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MOTHER'S DAY
This coming Sunday is Mother's Day, one of the most commercially successful occasions of the year. More telephone calls are made on this day than on any other, in spite of the increase of electronic greetings, and it is the most popular day of the year to dine out in a restaurant.
This activity would make Anna Marie Jarvis very unhappy. Her mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" author Julia Ward Howe are credited as the mothers of the "Mother's Day" movement, although their purposes were political, not sentimental. During the Civil War, Jarvis organized women from both sides to tend to the needs of the wounded. After the war, she arranged meetings for soldiers' mothers, promoting a "Mother's Day" holiday to emphasize pacifism and social activism.
In the aftermath of the brutal American Civil and Franco-Prussian wars, Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation, written in 1870, urged women to unite in the interest of peace. For a decade, Howe initiated and supported financially annual women's gatherings in Boston on June 2 as she attempted to establish a national celebration of mothers for peace.
When Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, Anna Marie, swore on her mother's grave that she would take up her cause to create a national day to honor mothers. She succeeded. In 1914, President Wilson signed a joint resolution establishing a national day to honor mothers, celebrated on the second Sunday in May.
Ironically, Anna was never a mother herself. And although her lifelong mission was successful, within nine short years after the first official Mother's Day, she became a major opponent to its celebration due to the increasing commercialization of the holiday.
Animal mothers may not receive telephone calls or get taken out to dinner, but they deserve to be recognized nonetheless. Regardless of species, mothers everywhere nurture and protect their young, and some of these ladies have very interesting stories.
Elephants have the strongest family ties in the animal world. In their natural habitat, females stay with their mothers their entire lives, taking care of each other and their young. Males stay with their mothers until they reach maturity at about 15 years. Elephants can live 70 years and a female will have babies until 50 years of age or so, with intervals of two-and-a-half to four years between calves. The gestation period varies from 19 to 22 months and twins are very rare. Elephants cry, play, laugh and grieve. They are also very sensitive; if a baby complains, the entire family will rush to console and caress it.
The female wood duck lays her eggs in the hollow of a tree as high as 60 feet above the ground. The eggs are laid on different days, but to assure they hatch on the same day, she waits until all are deposited before sitting on her nest. After hatching, the chicks will spend just one night in the nest before Mama repeatedly calls them to her from the water below. Day-old chicks have to jump out of the nest into the unknown far below, or risk starvation.
The sloth is the slowest mammal on earth. It spends its entire life living in trees in the rainforests of Central and South America, subsisting on leaves, buds and fruit. They sleep up to 20 hours a day and spend most of their time upside down. Unless she moves too slowly to engage a mate, which happens, the female will produce a single baby a year and give birth while hanging upside down from a tree limb.
Wood roaches, very similar in appearance to the common American cockroach, are outdoor dwelling insects found in most areas of our country. If they accidentally find their way inside, they will not respond to common insecticides, but they will die for lack of a consistently moist environment. Unlike their cousins, they are neither secretive nor nocturnal. Wood roaches are monogamous, raise one group of children and live in one log for their entire lives.
Twice a year, in the spring and at the end of the summer, a female squirrel will produce from two to five kittens. Mother squirrels are so protective of their babies that they kick the fathers out of the nest during this time, but they may allow them back in with the family during the winter.
Multiple wives are fine with the ostrich, the world's largest but flightless bird. A single male ostrich earns a harem, but forms a pair bond only with the dominant female. He makes a nest by scraping a depression in the ground, where all the females deposit their eggs. The dominant pair sits the nest, the female by day, the male on night duty. The alpha hen puts her eggs in the center, where they are most likely to incubate successfully. A few days after hatching, the chicks are ready to hit the road with their parents.
A Happy Mother's Day to all mothers everywhere,
human and otherwise. I
Jan Jaeger is owner of Geronimo's, Ltd., Nantucket's pet supply and gift shop, and is a member of DWAA and CWA (Dog and Cat Writer's Associations of America). Her pets at home are Junior, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, and Miz Edna kitty. At the shop are the cats, Messrs. Fish and Chips, Flower bunny, Willie guinea pig and two budgies. Send e-mail to jan@geronimos.com.
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