Minks can squeeze into the tinest spaces imaginable... my parents raise chickens and have mink problems sporadically throughout the year; pesky little buggers they are! My dad's only solution has been to securely pen the chickens in at night. They have a large fenced "flight pen" area for the daytime, but for coops, he used converted army communications boxes-- and they get locked in every single night. It never seems to fail that, just when he thinks it's safe and stops closing them in at night, a few weeks later another mink or weasel is at it again. I really don't think there's any way to use fencing to protect the flock, unless you plan to dig footers and bury the bottom in concrete-- and that's assuming the fence has holes small enough that the vermin can't get in. Probably better to try and figure out a secure (and SOLID) enclosure for nighttime instead.

I was initially confused by the style arms. I had read that an iris has 3 "falls" (which very obviously fit both these plants) and 3 "standards" (which I thought didn't fit) and I misunderstood something so as to expect only one "style arm" and to not expect style arms to look so much like "standards" as the flower developed. So one plant's flower seemed, while developing, to have five identical upper petals, because two style arms initially looked just like the standards and the third (in each flower) developed late. I didn't reexamine the developed flowers until just now, and saw the 3 style arms now are very distinctly different from the 3 standards and all 3 style arms are equal size. So I thought one plant had 3 of one petal type and 5 of the another, while the second plant had three types of 3 each. Neither matched the text I saw for Iris of 3 falls, 3 standards and (I thought it said) 1 style arm. Now the two plants are much more similar to each other as the orientation of the 3 style arms over the 3 falls became consistent as the flowers matured. The shape of the falls is still distinctly different between the two plants. But otherwise the flower structure is each exactly as I now understand for an Iris.

Lars, I'm so sorry! I didn't mean that at all! I wasn't addressing only the women or lumping the men in with the women. I only meant that the proportion of women plumping for the raw size of rare was unusual to me. The men's responses seemed to be a normal or unremarkable spread. In the linked discussion, I could have said "people", but I said women just because I know about women's cooking behavior, both now and from my grandmother's age, as well as what I've read in old diaries and cooking articles. I don't know enough about men to say, though I have heard lectures about the kinds of implements that women used in the past, while I can't recall anything on the subject about chuckwagon cookies or other male cooks. My only memories of a being in a kitchen with a man making a reduction are by an astronautical engineer who is more precision oriented. I wasn't excluding men, per se, just didn't have any relevant information on how they do things so didn't speak for them. If something should like that should happen again, please chime in! There are some posters whose genders/gender identities aren't known to me, but I promise you I don't mean to marginalize men, and I certainly didn't mean to make you feel uncomfortable. This is not a women's group, nor do I regard it as one. I have belonged to a women's group whose mission was to give women roles and authority, as well as a feminine voice, in what was otherwise a very traditional, traditionally male field, but even then men were welcome to participate so long as they didn't try to take over. This is not such a group and the only one I can remember belonging to which was 100% women only was the girl scouts. Neither textiles nor cooking are womens' fields (nursing babies is, though there are some men with acquired (rather than experiential) knowledge on the subject), nor does gender of any kind have much to do with them. While there are some sociological and biological differences in tastes, they're not prominent. That is something that desired meat temperature speaks to, however, which is why I made the remarks at all--it was a beside the way difference that I found interesting and educational.

Florida has a few snails that have nothing to do with being near a body of water. And as for your worm, i don't know much about worms but you don't have to have poop to have a worm.