Dogs. Dawgs. Other critters. Life as Oliver Wendell Douglas. Live heirlooms, both flora and fauna. Self-sufficiency. Suffering not a fool to live. Land stewardship. Turnip trucks, and those who have not fallen therefrom. Training things. Growing things. Search and rescue. What is this bug and what is it doing under my desk light?
Embracing the reality that Nature Bats Last.
As I was showering this morning, I noticed two of the delicate, elegant spiders who typically occupy the corners and edges of the bathroom ceiling cautiously approaching one another.
Through the steam, they appeared to be the same species. Was I about to be a voyeur at the mating dance?
Alas, no. That was not a kiss that the victrix kept planting on the less fortunate arthropod as she systematically folded and wrapped eight now-ungainly legs.
By the time I got a camera and a chair, it was all over but for the dessication.
When we arrived home tonight, there was no sign there had ever been more than one spider.
When the dogs started digging around in the snow in the parking lot at training last week, and then brought me ... remains ... my kneejerk response was to curse the redneck who had cleaned his kill on his tailgate and dumped the leavings where he stood. Common enough in state gamelands.
Yeah -- no two-legged mammal produced these leftovers. (Click photo to embiggen.)
Hawk or owl? I'm sure someone out there knows the agent of Thumper's demise.
Whoever it was, she likes meat and is not too fond of tendons or bone.
I had thought that I'd be posting amateur photographs of the solstice eclipse yesterday.
Skies were winter-clarified and bright, and the news was abuzz about the blood-red moon that we could expect. I researched photography sites for hints on using my modest digital camera, got out the tripod, and played with the controls. Had some normally verboten dinnertime caffeine, and stayed up.
At midnight the moon burned cold and high, sharp-edged and brilliant. The landscape glowed back. I could read by the light.
By two, the shroud of clouds was so thick that I could not find the moon at all -- premature eclipsulation.
Sunday night I'd been possessed by the urgent thought that it was time for the last of the excess cockerels to convert -- convert from hen-harassing freeloading loud-mouthed date-rapists into coq a vin and mole. I'd caged them up then, and spent Monday afternoon killing, plucking, and butchering them. I am prone to procrastinate those chores that require me to kill someone, and this task goes faster if PC is here to help, so this positive urgency was curious. It just seemed as if it needed to get done now.
Much like the wood-splitting that calls me out back nearly every day while the light fades. As the stacked cordwood piles up, I feel a little less nervous urgency in my bowels.
I was not born a medieval peasant or stone-age pastoralist; winter has not meant especial hunger and risk for me. But somewhere in the last 10,000 years of re-twisting DNA, there must be a gene that, triggered in the proper context, tells me: Cold out, meat will keep, you can't afford to feed that guy all winter, now is the time.
So at Yule we celebrate with fire and flesh.
Barn chores kept me busy yesterday, and it was coming on 6:30 when I remembered the bowl of rooster heads and innards chilling on the porch.
The dogs get the necks, gizzards, feet, hearts, lungs, enormous testicles, and livers. But the heads and guts are the portion of the other canids, the family of red fox who den in the hollow log at the far east end of our south pasture.
The fox stump is a perhaps fifty feet from their favorite lookout spot. Because generations of lazy farmers have nailed their fence wire to the trunks of trees, any tree that expires near the pasture edges must be cut at least chest-high, leaving a tall stump. The fox stump is too tall for my dogs to steal the foxes' tithe. As the tree's formerly living layers rot away, nails and staples and bits of wire appear on the pasture-facing side, as if exposed by rain on stone.
I've been bringing the slaughter remnants and the occasional naturally-expired bird to the stump since we got our poultry. I've never lost a bird to a fox. It's a contract enforced by Moe's diligent patrols and the block walls of the barn. But still, the foxes have been good neighbors. Polite. Deferential. Their tracks in the snow take a hard turn when they encounter the tracks that record Moe's perimeter -- the canids have an ongoing and subtle conversation, though I doubt they have often seen one another. For a dog or fox, scent is thought and intention distilled in time. Moe's perimeter, and Rosie and Cole's profane late-night call-and-response sessions, are no doubt what keeps the local coyotes at arm's length -- and whatever pushes the coyotes away is good for the foxes.
So the dogs and I walked out to the end of the pasture and left an offering feast on the fox stump at just about the moment of the solstice. We had the moon and sky back; I had not even brought a headlamp, whose beam shuts out the world. As we neared the house and barn, warm lights making embers of each window, I felt the great horned owl.
One never hears an owl, unless the owl intends.
I turned just as she landed on the top of the big hemlock that guards the outside curve of the lane. The dogs felt her too; they rushed the tree -- but silently -- and must have been circling its trunk under the dark cave of its branches.
The owl said nothing, just made a silhouette. I watched her for several minutes. But goats were yelling in their stalls about dinner.
When I came out of the barn ten minutes later, she had silently dissolved.
In the small hours this morning, Rosie stood at the bedroom window and growled profane threats under her breath.
This happens from time to time; usually I can make out nothing in the darkness. I believe her, but in winter, with all our creatures locked in after dark, the night belongs to the wild things.
This time, moon blazing once again and snowy world glowing, I could see the owl, posted on top of a defunct utility pole a hundred feet from the front door. She was scanning the garden, hayfield, and stone retaining wall for prospects of her own Yule meat feast.
Uncommon brightness illuminated the solitary life of a night creature on this, the darkest day of the year.
What? Walt Disney got the biology of critters wrong? Say it ain't so!
Spring is not the season of twitterpated. At least it isn't around here.
As the plant world and the invertebrates* die or tuck themselves in for the year in the forest and farm, the local tetrapods are getting busy. Late fall is the time for making babies. When I say you can smell the sex on the air, I'm not being hyperbolic or metaphorical. I'm hoping the wind doesn't shift from the goat pasture towards the house.
Rosie is in season, which makes her pushier, snarkier, cuddlier, and generally underfoot. She harasses the eunuchs and has her way with them. Neither Moe nor Cole got the memo about their testes, so they are happy to oblige. It's hazardous to turn a corner suddenly around here -- always a little disconcerting to walk in on a couple of dogs in flagrante delicto.
I've had bitches who became uncharacteristically stupid or wacky when they came into season, and were unreliable in their work. Pip and Rosie just add energy and intensity to their already driven performances. Rose has done a bang-up job on her last two trails; her estrus is a good time to throw extra distractions and new challenges her way. Canine sublimation?
Next estrus is put up or shut up time; we'll be deciding soon whether she will be a mother.
The deer rut means that I see more of them, as caution takes a back seat to libido. Six paraded through the south pasture at dusk; I think it was five does and a buck, but there may have been two bucks. Their rubs are particularly shreddy this year.
Our new rabbit herd got off to a slow start. The first doe that my original buck bred, back in September, did not "take," though she seemed to have. It's likely that his swimmers' soup was overcooked by the summer heat. The second doe had a litter of six, around the same time that the buck sadly succumbed to (what turned out to be) a urinary blockage. I got a new unrelated young buck from a different breeder, and have just integrated him and a new doe in the colony. Within two minutes of being released, New Guy had scent marked ten places in the stall, bred one of the younger does, and gotten his ass kicked by the dominant doe. With five does in the colony, I expect an early winter population explosion.
Gollum the barn cat, fearsome slayer of mice, voles, rats and chipmunks, has taken to sleeping amongst the rabbits. No shit. He ignores the babies, which are hardly larger than a large rat, and I've spotted him nuzzling with more than one of the does. Gollum said buh-bye to his little friends at a tender age, so I don't think he's joined in any Samhain barncat orgies, but he did get into a fight recently, which for a cat is much the same thing. His face wounds healed up fine, and he kept claiming that I shoulda seen the other guy. His sister does not corroborate his account, however.
It's not just dogs who can† discriminate between "ours" and "other" without explicit instruction and control their predatory impulses accordingly.
Meanwhile, I have to remind myself that our baby chicks and turkey poults were also freaking adorable, and grew up to be delicious.
Speaking of bucks, and urine.
Jefferson the he-goat is visiting from Rachel and Stan's farm.
He's got a lovely calm temperament. Pity about his personal habits. I do everything I can not to touch him. There's burdock in his beard and on his rump, and he's just going to have to cope, because there is no way I'm combing him out. Also, I know just how far backwards he can reach; he could groom that burdock out if it was a priority for him.
His job here is to settle Patsy and Edina. Lovely term that. Knock them up.** We'll know in a couple of weeks whether he's succeeded.
He courts the ladies by applying Capraxxe body spray, waggling his tongue, blubbering, flaunting his flehmen, and -- well, now I know what inspired the odd-looking phalli on all those vases depicting Bacchanals.
The wethers swear that he's been hanging around the playground wearing a trenchcoat and talking about a lost puppy. I'm monitoring the situation.
Jefferson gave me some crap about the gate his third morning here. Cole, who is deathly afraid of the electric fence around the goat pasture and never willingly approaches it, came flying off the back porch, through the gate, and straight at the he-goat's nose. Cole doesn't think much of visiting he-goat, and he interpreted a little stroppiness as a genuine threat. And now I know what he does when he thinks I'm threatened.
Good to know.
Finally, a weirdly untimely ray of hope in our disappointing heritage turkey breeding season.
Three or four weeks ago I noticed that the Bourbon red hen who had not succeeded with a clutch this year was not coming in to roost or running with the flock. But I would sometimes spot her for a few minutes in the morning around the feed trough before she would dematerialize.
Far too late in the year to be setting a nest, but the signs were unmistakable.
I finally found her Tuesday morning, close to the barn and setting a dozen eggs. She'd already pushed out three eggs -- a good sign, actually, indicating that she was paying attention to their viability and keeping the live eggs protected -- and this nest and eggs were clean, unlike her previous nests.
It is now far too cold and snotty for her to set outside, and I lost two shrubbery-setting hens this year to a raccoon, so in she came, whether she wanted to or not. The answer was Not. A twelve-pound bird can be surprisingly strong when she Does Not Want, but in she came with her eggs to a private stall. I candled them Thursday, and found squirming embryos in seven of them. Fingers crossed. It's a ridiculous time to raise turkeys, but I cannot say no to her.
The broody hens work so hard. It breaks my heart when things don't go well for them. Such devotion demands fulfillment. The only thing harder than brooding a clutch is the hero's journey of hatching out of an egg. It's hatch or die, and if anyone takes pity and helps the little warrior, it's likely to kill or cripple him. We mammals know nothing of birth struggle.
Spring may be the time of vegetative abundance and enthusiasm, but as the death and dormancy of Winter looms, the animals flaunt their eternal optimism. Snow all you want, we'll make more.
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* Including the hornets, wasps and bees that make life exciting and possibly brief, and the $#@^$ stink bugs that make it annoying.
** For the dairy-animal uninformed: A goat (or cow) can produce milk for about a year after giving birth (kidding or calving), provided she is nursing offspring and/or milked regularly. To continue to get milk, the farmer must breed her every year. The onset or resumption of lactation is called freshening. She'll lactate just fine while pregnant. It's the usual practice to dry her off a couple of months before she's due again. So I'll stop milking the girls, and wean their 2010 kids, in February in preparation for April kidding.
None of this applies to the "Happy California Cows" of agribusiness fairy tales who calve and freshen, then receive hormone injections to keep them continuously lactating until their udders break down and they become hamburger. (The cows. Come to think, the udders, too, both metaphorically and probably literally.)
† Can. Can. Not necessarily will. And an absence of formal, or even conscious, training does not equate to a guidance vacuum or magical thinking.
Dale McNugget passed away peacefully and rather suddenly in the sunny barnyard, surrounded by her flockmates, this afternoon.
The proximal cause of death was pulmonary failure. This was secondary to what I would have called morbid obesity -- except, on necropsy, she really had very little body fat. She was just one enormous chicken.
Hybrid broiler birds are not designed by artificial selection to live long, healthy lives. Had Dale been a conventional cornish cross hen, she would have been unlikely to live four months, much less fourteen. Because she was a "freedom ranger," she was a little better equipped to live in the world. But she was still too heavy to flutter up to the roost with the other hens, spending her nights on the coop floor with the ducks and the two auxiliary Dales -- hens who escaped capture on processing day last July. She laid eggs under the nest boxes* after she became too large to fit inside one -- or rather, too large to get out once she had squeezed in. Later I installed a large covered cat litter box as a floor-level nest box for the former McNuggets.
I started limiting the plus-sized girls' access to feed a few months ago, gating them out of the coop during the day by installing a creep on the pop door that the smaller chickens could slip through, but kept the three big girls outside to forage on pasture rather than hog down layer feed. It didn't seem to make a lot of difference in their weights, but they did become more active.
Of course I'm ambivalent about the very existence of hybrid broiler chickens, let alone the lives they usually lead. That those will be short is a given; knowing this and feeling a bit guilty about it, we endeavor to eliminate nasty and brutish from the list of options. There are currently fifteen Cartmans living in a chicken tractor in the pasture; they'd have grown just fine in a stall in the barn, but a chicken should breath fresh air and eat bugs and grass. They'd also be fairly content confined to the tractor, but I open it up during the day so they can shuffle around a bit, and sack out in the tall grass along the old fenceline when they want to, and dustbathe. To the extent their genetics allows, they get to be chickens during their very short span on this earth.
There are 76 new McNuggets growing feathers in preparation for their own move out to pasture, where they'll live behind electronet at night, range free for much of the day, and have even more chicken-like and slightly longer lives.
But their genetics dictate, always, that those lives will be short. Not even an internet rabble with money in their teeth will convince me to hold back any meat birds from this years' flocks. I do not believe it is kind.
I think of the short lives of giant breed dogs, and how their hearts so often give out. The incredibly plastic canine genome can produce 200 pound dog bodies, but not the hearts to run them.
One of the two auxiliary Dales died a month or so ago; her heart was at least four times normal size.
I didn't weigh Dale after my mom found her still-warm body this afternoon. But a necropsy on a chicken is another way of saying "dressed out," with a little more haruspicy. She makes at least a dozen dog meals -- feeding five English shepherds and one hollow-legged German shepherd -- in other words, you could easily feed an English shepherd for a week on one chicken. She must have been at least sixteen pounds alive.
I took her skin, head, and intestines out to the Fox Stump at the far end of the south pasture, where we leave offerings to the vulpine neighbors in exchange for respect for our living flock. Think of it as a sky burial.
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* She had no fewer than eight eggs at various stages of growth queued up in her oviduct.
We cavers have a grim category of stomping ground known as the "sacrifice cave."
A sacrifice cave is easily-accessible, near a road. It does not require an extended hike to reach the entrance, and the cave itself is non-technical in nature, requiring no special equipment or technique. It generally has a long history of local exploitation and "recreational" visits, often going back for centuries.
And it has already been trashed.
Any speleothems have been long-ago broken off by klutzes or thieves. Delicate habitat for troglobitic and troglophilic creatures is often beyond memory. There is trash. Graffiti. Miles of string. Party refuse. The remains of "campfires" lit by geniuses unclear on the concept of the chimney. And don't drink the water.
When someone new wants to try caving, we take him to a sacrifice cave. Ditto for kids -- cavers' kids, our nieces, troops of scouts whose leaders want to take them on an adventure.
When we train our SAR dogs for underground search, we almost always use sacrifice caves.
On the one hand, if the new guest turns out to be a klutz or a cretin, there is little harm that he can do that hasn't already been done. He won't be invited on a trip to a more remote, protected, hazardous and unspoiled cave.
On the other hand, the condition of the sacrifice cave becomes an object lesson and an inspiration for the sincere wannabe caver. Here's where treasure hunters took sledgehammers to the stalactite that took millenia to form. There were the delicate soda straws swept away by the leaden head of some galoot crawling around with a $3 flashlight in his teeth. Over there is the elfin corpse of a bat knocked from the ceiling last Saturday by a drunken frat boy. See what we have lost?
Later, when the initiate wriggles down a secret hole after a long hike along a remote limestone ridge, rappels two eighty foot drops, and traverses an exposed cleft to finally find herself gaping among grinning friends in a sparkling vaulted gallery of pristine speleothems, she will remember all those mud-smeared, battered and spray-painted sacrifice caves where she learned her skills and earned her invitation. And fiercely swear not here -- not ever.
Otherwise, it was no sacrifice, just another pointless atrocity.
The December 2003 Whole Dog Journal featured an interview with a pair of Sea World whale trainers.
Our friend and teammate Craig had a subscription, and handed me the issue when it was new. In one section of the interview, trainer Chuck Tompkins discussed the use of "negative punishment" -- e.g. withdrawal of food for noncompliance -- on the orca they were training. Here's the passage that I read aloud to him and Perfesser Chaos:
Tompkins: "Yeah. One of the first chances he got, Ramu showed us exactly how he felt about having things taken away from him, and how he felt about us.
"One of the first times I got in the water with him, he grabbed me by the waist, dragged me to the bottom of the pool, held me down there until Ialmost passed out, brought me up for a breath -- and then did it all over again. He shook me, tossed me around, raced around the pool with me in his mouth. When he had made his point, he literally spit me out onto the deck."
WDJ: "Yikes. and the conclusion you drew from this was?"
Tompkins: "I said to Thad, 'Oh my god! This whale hatesme!' It hit us both like a ton of bricks. When push came to shove, we had no real relationship with that animal. It was a revelation."
WDJ: "And that's when you decided to try an all-positive training program with the whales instead?"
So, what became interesting about this passage were the different reactions the three SAR dog handlers in the room had to Tompkins' story.
• Craig was struck by how intelligent an animal Ramu had to be, to know just how long was almost, but not quite, long enough to drown a human being, and what it might mean to keep something that intelligent in a tank and make it do tricks.
• I marveled at how Tompkins missed the fact that the whale did not "hate" him. The whale held him in contempt, which is different. If Ramu had hated him, he'd have killed him. I especially liked the "spit me out onto the deck" image. Forbearance -- a mark of nobility. Also, "withdrawing rewards" as a form of "negative punishment" sounds very benign, until one reflects that it comes down to "Do as I say or I will starve you in this concrete tank, bitch."
• Ken -- the guy who cannot hear 90% of the simple declarative sentences that are uttered by his wife, the non-trainer who seems to be not paying attention at all most of the time -- Ken was the most astounded of us all, because it was obvious to him that the whale had trained all the trainers to behave exactly the way he wanted them to by administering one powerful correction to just one of them.
The humans failed to see that "punishment" was working very well on them, even if it hadn't been working very well for them.
In the aftermath of Tilikum's fatal attack on trainer Dawn Brancheau, the three human corpses floating in this whale's wake are being spun as "accidents" because the whale was "playing."
Some game.
The whale was not angry, vindictive, cranky, testosterone-poisoned, predatory, or yearning to breathe free. There is nothing to take away from Ms. Brancheau's death beyond no ponytails in the splash zone, and under no circumstances will Sea World take any steps that will cut into its $2.7 billion business. Tilikum is a $10 million commodity. As the Baby Daddy* to two-thirds of Sea World's tank-bred orcas, he may be the most valuable livestock in the industry. He stays in the bathtub until he dies.
But that long-ago warning shot by Namu -- "this whale hates me!"
Now, the trainers who obediently stopped withholding fish from their masterful human trainer and became "pure" positive continued to get knocked around. But Tompkins had an explanation for that -- it was due to the previous training regimen, natch.
Maybe so. Tilikum, however, was snatched from Icelandic waters long after all the whale trainers went officially "purely positive." All the overt force was front-loaded onto the bad guys who kidnapped the whales from their families, and the background coercion of the tank walls and the fish bucket pushed beneath the crust of consciousness. So I guess that excuse won't fly this time.
Later in the interview, Tompkins describes "going positive" in his personal life after the revelation in the bathtub.
"I realized that I had effectively trained my family to see my car in the driveway and be all 'Dad's home! Run!' Even the dog used to hide when I got home!
That wasn't what I wanted; I wanted my family to be happy to see me, to greet me at the door. To do this, I had to stop 'correcting' everything that I saw that was 'wrong' and instead start reinforcing all thegood things I saw in my family. I had to practice being engaged and enjoyable to my family. Now when I come home, everyone says 'Yay! Dad's home!' And my dog doesn't hide anymore, either!"
WTF?
Over the years I've helped many clients who had who had poor relationships with their dogs, and a few who had fallen into a poisonously punitive spiral that was hard to break, and probably met technical thresholds for abuse at some point before they asked for help. But I have never, ever, met anybody whose dog runs and hides when he comes home. Most dogs that are frankly beaten still run to fawn over their abusers; they may be crouched and peeing on their own feet when they do it, but they are coming out to greet that person.
Is it any wonder that this guy was ripe for a conversion experience?
Furthermore, notice that this is all about what he wants. He wants Mom to meet him at the door in pearls and high heels and hand him his pipe, Rover to bring his slippers, and little Mikey and Sarah to jump up and down and yell Yay Dad. And he figured out how to get what he wanted.
Has Tilikum?
Does he even know what he wants?
Whatever it is, it isn't forthcoming when he positively reinforces his captors with his spectacular cooperation. And it sounds as if his other plan isn't working out too hot either.
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* Orcas don't have a Species Survival Plan. They are corporate assets. There is no conservation value to the captive breeding program -- its only function is to engender more performers, and boost ticket sales when there is an adorable orca infant for the gawking. Be that as it may, if one is going to create a catastrophic genetic bottleneck in the very first generation of a breeding program, one might at least mitigate the damage to the future character of the inbred gene pool by not using a sire who ices a human being once a decade.
Arborists, township road crews, and the utility company guys who turn street trees into hideous Suessian lollipops are not allowed to move wood chips very far. It can be challenging for a tree guy to find a legal place to dump a truckload of what I consider primo hardwood mulch.
The foster kennel is already mulched inside, but the outside run, which was originally turf, was starting to edge towards mucky.
So a while back, when I saw the big orange Asplundh truck parked outside a local mechanic's shop, I nipped in to see if the tree guy was there.
He wasn't, but the shop belongs to Professor Chaos' assistant fire chief (because, small town, if you haven't already got that). Neil said he'd mention it to the guy, and I put a note on his window with a map and phone number.
About a week later, this enormous truck just appeared. It could not have taken on even one more wafer-thin mint of a woodchip.
I opened up the side of the run of the foster kennel, and the guys dumped all the chips in.
Trouble is, I pulled an intercostal muscle last week, and what I certainly cannot do is rake. Or fork. Or be useful in any way.
My cunning plan is to lock up Jasmine and Cole for a few hours of puppy romping at a time, and get them to distribute the pile.
So far they seem willing and energetic, but are not making much headway.
Barry White isn't bothered by it, but doesn't see much point in the kidnicks' because it is there philosophy.
Wednesday night when I went out to bring Jasmine and Barry White inside for the night, she was curled up in a ball on top, fast asleep.
This kildeer (aka kildee) put her nest right by the gatepost to the barnyard at our friends' Rachel and Stan's farm.
I'm not sure whether to call it just "not a great spot" or simply evidence that this kildeer has always relied on the kindness of strangers.
At one point one of the horses opened a gate from the pasture and let the whole herd into the barnyard. We hurried to contain them again, for fear the great lummoxi would crush the nest. So maybe she has it all figured out. For example, she had the good judgment to live absolutely nowhere near George W. Bush.
When we first arrived, she was doing the usual broken-wing distraction routine. Later, we couldn't get her to leave the nest and perform this show for the camera. The sun was blazing (hence the harsh shadows), and perhaps she was unwilling to leave her eggs to roast.
I have watched these birds all my life, and have never been this close to one with such leisure. And I've only rarely found the nest. You do see the eggs under her, yes?
I never knew what extraordinary eyes they have.
And I could curl up and go to sleep on her tail feathers.
If I work on my laptop upstairs in the mornings, my eye is constantly being drawn to the west-facing window as chickens and guineas walk by, flap around, scratch for bugs, and discuss their interpersonal issues on the front lawn.
Isn't that what lawns are for?
Later in the day they generally move further afield. I suspect they are hunting for earthworms in the more closely mowed lawn area. The first time I saw a hen pull one out, just like a robin does, I was quite surprised. Didn't know they did that. Once the sun is well up, the worms go below and the chooks go looking for other things to eat.
This morning the fog was so thick in our little cleft that, despite the dogs' early patrols, I didn't let the birds out until about 9. Was aware of the usual activity in my peripheral vision as I returned email, then did a quick whiplash when this walked by:
It was still quite foggy, so the picture quality (even with electronic enhancements) is not great.
He's a young jake, and he was checking out the two hen guineas. By the time I ran downstairs, got the camera, ran back up and threatened the dogs with lifelong enrollment at a PetsMart clicker class if they didn't keep their gobs shut, the hens had moved off a little, possibly having concluded that the New Guy was a boring geek.
But my largest guinea cock had not:
The guinea is mostly feathers, and is fluffed up in a threat display. The jake, though not a big turkey, is probably three or four times his body mass. The guinea is no older than, and probably several months younger than, the jake.
Nevertheless ... A little mean guy on his home turf can trump a lot of muscle.
I can't wait to see what transpires as breeding season approaches for both species.
Not to mention, what happens when we get our domestic heritage-breed turkeys in.
As part of our gift-with-purchase of New Improved Warmer Planet, we've been enjoying the first real winter in over a decade here, and she's a doozy. Persistent snow cover instead of our usual "look pretty and white for a day and then melt into muck. Epic northwest winds; I now own two new lawnchair cushions, some fiberglass roofing, and a mysterious linoleum kinda thing, while my Republican neighbors a half kilometer to the east are no doubt rejoicing in their acquisition of several thousand asphalt shingles and an Obama yard sign. Deep cold.
My main occupation these days consists of
Warm up the tractor Fire up the tractor Plow the driveway Plow the driveway some more Hand-shovel the especially tricky bit just below the curve Admire my capable plowmanship Watch the wind fill in the especially tricky bit just below the curve Call Ken to tell him to park up top if he wants to leave in the morning
We were lucky to get a few days of ice-free driveway during which our oil vendor could get a truck down the drive; Ike knocked down plenty of firewood, and we've been cutting and splitting, but it won't be seasoned until next year. It could have been a tad nippy.
But this whinging about the cold from someone who has a pantry and fiberglass insulation does not impress the other residents here. There is not an animal alive in our woods who has lived through such a winter. Probably their grandparents never experienced a winter like this one. The only memory of snowdrifts and crust, no way to get to food, is written in their genes.
The voles and field mice have it pretty good when there's a crust. Most of their predators can't get through. Not counting these guys.
They are well-insulated under there, and can get to food caches. A shallow snow-tunnel is also nicely-lit; it must be a bright and pleasant time for the little mammals. The snow-fossil runs revealed during the oil-delivery thaw remind me of the Uncle Milton's Ant Farm I had as a kid.
The rabbits are living pretty close to the bone. A crust is a good running surface for them, but it locks up the better part of the food supply. The trees and shrubbery are paying for it.
And the high-fiber diet is evident in the dry, woody pellets at their scrapes.
The slash piles from where we've cut firewood out of the Ike blowdown are a favorite food source for the rabbits, and for the deer who yard up in the white pines on our north property line. There's a well-trodden detour from their perennial Bambi highway to this pile in the south pasture; most of the twig tips are roughly clipped off now. In future years I'll remember not to chip or burn this stuff up until spring.
Songbirds, too, are in shock. It's been eight or ten songbird generations since we've had deep winter here. Why are the berries and grub trees covered in ice? I made suet blocks with safflower in them.
I do not know what the turkeys are eating, or how they get it.
The few remaining groundhogs are holed up, heedless of Phil.
Our predator population is significant, but not varied. Fox tracks -- straight, purposeful, single-tracked and direct-registered -- are thick in the woods and fields -- except near the house and barn.
I have to credit Moe and his homies for their diligent patrols; the brushy buttcrack below the barn is bunny central, providing the cottontails with cover, food, and a built-in goon squad to keep Reynard at bay. We've yet to lose a chicken to a predator. (Sound of knocking on bentwood arm of the Poang.) On snow-free days, Ken puts the dogs out to conduct their Secret Service sweeps for a while in the morning, then opens the pop-door for the chooks.
Despite their sincere efforts, the dogs pose little direct threat to the rabbits, who can skim along atop the crust while the relatively lumbering canis lupus familiaris crack through. Except for Rosie, who does a pretty fair Legolas impression on the crustiest days.
The sign is from the Chicago Field Museum -- the grand entrance to their revamped fossil exhibits. The most excellent fossil exhibits of all. Go! (And when you've done that, go here as well.)
It is not labeled "The Hall of Dinosaurs" or "Ancient Earth" or anything so quaint -- the chronologically arranged, masterfully interpreted collection is called Evolving Planet.
The Church of Jebus Christmas and the Latter-Day Flat Earthers can suck it.
It's not the job of scientific educational institutions to cater to the carefully cultivated sensitivities of those who stick their fingers in their ears and hum You Light Up My Life when confronted with the central organizing principle of all biological science.
The Facts, The Truth, and the credible voices of interpretation and controversy surrounding them, are the sworn duty of science educators.
If Born-Again Bob gets his knickers in a knot when he takes little Elijah and Rachel to see the Giant Head of Sue and is confronted as well with the toothy science of life on earth, well, sucks to be Bob. If you can't manage the 21st century, could you take a stab at the late 19th? Guess he'll have to schlepp the house apes off to the Creation Science Museum for an exciting account of how Our Lord Walked With Dinosaurs. Then be astonished when Elijah can't get into even a Caribbean medical school on the strength of your paranoid home-schooling and further indoctrination at Oral Roberts U, and Rachel practices sexual selection at age fifteen by getting knocked up by an alpha-male well-adorned with prison tats and a grill.
Because the only thing that hasn't, in 150 years, conformed to the principles of natural selection is the idea-bank of the tiny-brained mammals for whom the realities of the natural universe threaten to completely annhilate their deep, strong, unshakable faith in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving deity who is currently fully occupied sticking pins in the immortal soul of Charles Darwin.
Over at Pet Connection, Gina is reporting on the animals abandoned by Texans who evacuated the Gulf coast and failed to make provisions for their animals.
This is no reprise of the injustices of Katrina. Snowball wasn't ripped from the arms of his screaming, vomiting child-owner in Galveston. It took an Act of Congress to prevent that travesty this time. But an Act of Congress has no power to force individuals to not be creeps.
What most "civilians" don't know about is the long history of attempts by members of the public safety and animal welfare communities to convince emergency managers that planning for pets in disasters is just good public policy.
I attended the first organizing meeting of the FEMA New England TF-1, in early 1993. The experience convinced me permanently that I could not trust FEMA, or any of the "types" who were attaching themselves to it -- my interest in becoming a handler for them evaporated when I saw the triage priorities that effectively classed an injured SAR dog with damaged equipment.
At that meeting, my friend Sue Webb -- SAR handler, animal control officer, vet tech, reserve police officer, and veteran of animal rescue post hurricane Andrew -- put the Massachusetts EMA Director into a corner. Literally. Out in the lobby. Sue is about 5'3" in her Vasques, a petite and soft-spoken Quaker lady, and that fat bombastic man was going nowhere until she was done with him.
He'd stated in a meeting session that the Commonwealth's disaster plan for animals was to tell everyone to leave them behind and run. My husband pointed out that roving packs of abandoned dogs were a safety hazard and all abandoned animals were a disease vector. No worries -- the post-disaster plan for animals was to shoot dogs on sight. Problem solved. (And authorities really did exactly this before and after Katrina. Caught on film.) Ah, but people would refuse to evacuate if it meant leaving their pets behind, creating more civilian casualties and endangering public safety personnel. No problem, we'll evacuate them all at gunpoint!
For a state with strict gun laws, Massachusetts in a hurricane was sure starting to sound like the Wild West (movie-style, not reality-style.)
The EMA Director was no match for Sue. She'd been there, done that in Homestead, and he heard every detail of how failing to plan for animals turned a natural disaster into a human-caused disaster. She used phrases like "dereliction of duty" and "criminal culpability."
It took her several years, but eventually Sue prevailed in Massachusetts. I believe the EMA Director did the good deed of finally retiring, or maybe dying. That's often the only way to accomplish the most urgent and butt-obvious reforms. Send the Old Guard to Sun City or Mount Auburn and get on with it.
But it took sixteen years and another major natural and human-caused disaster for our country to recognize -- in this little way -- that public health and public safety requires us to accommodate the way people actually behave, instead of imagining that we can force them to behave as disaster planners wish they would. Sixteen years and a little dog named Snowball lost with all the rest to acknowledge that it is a grievous injustice to do otherwise.
Because "we" knew in 1992 that planning for animals in disaster was a public safety obligation, not a woolly-headed luxury.
Spoke to my friend Jan yesterday. She's the owner of Son-of-Pip, Brother-of-Rosie, Tuck.
Jan lives in Socorro New Mexico. Soccoro is 980 driving miles from Galveston, TX.
It is 1744 miles from Harmony, Pennsylvania.
While Ike scraps were blowing the shingles off our barn, uprooting trees, and taking out the fence at our former home in nearby Cranberry, Jan's road was being washed out by Ike rainfall.
Folks, we broke the planet. And it is out of warranty. We're going to have to fix it with duct tape and bailing twine ourselves. And most important -- we have to stop making it worse.
How much more dramatically can the Earth spell it out for us?
As you are sweeping out your yard, chainsawing the tree off your garage, pumping out your basement, and counting yourself lucky that this is all you have to do, ask yourself: Do I want more of the same binge-orgy attitude that created this?
More Big Oil. More agribusiness. More scientific pig-ignorance (w/lipstick). More millenialist lunacy -- "What do I care about this nasty ol' material world, Jesus gonna rapture me any day now, I got mine, beyotch!" More trashing of the world, its creatures, and its people as if it was all a weekend rental car.
Do we want to be remembered as the generation that sobered up, saw the problem, and began the solution?
Because the alternative is that there will be no one around to remember anything.
We finished up the first CDS Wilderness First Aid class hosted at our new place just in time for Ike to start passing wind at us. I'm glad to have sent our great group of students on their way before the roads became hazardous.
A number of of members of Allegheny Mountain Rescue Group, and several prospective members, spent Saturday night on bivouac in the back forty. Glad they chose last night's icky sticky humid discomfort over tonight's Was That A House With a Little Girl In It That Just Flew By? ambience.
1400 miles from Galveston, and we are getting 50 mph gusts. Power has gone out twice, but back on quickly.
This afternoon, as the air started to get moving, young Rosie set upon barking at the power transformer at the top of the pole outside the house. I don't know whether it was making some uncharacteristic sound that I couldn't hear, or perhaps swaying when it is clearly supposed to remain stationary. Rosie did not succeed in driving it off, and has abandoned the attempt.
The barn kittens demanded to be let in, and are enjoying the good life in the living room.
Grill cover, a couple of trash cans, a heavy wooden bench, and several noisy objects unknown have gone walkabout into the darkness. We'll have a treasure hunt in the morning, and assess any damage to trees around the place.
After the second fire call of the night, Ken decided to just hang around the station until things quiet down; lots of jumping spitting power lines to enjoy.
All told, I'll take Ike's blowhard ways over Ivan's inland incontinence. I suspect the citizens of the Western PA towns that found themselves underwater four years ago are inclined to agree.
Casualty Update: All sentient beings under our protection weathered the night just fine. The barn roof, not so much -- quite a lot of roof shingles on the ground this morning. Ripe wild cherries that were going to become syrup this week-- trees are stripped bare. I've recovered the grill cover, several chairs, buckets, tarps, the wooden bench, bird feeders, trash cans, a pineapple plant, a broom (no one riding it at the time). One screen door may be a total loss, and a cable runner that easily withstood the lunges of a 70# GSD popped completely.
Country Living Insights: Remember to stockpile water before the power goes out. It is hard to internalize the fact that my water comes via an electric pump.
Also, those solar-powered LED landscape lights are the balls! If the power goes out, you can just go out and pluck them from their posts and bring them in -- safer than candles, and they'll last all night. If the power stays out, just set them back on their posts in the morning, and they'll recharge. We're cavers -- I've got three sources of light on me when I go to the mall. So no worries about being left in the dark. But those solar LEDs can light the whole house enough to get around. I can't say enough for the advances in LED technology that have gone commercial in the last five years.
