This winter, though, this winter is different. It’s the first week in February, and the ground isn’t frozen. We’ve had exactly one snowstorm, and the foot of snow melted in 48 hours. Temperatures have been in the forties most days, and occasionally in the fifties. The only body of water that has iced over is the puddle on the low spot in our driveway.

Each day that is warmer than normal seems like a gift, a gift that takes us one day closer to our goal of an ice-free winter.

Even if I weren’t an oyster farmer, the prospect of an ice-free winter would make me happy. But the thirty thousand or so oysters we still have in cages out in Barnstable Harbor give an ice-free winter a whole new meaning.

Most oyster farmers take all their stock and equipment in over the winter because ice destroys everything its path. You can leave nice neat rows of cages out in December and come out to heap of twisted wire in March. We took in our seed (oysters we got as pinheads last spring) just around New Year’s, and the 100,000 one-inch oysters will remain safely stowed in a giant refrigerator until, probably, April. But we still had a good number of this year’s crop that didn’t quite make it to three inches, the size at which we can legally sell them. At this very moment, Kevin and I may own more 2 7/8-inch oysters than anyone on the planet.

We’ve been ready to take them in for a couple months now. We’ve planned to put them in big plastic boxes called fish totes, that hold about 800 oysters each, and store them in our basement, which stays cold but doesn’t freeze. It’s not an ideal way to store them, and we would expect a good portion of them to die, so we didn’t want to take them off the water until we had to.

And so we watched the ten-day weather forecast, waiting for temperatures to drop low enough to freeze the water in the harbor. As long as there was no ice, there was no need to bring in the oysters.

All December, there was no ice and no prospect of ice. And again in January. And now it’s the first week in February, and the ten-day forecast shows more of the same. It’s beginning to look like we’re going to have an ice-free winter, which, with luck, our almost-legal oysters will spend not dying in Barnstable Harbor.

So far, so good. We went to check them yesterday, and found them happy and healthy. Some of them even showed signs of growth, in the form of a translucent white ring around the edge of the shell. Growth! In February!

I’m sure a freakishly warm winter will have unfortunate repercussions. A little later in the year, we may have wall-to-wall insects, an unpredictable growing season, or mutant raccoons the size of mastiffs. At this point, though, I’m ready to pay almost any price. One more month, please. One more month.

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But, before I give you January’s list, I have a confession. At the end of last year, when I added up our total 2011 take and figured out it was about 11% of our calories, I thought it would make all of you hunters, gatherers, fishermen, and gardeners curious about your own year in food. I thought I’d get comments along the lines of, “What a great way to look at first-hand food, Tamar! I added up our year and it was 47%!” Because my commentariat is uniformly polite and supportive, no one would add, “Ha ha!”

Only Milkweed & Teasel’s Jen, who, I am convinced, is my across-the-pond doppelganger, thought this exercise was even remotely interesting. In a hail-Mary effort to get people other than Jen interested, I even posted the tally on the Huffington Post. Let’s just say there’s no bandwagon forming.

So I have a question: Don’t you want to know? After all the work you do growing tomatoes and keeping chickens and raising livestock and tracking deer and hunting mushrooms and digging clams, don’t you want to know?

It’s not hard to work up a rough estimate of your take. We’re not looking for precision here. You eyeball your pile of potatoes and figure it’s twenty pounds. You take a guess of the average yield of your ducks. You count your chickens, and figure so many eggs per. Then you check the USDA’s calorie database and do the math.

Don’t you want to know?

Well, I want to know. And you’ll just have to bear with me as I do my little empirical exercise every month.

Saved by the eggs

For simplicity’s sake, I count everything we harvest – whether we eat it or not – but nothing we barter for. The point of the exercise is not to track what we eat but to see how well we’d do if we had to rely on what we hunt, gather, or grow.

It’s a good thing we don’t have to rely on it, though, because we’d be mighty sick of eggs.

Here’s January’s haul:

1.5 pounds beets (300 calories)
1 pound parsnips (300)
1 pound beet greens (100)
1 pound collard greens (100)
50 oysters (500)
1 peck of clams (about 4 cups of chopped clam meat, 800)
1 eider (a whole 10 ounces of duck meat, 300)
18 dozen eggs (about 800 calories per, for a whopping 14,400)

On the other side of the equation, I’m still estimating that we need 5000 calories per day (2200 for me, 2800 for Kevin), even though it may be a little high. It makes the calculating easier: about 150,000 calories needed per month.

In January, thanks to our chickens, we harvested a respectable 16,800 calories. Of course, we didn’t eat all those eggs – we gave a lot away – but if the alternative had been going hungry, we would have.

January came in at 11%. Even though our goal is 20%, I don’t expect January to get there. There’s no fishing, there’s almost no garden, and, although there is some hunting I’m a crappy hunter. February and March, and maybe even April, will probably be about the same as January – all eggs, all the time. Come May, though, we’ll start picking up.

So, don’t you want to know?

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A Fry Baby is the world’s smallest deep fryer, and we got ours at a Yankee swap hosted by our friends Tommy and Ali, for which all the guests were instructed to bring something that’s been lying around the house for ages but never used. We brought a platter we’d bought at a yard sale a few years back, but somehow never warmed up to. But one couple brought this 1970’s-era miniature deep-fryer. Imagine! They had it for years, and it was still in the box! There’s no accounting for taste.

A Fry Baby, with jam for scale

It’s not really called a Fry Baby, but Kevin started calling it that and the name stuck. It was made before we had all these pesky safety regulations, and there’s no visible means of controlling the temperature of the oil, and no automatic shut-down if you forget to unplug it. It’s clearly a house fire waiting to happen, and perhaps it’s the element of danger that endears that little appliance to Kevin, who’s been deep-frying anything that’s stopped moving.

If you have a Fry Baby and you have chickens, it won’t be long before you start wondering just what would happen if you tried to deep-fry an egg. You’ll go to the Internet, and you’ll see all kinds of videos of people trying to do it, with results that range from failure to tragedy. Than you’ll eventually stumble on one of Jacques Pepin doing it, with perfect results.

The lesson you should take from this is that you should only deep-fry an egg if you’re Jacques Pepin. The lesson we took from it is that, hey, we can deep-fry an egg!

Pepin does it in a shallow pan of oil, and uses two wooden spoons to gather up the white as it spreads. But, before he does, he gives the critical piece of information. Make sure, he warns, to refrigerate your eggs so the whites don’t spread so much.

Anyone who’s ever opened an egg just out of the nest box knows that, the fresher the egg, the more coherent the white. As eggs age, they ooze carbon dioxide and the whites lose their viscosity.

So, we figured, if a cold egg is good, a fresh cold egg is better. So we heated the oil and, when it was hot, we took a couple eggs right out of the 38-degree chicken coop.

I broke an egg into a bowl, and slid it into the hot oil. I had my two wooden spoons ready, but I didn’t need them. The bubbles that rose up around the egg had the effect of keeping the white close to the yolk. I flipped the egg over mid-fry, but it’s not really necessary. There’s enough oil on the top that it cooks pretty evenly. When the white began to brown, about 45 seconds in, I took it out with a slotted spoon and drained it on a paper towel.

It was perfect, with whites completely set and a liquid yolk. There was a little crispy edge on the whites, like you get with a pan-fried egg.

The sandwich was better than the picture

Kevin had found another way to do it, and we tried that, too. You soft-boil an egg, peel it, and then coat it with flour, then eggs, then breadcrumbs. Then into the oil for about thirty seconds. It works great, but I don’t think it’s worth the extra work. Kevin, who can’t resist a crispy panko crust, disagreed.  Which is fine by me, because it means he may occasionally make one for me.

We made open-face sandwiches of crusty bread, goat cheese and bacon, sautéed beet greens and garlic, and topped them with the eggs. They were terrific.

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We’re not there yet, and Kevin’s been unsatisfied with the pace of our progress. So he dispensed with the whole leapfrog thing and went ahead and bought a boat and a truck.

The boat is a Steigercraft 23 Chesapeake, with an enclosed pilothouse and a cuddy cabin. At least I think that’s what it has – I’m still a little iffy on the terminology. Better I show you a picture.

The hull is from 1990, and has a recently re-fiberglassed deck and a new gas tank. The engine is a 2008 225-horse Evinrude E-tec. It’s s super-low-emissions two-stroke, the big brother to the 50-horse version we have on our oyster boat.

The best part is that it’s totally tricked out. It’s got super-groovy Raymarine radar and GPS, and outriggers on the roof that are controlled from inside the pilothouse. It’s got enough rod holders for a small village and – get this – autopilot.

I was a little worried about the autopilot when Kevin explained what it could do for us. “We can go out to Horseshoe Shoal and set it to go in circles over our favorite spot.” I immediately had visions of us, lazing in the sun, as our boat went on autocrash with another boat with the same favorite spot.

“Don’t worry,” Kevin said. “We also have collision avoidance.”

A 23-foot boat with a pilothouse and cabin is a lot more boat than our current 19-foot center console. It’s the biggest boat Kevin was comfortable trailering regularly, and he’s only comfortable trailering it with a big hairy truck. So he flew to Chicago, made a deal on a 2008 Ford F250 Super Duty diesel, and drove it home.

While he was gone, our friend Bob stopped by. Bob knew all about the boat; he went to see it with us to because we wanted it to get the Bob Seal of Approval. I told him Kevin was away, driving home in the big hairy truck we bought to pull it.

Bob scratched his head and took a pointed look around our property, densely populated with boats and trucks. “I see a lot of addition,” he said, “but not very much subtraction.”

That hit the nail on the head. When Kevin got home, we had a come-to-Jesus on the issue of subtraction. At first, Kevin contended that I was overreacting to addition. “Hey, at least it’s not multiplication,” were, I believe, his exact words. I told him that if he didn’t focus on some subtraction, we might be headed for a long division.

So we officially have for sale one 19-foot Eastern center console with a 70-horse Johnson, a 14-foot Carolina Skiff with a 25-horse Honda four-stroke, and a 1970 Series IIA Land Rover. No reasonable offer refused, since we’ll never have room for the Queen Mary at this rate.

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There are rabbits criss-crossing the driveway. There are raccoons (still!) trying to get in the chicken coop. There is the occasional wild turkey. There is a coyote, or maybe the neighbor’s German shepherd.

But what the hell is this?

As much as I'd like to have varmints who leave money, the bill is for scale.

It’s a series of tracks, in one line, evenly spaced a little less than a foot apart. Each print is a grouping of four holes, each of which seems like it’s made with a stick, rather than a paw pad.  My best guess is a small rabbit on stilts. You got a better idea?

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We’ll start with the good news. The good news is that our hoophouse has successfully extended our growing season. Granted, it’s gotten an assist from the warmest winter in human memory, but it still felt good to be out there in January, harvesting the parsnips and beets I planted in the early summer.

Or at least it did, until I got the bad news.

Root vegetables allow gardeners to remain in denial up until the very last moment. When you’re growing tomatoes, or eggplant, or lettuce, the fruits of your inadequacy stare you full in the face, from seedling to harvest. You watch as, right before your eyes, they stubbornly refuse to turn into the picture-perfect vegetables of your imagination. You never have the chance to develop unreasonable expectations.

Roots, though, allow you to dream. Surely that forest of beet greens is collecting sunlight to feed big, sweet, deep red beets just beneath the surface.

Surely.

Parsnips, with an egg for scale

Last week, I pulled up the parsnips. Despite having been in the ground for some eight months, most of them were about the size of my pinky. A couple of them reached a diameter of over an inch, but none was more than about three inches long. A more pathetic root harvest I have never seen.

Or hadn’t, until I pulled up the beets. The best of them looked like miniature stunted carrots. There was not a rounded one in the lot. The dozen or so largest – the only ones that merited keeping – came in at about a half-pound. Total. Not for the first time, I was grateful that beets are two vegetables in one, because the greens were lovely.

Beets, with an egg for eating because the beets won't fill you up

I suspect our soil is long on N, and short on P and K. We have a history of growing plants that are long on leaves and short on fruit, and our root harvests have almost always been terrible. Each year, I think I should give it up and only grow things that are supposed to have lots of leaves but beets are one of my favorite vegetables, and I’m of the hope-springs-eternal school of gardening.

So, come spring, Kevin and I will be loading up on organic matter, supplementing P and K, and slipping back into denial.

Consolation greens

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Which raises a very important question: What on earth is the point of an omelet?

Not for omelets, please.

I certainly see the point of mixing eggs with things like cheese and onions, mushrooms and ham. But it makes so much more sense to simply scramble all those things together.

It starts with the pan issue. If you’re making an omelet, you either have to use two pans, or use one pan serially, first to sauté the filling and then to cook the omelet. A scramble uses one pan, once. Cook your onions, add your sausage, finish with spinach, then mix in the eggs and cheese. No getting bowls dirty with fillings, no worrying about little bits in the pan that will interfere with the omelet-making.

But that advantage pales in comparison to the other, more substantive advantages. It’s not easy to make an omelet so the eggs are cooked properly all the way through. Generally, you end up with a tough skin on the outside and an undercooked layer on the inside. But, even if you get it perfect, the eating experience is suboptimal. You get bites of all egg and no filling around the outside, and bites with too much filling and not enough egg on the inside.

And then there’s the texture of the egg. Eggs are best when they’re cooked in soft, creamy curds, not firm, spongy pancakes. The egg in omelets is the equivalent of well-done meat.

As far as I can tell, there is one, and only one, advantage to omelets. An omelet is an opportunity to show off. You get to demonstrate your professional technique and slide the perfect yellow semi-circle out of the pan and on to the plate of a suitably grateful diner. Well, bully for you.

I’ll take the scramble, with eggs just barely set, and cheese distributed evenly throughout. Every bite has a little onion, a little sausage, a little spinach. I’ll take my scramble over your perfect yellow semi-circle any day. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that omelets top my list of over-rated foods, a list that also includes cupcakes, vegetable juice, marshmallows, and the downright disgusting Philly cheese steak.

I wonder if being an unyielding absolutist has anything to do with my not having all that many friends.

Nah.

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And you’re studying Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart to figure out how to pick your breeds.

Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart is indispensable for anyone considering keeping chickens. It’s a comprehensive list of breeds, with their origins, egg-laying potential, heat- and cold-tolerance, and notes on their behavior. I love Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart, and I encourage you to spend time reading about your many choices.

When it gets serious, though, and it’s time to actually buy chicks, I can help you cut through the indecision. There is one chicken breed that’s beak and wattles above all the others.

You will be tempted by the breeds, like Brahmas, with froo-froo feathers, but those feathers decorate chickens that have less in the way of brainpower than your average chicken – and that’s saying a lot.

Pretty is as pretty does

You will be tempted by the ones with the big floppy combs, like Leghorns, because they look like Elvis. But those combs get frostbite instantly.

I'm all shook up

You will be tempted by the ones that are docile and friendly and good with children, like Orpingtons, but you will get very tired of the frequency with which they go broody and have to be kept in a cage for a few days to be convinced that, no, they’re not going to hatch a brood of chicks.

You will be tempted by Araucanas and Ameraucanas, because they lay eggs in pastel shades of blue and green. And they do – every other Thursday. They are freeloaders.

The go-to chicken – drumroll, please – is the Rhode Island Red.

These plain brown hens are barnyard stand-outs. They lay big brown eggs, practically every day. They’re curious and engaged, but not needy or clingy. They don’t bully, and they don’t tolerate being bullied. They never get sick and they never go broody.

It makes sense that it should be that way. If you’re doing the selective breeding, it’s much harder to get feathers and combs and Easter eggs coupled with temperament, egg production, and disease resistance than temperament, egg production, and disease resistance all by themselves. Focus on what’s important, and you get a plain brown hen.

George

The favorite in our flock is George, who’s always the first to come investigate when we’re working in the yard. She’s friendly and calm, and she hangs out near us, scratching for bugs and clucking. If she decides nothing interesting is going on, she rejoins the rest of the flock.

There’s a lot to be said for a mixed flock, with its quotient of stupid ones, flighty ones, and broody ones. We love our motley crew and, if you’re just now venturing into chicken-keeping, I’d encourage you to go that route. It makes watching them and caring for them more interesting, and it sure makes counting them easier. As much as we like them, I don’t think we’ll ever have a flock that’s all Rhode Island Reds. But we’ll never have a flock without them.

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Yesterday was the most astonishingly beautiful January day Cape Cod has ever seen. Temperatures rose into the high 50s, and there was a light breeze out of the southwest. We outfitted our oyster boat, a 17-foot Carolina Skiff, for duck hunting, by which I mean we put three chairs in it. Three, because Bob was going with us.

You may remember Bob as the guy who’s taught us just about everything we know about Cape Cod fishing. Well, turns out Bob hunts, too. He used to hunt ducks a lot, but he hasn’t been out in a while. Okay, 27 years. But the jacket still fit him.

We met at the ramp yesterday morning, and set out into Barnstable Harbor. Our plan was to go fairly deep into the harbor, set out decoys and then drift east, toward the mouth. We knew we’d be at a disadvantage because we don’t have a camouflaged boat but, hey, ducks make mistakes.

Don’t they?

All our ducks were in a row

It’s easy to tell which birds are hunted and which birds aren’t by the alacrity with which they avoid a boat full of people with guns. Ducks fly away when they’re still way out of range. Seagulls, you can practically run over. Terns circle over your head, laughing because they know the song:

To every tern,
Turn, turn, turn,
There is no season,
Turn, turn, turn,
And no time you may send it
To tern heaven.

Occasionally, though, a duck would make a mistake and come within range. Bob or I would take a shot, or maybe two, and miss. (Kevin, who’s never cared for duck hunting, was driving the boat.) While it’s not surprising that I would miss, Bob is an excellent shot, and it’s very surprising that he would miss.

The problem, I think, is that the kind of shot we use for ducks is so expensive (up to $25. a box) that it’s hard to bring yourself to practice with it much. So you practice with the other, cheaper stuff and the trajectory is just not the same.

I have a 20-gauge, which is arguably not enough gun for sea ducks. I tried to make up for last season’s wrong-shot fiasco by getting 3-inch cartridges of #2 shot. Out of a 20-gauge, that should do the job.

But only if you actually hit the duck.

I don’t know how different the trajectory of the shot I was using was, but I do know I was consistently behind and below the target. Part of this, no doubt, is that I was making various other mistakes, including not swinging through properly, but part of it was that I wasn’t sure by how much to lead the duck or how quickly the shot would fall.

There was one duck, in particular, that haunts me. I had not one, but two chances as it flew by the boat’s broadside, a mere twenty yards out. It was big and meaty, and I missed it twice, low and behind.

“Big and meaty?” you may be asking. “Don’t you even know what kind of duck it was?”

The answer, sadly, is “no.” When they’re flying, all ducks just look like ducks to the inexperienced eye, which mine most definitely is.

The night before, I’d spent a couple of hours studying pictures of ducks, in the hopes that I would be able to tell one from the other. Fortunately, there’s only one kind of duck we’re not allowed to take, and it’s the easily (?) identifiable harlequin duck. You’re allowed to take at least one of every other kind, so identification only becomes an issue once you have one in the boat.

I was pretty sure I could identify eiders, scoters, and long-tailed ducks, which are the three sea ducks you’re allowed to take seven of, and I figured I’d simply limit myself to one of any kind of puddle duck I couldn’t ID; I’d have to be content with a boat full of one-offs. Yeah, like that’d happen.

After we’d drifted around the harbor for a while, missing ducks, we went out toward the end of Sandy Neck, where the harbor turns into Cape Cod Bay. There were more sea ducks and fewer puddle ducks, and the sea ducks weren’t quite as skittish as their inland brethren. Two eiders let us get quite close before they flew, and then went by right in front of me.

My first shot missed, and I thought my second did, too, but after a couple of wingbeats the eider dropped to the water, wounded. Before I could shoot it again it dove, and it came up on the other side of the boat. That was Bob’s side, and Bob finished it off when he had the chance. We didn’t want the poor bird to get away, wounded, and die a long, hard death, which it might have if we had waited for me to get over there to take the shot.

So I didn’t even kill my first duck. I only winged it.

We were out on the water for about six hours, and that was the only duck we had to show for it. Despite its being a beautiful day, it was a profoundly unsatisfying hunt.

I took the eider home, and turned to the world’s leading expert on preparing wild ducks, Hank Shaw, for advice. Hank, who’s known for eating “everything but the quack,” makes an exception for sea ducks. Roasted whole, they taste like low tide, so he skins them and takes the breast and legs. I watched his video, and did the same.

I was left with ten ounces of duck meat, plus a heart and gizzard that I added to duck stock I was making out of one of our ducks. It wasn’t much.

Had we been properly equipped and more skilled, it probably would have been much more. But to be properly equipped and more skilled takes both time and money. The boat needs to be painted, and it needs one of those hula skirts you put around the gunwales so it looks like a patch of reeds. We need more decoys, more realistically deployed. And I need to spend a lot of time at the range, shooting shells that can cost a dollar a pop.

I’m just not sure about duck hunting. A successful hunt yields something very delicious, but also very time-consuming. I’ve processed ducks, and it isn’t much fun. And Kevin and I have taken on so much that we have to start thinking about what we don’t want to do.

I realize that all this doubt may be the byproduct of a profoundly unsatisfying hunt, so I’m going to wait until I do well, at least once, before I make up my mind. But hell mayhave to freeze over first, so I suspect I’ll be in limbo for a good long time.

While I’m there, I do intend to enjoy some eider-pork sausages with caraway and sage.

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Okay, there are a lot of things I don’t understand, but I’m going to limit this discussion to one thing in particular, and it isn’t quantum mechanics. It’s why people seem to want to believe that some traits are hard-coded in our genes, while others aren’t.

Usually, it’s the crappy stuff that’s genetic. Science journalists are jumping through hoops to show that obesity is hard-wired. Ditto alcoholism. Criminality, even. But nobody seems to want to believe that your genes are your destiny when comes to the good stuff, like intelligence, musicality and athleticism.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book, Outliers, on the subject. I haven’t read the book (having given up on Malcolm Gladwell since the last chapter of Blink, in which he undermined the entire theory of the book), but Kevin has, and one of the advantages of being the proverbial One Flesh is that I get to talk about books he has read as though I read them myself. They hypothesis of this particular book is that success is, to a large degree, determined by A) luck and B) practicing for 10,000 hours, and not so much to innate gifts.

You’ll get no argument from me about luck, but I’ve got a problem with the 10,000 hours theory. It seems to me that people with no gift give up on whatever skill they’re trying to build at about Hour Seven. The degree to which one perseveres is likely to be directly proportional to the size of one’s gift. I’m something of an expert on this, having not persevered at many, many things. Clarinet. Photography. Fiction. Stonemasonry. Tennis. One cheek swab would tell you all you need to know about why I’ve given them all up: I suck at them.

Intelligence is a particularly sticky wicket. While everyone concedes that genes are involved, there’s a general unwillingness to believe that we none of us can get any smarter.

This is compounded by the difficulty in measuring an innate thinking ability. It’s hard to imagine a test that will yield identical scores from identical twins, one of whom went to Harvard and one of whom was raised by wolves. And so parenting web sites are crammed with advice on how to raise your child’s IQ – read the right books, go to the right school, take practice tests.

And you can raise your IQ score. You just can’t get any smarter. I’m absolutely convinced that we are born with every iota of intelligence we’re ever going to have. It’s just that we can’t prove it because we don’t have a good enough test.

Which brings me to my opossum.

Those of you who stop by often know that raccoons have been terrorizing our chickens, gnawing away at the coop in the middle of the night. You also know that we’ve decided to trap, kill, and eat the culprit(s).

We borrowed a trap from our friend Les, who happened to have a raccoon-sized Havahart in his shed.

If you’ve never had to trap a wild animal, you may be unfamiliar with the Havahart trap. It’s a cage with a door that closes when the animal steps on a plate in the cage. It’s called “Havahart” because the assumption is that you’re going to take the trapped animal to a safe haven and let it go. I’m sure the marketers who named the trap fully understood that some of their customers would shoot and eat the animals they trap, but “Havablast” didn’t go over well with focus groups.

We baited the trap with sardines and put it out next to our compost pile, the site of many a midnight raccoon rave. For the first couple of nights, we got nothing, and then we got a something. A furry something. But it wasn’t a raccoon. It was an opossum.

We had nothing against the opossum, whose worst offense was stealing some turkey feed, so Kevin opened the cage to let it go. After a few moments, it realized it was free, and lumbered off into the woods, dazed and confused but unharmed.

Kevin and I speculated that we caught an opossum instead of a raccoon because raccoons are smarter than opossums, and know better than to eat sardines put out in a metal box. But, when I tried to ascertain opossums’ general intelligence level, I found that they are supposed to be quite smart.

Go free!

According to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, “Results from some learning and discrimination tests rank opossums above dogs and more or less on a par with pigs in intelligence.”

If we can’t even measure human intelligence, how on earth can we measure and compare such disparate animals? I know we can arrive at some rough generalizations – rats are smart, turkeys are dumb – but to conclude that an opossum is smarter than a dog and “more or less” as smart as a pig seems unrealistically granular.

It also sounds like the beginning of a joke. A pig, a dog, and an opossum walk into a bar. Bartender says, “If the train leaves Chicago at 9:00 AM traveling at 60 miles per hour …”

Maybe the people who determine the animal intelligence hierarchy take into account how long the species has survived. Opossums have been around some 70 million years, so they must be doing something right. But, by that logic, horseshoe crabs should rule the world.

Unfortunately, the experts at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife didn’t compare opossum and raccoon intelligence, so I can neither confirm nor disprove my theory that raccoons are way smarter. I mean, come on. They’re always the ones who figure out how to open the garbage cans. They’re the ones who come into your house to eat the cat food. They’re the ones who have a long-term plan to break into the chicken coop.

But maybe it’s because they have 10,000 hours of practice. I think we should bait the trap with Kevin’s copy of Outliers.

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