) an expert witness for court purposes
c) a sock puppet
But the agency didn’t seem to think this was a good idea. Rats. These people lack vision! I still think it would be a major time-saver.
In any case, the attorney has now rung back – still not able, apparently, to understand what’s happening, and still, obviously, on the track of the ideal expert who won’t insist on seeing any of those boring old case materials and will cheerfully read or recite his wee script for him in court. This time around, I said “Look, this relationship just isn’t meant to be, you know? You want me to work without any information, and I can’t function that way. If you wanted me to stand up in court and swear that a piece of string was 3′ long, I would STILL need to review the case materials, look at the photos, handle and measure the string, and talk to an engineer – and then I could stand up and say that it was, in fact, (a) a piece of string and (b) precisely 3′ long… unless, of course, the object in question proved to be an 8′ length of hawser or a 5′ length of chain, or a boa constrictor, in which case I could NOT stand up and announce that according to my professional judgement it was a 3′ piece of string. Capisce?”
He was SO not a happy camper. I did my best to explain to him that (contrary to his experience?) not all experts are “guns for hire” and some of us aren’t for sale, and that attorneys – himself included – are welcome to purchase my TIME, which often IS for sale, but my opinions… not so much, in fact not at all. Too bad, so sad.
* thus endeth Adventure Story The Second *
So what did I learn from these adventures/experiences?
1. Don’t drive certain backroads right after heavy rainstorms. Also, boarders can occasionally be useful.
2. If at all possible, take a good hard look at anything that trots across the road in front of the car, and make a quick decision about what to do. Braking might not be the best choice. I might still end up in the ditch either way, but then again I might not. And depending on what it IS, I might actually WANT to hit it. Oh, I wouldn’t want to hit anyone’s dog, perish the thought, or even a comparatively innocent coyote, for that matter, but if the critter trotting across the road happened to be a New York/New Jersey attorney in search of a sock puppet, I just might be tempted.
Sunshine Contest – Round 2 (Guest post by AJLR)
Well, it was too much to ask of anyone, to see all those wonderful recipe ideas coming in as responses to the previous contest and to then just let them drift out of sight into the ether. Robin was drooling fit to match a ravenous hellhound* and I suspect many readers were too (I certainly was!). So for one more, one final** gorgeous, glittery, golden (and signed) copy of the new edition of SUNSHINE, this competition is asking participants to submit a chosen recipe.
To enter this contest you will need to post one (only ONE) recipe here on the blog Forum, in the thread that has been set up specifically for it in Playing With Your Food.
Please note that if your chosen recipe has been drawn from a published cookbook, you’ll need to have tweaked it in some way to have made it your own for posting in the competition. (Advice on how to avoid a breach of copyright has been that you need to have changed three things about a published recipe for it to belong to you.) Additional ‘Cook’s Tips’ are also good, ‘I now do it this way instead….’ or ‘I find XXX is a better ingredient for this’ or ‘This originally used 2 pints of double/heavy cream but I found that 3 pints made it better***‘ – really, anything that puts your own stamp on the recipe.
You could use the recipe that you listed in the last competition (please do – several of those have been haunting my dreams..) if you entered that, or anyone can post a totally new one. The recipe needs to be in full, with sufficient detail that someone could cook the dish from it. As guidance, Robin has said “this is in the spirit of Charlie’s Coffeehouse, so we’re looking for recipes for the kind of thing you’d want to order from the on-site bakery the next time you’re in a serious that-kind-of café”.
Rules of the contest:
Entrants will need to
i) belong to or join the Forum in the normal way in order to post their recipe (Blogmom is standing by to approve any new members at near light speed);
ii) conform to the Forum’s rules while there, particularly Pollyanna;
iii) bear in mind that if the recipe to be posted is a long-standing one in your family, it would be best to check that no-one’s going to be upset by your sharing the details on the Forum.
All of the recipes will eventually be copied over onto the PWYF blog, using [your forum name]’s [recipe title] as the name, eg ‘Eadgyth’s Ecstatic Eclairs’, so that we can all go on enjoying them in the future.
The closing date is Saturday, 14 August, at midnight GMT and the winner# will be drawn according to an ancient English ritual, the details of which I couldn’t possibly divulge…although, strangely, the result is always identical to a random drawing.
Good luck!
* * *
* No, much worse. Hellhounds are never ravenous, more’s the pity.
** Unless, of course . . . um . . .
*** I so want this recipe. Whatever it is.
# Anyone who at this point is screaming, BUT I DON’T BAKE! I CAN’T EVEN TURN AN OVEN ON! . . . Please. Everyone knows someone who bakes. Owe them a favour. ‘My best friend Xiuhcoatl’s recipe for Pistachio Meringue Fandangos’ is fine with us so long as it’s fine with Xiuhcoatl and it follows the rules above. Who knows? After they stop laughing (you want what? You want it why?) they might be intrigued enough to sign on here themselves and we can always use forum members. Especially forum members who bake.
