Four Seasons in Vermont

A Farewell to Blogs

2009-09-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's official. I have lost my long-running battle with excessive laziness and am forced to cease publication of Four Seasons in Vermont. I appreciate everyone who has stopped by for a look, but I really appreciate the readers who thought my posts were funny. Good-by from the North Country and happy lives to everyone!

The Great Wall of Vermont

2009-08-20T14:40:00.000-07:00

The local masons pose in front of their handiwork.

Some of you readers are well enough read and travelled to be familiar with the so-called "Great Wall of China". Even though that wall can apparently be seen from space, I'm not convinced that China's "great" wall is all that great or can even come close to comparing to the wall we have recently completed in our yard. There are similarities however. The chinese built their wall to protect them from the ravaging barbarian hordes of Mongol horsemen. We have built our wall to protect us from the ravaging barbarian hordes from outside Vermont (New Hampshire comes to mind for example). It will also serve as a retaining wall for some flowers and shrubbery. Eventually we hope to extend the wall all around our property and then build a moat. That will be followed by the guard towers complete with catapults equipped to hurl copious quantities of Greek Fire. When it comes to home security, no excess is excessive. I'm not sure what that means but it's a motto I try and live by.

As Dumb as a Duck

2009-08-12T14:11:00.000-07:00

The piercingly unintelligent gaze of our drake.

The ducks at their little hideaway on the brook.

The expression "as dumb as a duck" is not a colloquialism in the English language as far as I know. That is a great pity because ducks are some of the dumbest animals I have ever encountered. Cute perhaps, but their overriding quality seems to be dumbness. Our ducks, for example, refuse to go out on our 1/2 acre pond. The same pond that was the main motivation for us to get ducks. We imagined seeing the cute little creatures serenely cruising across the pond, lending a wonderful touch to our little bucolic paradise. The 4 Rouen ducks we have, unfortunately, appear to be hydrophobes. O.K., that's a little harsh. They're not afraid of all water. For example, they will splash around all day in the 2 gallon kitchen basin we used to leave out as drinking water. The million gallon pond? Not so much. They have also found a secluded spot along the brook where they like to hang out, and of course the brook is made up primarily of water. They can even float for 2 or 3 whole feet along this stretch of brook if they tuck their feet up real tight. In another sign of limited IQ, the ducks also appear to believe they are chickens. They don't sleep with the chickens, they don't look like chickens and they don't hang out with the chickens all day. But leave the chickens closed up in their run and the ducks will hang out by the gate wondering why their compadres have been singled out for such harsh treatment. If they knew what has already happened to a couple of the chickens (eaten by yours truly) they might not be so anxious to hang out with them. Anyway, we've got the darn things now and I admit they are much too cute to, how can I say this delicately, turn into 'canard a l'orange', so we'll just have to put up with them. For the time being anyway.

"Just try to ignore him."

2009-07-19T17:12:00.000-07:00

Some alert Reds notice the intruder.

A quick strategy conference ensues.

The strategy? Ignore the snapping turtle and try to eat as much as possible. You never know.

I recently took down the fencing that was meant to keep the ducks from exploring the pond too precipitously. Tommy the turtle immediately decided that the lawn near the duck shelter was a good place to sunbathe, and for the last two days he's come up to loll around and check out the poultry. Snapping turtles can eat small ducks apparently, so out of an excess of caution, the ducks haven't been in the pond since Tommy made his first appearance. I've begun chasing him away so our Rouens can have their little corner of the pond back. After all, if anyone's going to have duck soup around here, it's going to be me.

J'accuse ! ! !

2009-07-15T15:09:00.000-07:00

Giselle casts an accusing eye in my direction after the untimely death of her friend, Gertrude.

The ducks hasten to the safety of their shelter as I approach.

Sauve qui peut! (every chicken for herself!) the Wyandottes shriek as I saunter up.

An impromptu memorial for the dearly departed Gertrude.

Our poultry plan has run into something of a headwind. Originally we intended to eat 10 of the 20 birds we recently acquired and keep the rest as our laying flock. Things started well. The 10 Wyandottes were scraggly and a bit wild. Just the thing for roast chicken. The 10 Rhode Island Reds on the other hand were handsome, tame and two of them have just started laying. Wonderful how the stars align sometimes! So yesterday we decided to put the plan into action and butcher our first "roaster". The deal was that I would kill the bird and Catherine would pluck and clean it. (As deals go, I think I did O.K. on this one.) We identified a particularly unsympathetic chicken; I caught and killed it and proudly presented the headless fowl to Catherine. (No heads was another part of the deal on her part.) Then the trouble began. Catherine it turns out couldn't see her way clear to pluck and clean a chicken that "she knows". I'm not sure what she means by "knows" but I suppose that after 3 weeks our chickens are at least passing acquaintances and that apparently qualifies. Catherine also claims that she didn't know that "cleaning" a chicken meant removing the innards. So after beheading this unfortunate chicken I found myself finishing the plucking and doing all of the cleaning. The whole operation took just under a couple of hours. The bird itself was scragglier than we had suspected when we originally identified it. It may weigh 8 ounces, but I think that's optimistic. The moral of this story is that we now have a new plan which works wonderfully for everyone. All of our chickens now are "layers" as opposed to "roasters". As a result none of them are looking at imminent death. Catherine is relieved that she won't have to pluck and clean any of her new-found friends. And I'm happy I won't lose another two hours of my life butchering an animal that barely has enough meat on it to make a good fajita. We'll still eat chicken of course. All we'll have to "pluck" however will be the plastic it comes wrapped in.

The Chicken Slave

2009-07-08T16:05:00.000-07:00

The grandkids preparing to help catch our chickens at the farm on pickup day.

The ladies inspect their new home.

The flock looks over the park of Chateau Poulet.

The four Rouen ducks. Much cuter than the chickens.

You may have noticed, dear reader, that there haven't been many posts of late. There is a simple explanation that can be summarized in one word - chickens. For the past several weeks I appear to be working full-time for the chickens. And when I say full-time I mean 20 hour days, 7 days a week. We picked the demanding birds up 10 days ago and since then there has been no rest for your hero. First I had to work feverishly to finish the fence around the park of Chateau Poulet, so our new residents could leave the coop without running off. My oldest son was here to help me or else I would still be working on that darn fence. Then there has been a constant back and forth at all hours of the day to feed, water and otherwise tend to the demanding flock. Toss in the 4 ducks who have their own special demands and you can understand why I'm exhausted. To add insult to injury, 10 of the birds we got (the Wyandottes) are pretty scraggly. They were raised in a very small coop and got to picking each other's feathers out. They're the black and white ones in the photo above. The Rhode Island Reds on the other hand are pretty handsome birds. All of these young chickens should start laying any day now. So far however we have seen zero eggs. Nada, zilch, rien, etc. If they don't start laying soon, starvation could well start gnawing at our innards and then the inevitable will inevitably arrive. One of those scraggly Wyandottes will find its way into our oven. Not a pretty thought I admit. But then again neither is starvation. Pray for eggs because I'm not very practiced at butchering chickens.

The Quest for Moby Trout Ends

2009-06-22T18:11:00.000-07:00

Moby prior to a short stay on the grill.

My granddaughter caught the big one this morning in our first fishing outing of the year. Moby came in at 17 inches and 283 lbs. We bought a second freezer to freeze all the extra meat. My son also caught a good sized trout, 16 inches, and for a moment today the $382,596.76 we've spent stocking the pond and feeding the fish seemed like a wise investment. The fish were grilled and Moby (minus 280 lbs put away in the freezer) was eaten tonight. I must say, he tasted pretty good.

A Tattle of Turtles

2009-06-20T14:19:00.000-07:00

Tilly in a recent photo.

Tommy, the "Mother of All Snappers". At least around our pond.

We now officially have three snapping turtles living in our pond and/or river. I stumbled on Tiny, the smallest of the bunch, down by the river yesterday. Of course, I didn't have the camera, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Tiny, as his name implies, is considerably smaller than Tommy or Tilly. He was only about 12 inches long from head to tail. Tommy on the other hand is a real monster. His head is about 4 inches wide and 6 inches long, and his overall length, head to tail, is probably 24 inches. Tilly is somewhere in between. Our three turtles could come straight out of Goldilocks except that they are turtles instead of bears. A small detail. What is the word for a group of turtles? We all know about a herd of cows, a swarm of bees, a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows (what's up with that?), a school of fish (also very odd), and a pack of wolves. You get the idea. Animal groups are supposed to have names. But what's the name for a group of turtles such as Tommy, Tilly and Tiny? I didn't know, so I made up a name to use for the title of this post. I'm hoping it catches on ... as are the turtles. They've been discriminated against long enough.

A Couple of Odd Ducks

2009-06-16T15:31:00.000-07:00

The hybridized male Mallard / Black Duck

The happy multi-ethnic couple.

This couple of ducks spent the better portion of the afternoon napping and resting on the big log that's stranded along one stretch of our river. I haven't been able to make a positive I.D., but I think that the female is an American Black Duck and the male is a cross between a black duck and a mallard. From what my birding guide says, there's a possibility of hanky-panky between black ducks and mallards, and the resulting offspring have coloring that borrows from both parents. In any case, they were a pretty pair and I was glad to get a chance to snap some pictures. For some reason seeing these two visitors got me to thinking about all of the slang expressions that employ the word duck, and there are quite a few. He's a dead duck; like a sitting duck; like water off a duck's back; she's a lame duck; like duck soup: ducky (british for darling); and so on and so forth. I'm not sure what it is about ducks that inspires such linguistic gymnastics and tangential references. Is it their endearing waddle? The heart-rending "Quack!"? That odd beak? I really couldn't say. What I do know however is that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. . . well, then chances are it's a duck.

Chateau Poulet se construit dans le Vermont

2009-06-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

Le Chateau with the formal gardens in the foreground.

A closer view of Chateau Poulet.

Chateau Poulet from across le plan d'eau.

Rambouillet, the inspiration for Chateau Poulet.

The work has been arduous, but no great edifice is built without sacrifice, struggle and suffering. In the case of Chateau Poulet, the future abode of our chicken flock, the sacrifice, struggle and suffering has been all mine so far. I've been working on the chateau for 10 days straight and I'm pretty sore, very tired and my hands are full of splinters. As the French would say, "Je suis creve!" (Literal translation, "I'm punctured!" With all the splinters in my hands that's literally true.) The chickens will be coming in two weeks, so there's really no time to lose getting their digs done. I'm pretty happy with progress so far. The lines of Chateau Poulet are inspiring without being ostentatious. The whole seems to me to be quite harmonious and balanced. I'm sure all of you readers immediately spotted the uncanny similarities between Rambouillet, ancien chateau de chasse des Rois de France, and Chateau Poulet. They both have walls, windows and doors for example. Despite the obvious resemblance, I did not simply copy Rambouillet as some have accused me of doing. Let us just say that I was inspired by that other great work of architecture. Move over Frank Lloyd Wright!

Spring and a young man's fancy turns to...

2009-06-01T12:41:00.000-07:00

Our connection to civilized behavior hangs by the thin cable of the well repairman.

In the Spring a young man's fancy turns to well pump repair of course. Some of my readers may object that I'm not a young man anymore, so how can I judge what young men might be dwelling on in the Spring. A reasonable objection, but I can guarantee you that up here in the North Country when you live out in the country and you have a well pump problem, that's what your fancy turns to, be you young, old, infant, adolescent, tweener (whatever that is) or centenarian. You can even become quite obsessive about it. That's because a well pump failure means no water and no water means, among other things, no functioning toilets. Now even though bears can and do take care of their "business" in the woods, and I have been persuaded by necessity to do the same on occasion, it's not something I relish. Catherine I can assure you relishes it even less. So it's Spring, our well pump has been on its last legs for some time and today we got it replaced. They're not actually done with the repair as I write this. There were some "complications". I'm confident they'll be done by nightfall, however. If not . . . I guess I'll be going out to say Hi to Bruno the bear. Wish us luck.

Out of Africa

2009-05-31T16:44:00.001-07:00

Some of our neighbors on the military base where we lived and worked.

Street scene from Parakou, the big city where we stayed on the weekend.

A local gas station.

A typical village with cooking charcoal for sale.

On the way to school.

Typical room at the Visiting Officers Quarters. Neither the light nor the air conditioning worked in my room.

Our favorite local restaurant.

The kitchen of our favorite local restaurant.

The well just outside our rooms. The water looked a bit brackish.

Our "office".

The bathroom in one of the "visiting officer's" rooms. The far left corner is the shower. We actually had water for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening.

The Visiting Officer's Quarters from the outside.

The last supper at our "upscale" weekend hotel in Parakou. "Upscale" meant the air conditioning worked, there was water all day and the showers had shower curtains.

If you haven't already figured it out from all of the pictures, I have just returned from Benin on one of my exciting globe-trotting trips. Why are these trips so exciting? Because you inevitably get the trots, and that's pretty exciting when there are no toilets available as is often the case at the places I end up working. This post is my farewell (for a while at least) to Africa. All that globe-trotting has given me pause (as well as chafing), and I'm taking a break at least until January from my job training peacekeepers. After that we'll see.

Why Spotted Salamanders Don't Make Good Pets

2009-05-08T14:32:00.000-07:00

Our 6" long eastern spotted salamander.

Despite having a ready made pet name, namely "Spot", the eastern spotted salamander does not make a good pet. Sad but true. We researched this extensively after finding one in our yard doing a little gardening. In the spirit of David Letterman, here are the top ten reasons why spotted salamanders don't make good pets.

10. They live under ground most of the time.

9. They only come out at night when pet owners are usually asleep.

8. They only breed in ponds, making the mating trek to their breeding pond one night in the Spring when conditions are just right. (Not sure why this disqualifies them from being a pet.)

7. Their yellow spots can make a baby cross-eyed.

6. Since they're black and only come out after dark, it's easy to step on them when you get up to go to the bathroom late at night.

5. They're cute (for an amphibian) but not as cute as a golden.

4. They can regenerate a limb should they lose one, and that's just creepy.

3. If threatened they can secrete a poisonous fluid. Creepy and disgusting.

2. It's very hard to find salamander kibbles in the pet food section of the supermarket.

And now the number one reason spotted salamanders don't make good pets:

They can't be trained to fetch a stick if you throw one in the pond.

In other unrelated news, Nella our mutt caught and killed a squirrel out on the deck today. One down, millions to go. We have finished gutting and remodeling our upstairs bathroom without a.) a heart attack or b.) a divorce. It looks very nice, but the project kept me from posting to the blog, and for that, I apologize. Tomorrow I'm off to Benin for a two week stint in order to pay for a portion of the bathroom remodel. The irony of this is really quite stunning. I'm going to work in a place where there is running water only 2 hours a day (no hot water) and only pit toilets, so I can pay for the super-duper bathroom remodel. I can only pray that I don't get cholera.

Return of the Natives

2009-04-23T18:45:00.000-07:00

One goose keeps watch while the other grazes...

... before taking a little nap on a quiet stretch of the river.

Are Canadian geese "natives" even though their name isn't "Vermonter" geese and they don't stick around all year? Well, we're pretty tolerant up here in the North Country, and since the returning geese signal the real onset of Spring and with it the coming of Summer, we certainly won't begrudge them the title of "native". Each year during April and May a few geese stop for a few hours or even a day or two in our yard during their migration North. They graze on what new grass there is, rest up a bit, and then head out. If the goose manure covering most of our lawn is any indication, however, the couple in these pictures apparently liked it here and stuck around for a week or so while we were away on vacation. Once we got back, the dogs quickly showed them the door. Their sojourn reminded us of why the expression "like s..t through a goose" is not only wonderfully descriptive but biologically accurate as well. I wonder, what's the best way to get this stuff off your shoes?

An Osprey Visits the Pond

2009-04-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

Moby-Trout lolling around the shallows waiting to be fed and oblivious to the danger above.

In this scene from a trout horror movie, an osprey swoops down.

Dinner.

Breakfast & Lunch

A trip trout tremble at taking.

Osprey are birds of prey that are beautiful, quit large and feed exclusively (I think) on fish. They soar or perch over open bodies of fresh water until they spot a fish (like a trout) just under the surface, and then they dive on the unsuspecting fish, grab it with their talons and fly away to enjoy their meal on some cozy branch. Trout, as you might imagine, are not particularly fond of Osprey. As a birder on the other hand, I really enjoy seeing them as they are not at all common. Imagine my happy surprise then when I saw one swoop seemingly out of nowhere this morning and slam into our pond. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you're a trout) the Osprey came up empty-taloned and flew off in what I can only imagine to be an embarrassed huff. I'm hoping this one little setback won't discourage this beautiful bird from returning. Obviously I don't want it to empty the pond of trout since it's nice to have something for the kids and grandkids to fish. On the other hand it's priceless having a front row seat at this sort of life and death nature show. Well, maybe not priceless. But the trout only cost about $5 a piece, and at those prices, I'm willing to feed the Osprey once a week.

If You Melt It, They Will Come

2009-04-06T05:55:00.000-07:00

The pond a week ago. All of the ice is gone now.

The bufflehead (on left) and the green-winged teal.

Another view.

If you melt the ice the ducks will come that is. Every year around this time we see migrating ducks land on the pond for a quick rest and pit stop. Since our pond is rather small, it doesn't attract that many ducks, and I've never seen any particularly unusual ones. Just the usual suspects of mergansers and mallards. This morning however I awoke at dawn (closer to 8 o'clock really) to discover an odd assortment of waterfowl on our little body of water. There was the usual pair of mating mallard. But there were also two other ducks that I had a terrible time identifying. After feverishly consulting all of my guides, I came to the conclusion that the other two were a male Bufflehead and a male Green-winged Teal. This seemed rather odd to me as ducks usually travel in pairs or flocks of the same species. I leave it to my readers to correct my identification after studying the photos. I'm guessing these two fellows are just making the trip north together, kind of like weekend bikers, and will rejoin their own kind once they get to their Summer breeding grounds. We've all noticed that some birds, like the Bufflehead, have odd names, and you may have wondered where the name "bufflehead" comes from. Some cursory research led to two possibilities. "Bufflehead" used to mean dunderhead which is derived from the old Norse word "Tunder" which is where we got our word thunder. So these ducks are called "Buffleheads" either because they were Thor's favorite duck or they tend to attract lightning. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Why Some People Should Not be Allowed to Own Cameras

2009-03-30T16:35:00.000-07:00

The heron looks right.

The heron looks left.

The heron ponders the meaning of "ice-out".

As you regular readers know, this past Summer I purchased a gee-whiz, big zoom (18x), point and shoot camera with the intention of becoming Americas next great wildlife photographer. Sort of a later day Thoreau. Then again Thoreau didn't take pictures; he just sat around in the woods but let's leave that aside for the time being. Anyway, I've tried to become a decent photographer but with little success. In fairness to myself I have to say that the animals are really difficult models, never sitting still, showing up at odd hours, striking bizarre poses and often lurking just out of camera range. If the animals were fashion models, they'd be out of work. (Or maybe not. My description sounds a lot like a fashion model now that I think about it.) Today was another example of the frustrations I've faced in my quest for wildlife photography stardom. Late this afternoon a beautiful Great Blue Heron swooped into the yard and settled on the banks of the pond. There are two or three feet of open water along the near bank, and he immediately set up his still life fishing vigil while I scrambled to get the camera set up. The photos above are the result. (If you click on a photo it will enlarge and you can actually see the heron among the bush stalks.) I never did see if he caught any fish. We've seen some of the minnows stirring in the shallows lately, so there were fish to be had. Despite the challenges I've faced getting good wildlife photos, I'm going to stick with it. After all, I've pretty much mastered just sitting in the woods and relish mastering this new skill. As long as it doesn't interfere with lunch that is.

Spring is here; Ice-out is near

2009-03-24T10:45:00.000-07:00

Some die-hard ice goblins cling tenaciously to the banks of the brook.

The Father of Waters flows untroubled to the sea. (O.K., maybe not the Father of Waters but at least a 4th cousin twice removed, and my apologies to Lincoln.)

Still some serious snow pack on the far side of the river.

No ice-out on the pond yet.

The glacier blocking the front door as it appeared two weeks ago.

There's a small community north of us called Joe's Pond and every year it runs an "ice-out" contest. The point is to guess when a cinder block placed in the middle of Joe's Pond will fall through the ice as the Spring thaw warms things up. If you're interested in buying tickets you have until 1 April to do so. You can go to the Joe's Pond website at http://joespondvermont.com for all the information you might need. Of course we have a little "ice-out" process here at the house as well although I haven't started putting cinder blocks out on the pond yet. We'd love to see some open water on the pond and start feeding the fish of course, but our real ice-out event will be when the glacier in front of the front door has melted. Right now it feels like a short hike in Greenland's back country any time you try and walk to the front door. I'm guessing that the front path will be clear by 30 April and that all vestiges of snow and ice on the that side of the house will have melted by 15 May. Things could go faster if we keep having crazy hot weather like we've been having. I mean, it got up to 42 F (5 Celsius) today and at night the temperatures are only going down to about 15 F (-9 Celsius) or so. With intense heat like that the ice doesn't stand a chance.

Minnie the Mink's Marks

2009-03-11T14:11:00.000-07:00

Not marks really but tracks. The melting slushy snow provided a perfect medium for capturing Minnie the Mink's tracks on the path that leads off of our property and up the hill into the woods. The snow also makes the tracks bigger than they would otherwise be, but their shape is clearly delineated.

The Birds go crazy for a Sharped-Shinned Hawk

2009-03-10T13:40:00.000-07:00

Harry the "sharped-shinned" hawk.

For some reason whenever I hear the name "sharp-shinned hawk" I am reminded of the old ZZ Top song "A Sharp Dressed Man". I have no inkling why but today when a sharp-shinned hawk alighted atop one of our bird feeders, that song started playing incessantly through my brain. Then I started to say 'sharp-shinned' as fast as I could over and over again. I gotta tell ya, the days are pretty intense up here in Vermont. Sometimes I have to take a nap just to be able to handle the excitement. Now about that hawk. No one really knows why they are called "sharp-shinned" although one theory holds that when these hawks wear pants, they like them with a really sharp crease. Sharp-shinned hawks prey primarily on other birds which may be why our usual feathered visitors found today to be the perfect time to visit other feeders in our area. I had seen Harry the hawk earlier in the week down by the river but was particularly pleased when he showed up by the house and let me snap this photo. He didn't hang out around the deck for long (all of the other birds being gone and all), but we hope to see him regularly as the year progresses. As long as he doesn't take a liking to the chickens that is...

Not Super-Sized M&Ms

2009-03-08T18:36:00.000-07:00

The moose in our area have been pretty active right around the house recently. I snapped a picture of a little pile of calling cards one of them left on his/her way through the yard the other day. I suspect it's the same yearling calf I was able to photograph this Summer. I say that because these droppings are only about a third of the size of a golf ball. A full grown moose leaves droppings as big as a horse. Although the dogs found the moose nuggets to be quite tasty, I don't recommend them for human consumption.

Minnie the Mink Makes a Move

2009-03-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

Minnie's stunt double crossing the river in a scene from her soon to be released movie.

Minnie too is wondering when all of the snow will be gone.

The weather has been so nice lately that I have resumed having my late morning coffee out on the deck, if it's not raining that is. Sure there's still lots of snow left on the ground, about 24" (60 cm), but with temperatures in the high 40s F (5 C) during the day, it's starting to feel (dare I say it?) a lot like Spring. So anyway, this morning I'm out enjoying the warm weather, sunshine and my coffee when who should appear out of the pond's drainpipe but Minnie the Mink. She started to scamper across the ice along the far bank and then realized that the dogs and I were intently watching her from the deck. By the time I rushed inside and got the camera, she had disappeared back into the pond's drainage culvert. After a few minutes I saw her reappear near the river, swim across and start exploring. She sniffed and searched busily along a 200 meter arc on the far side of our property before disappearing from view. Unfortunately she was too far for me to get a shot with the camera. Although some minks do turn white in the Winter, Minnie is black. The white and the black minks are the same species. They're excellent hunters and fishers, and I'm sure Minnie appreciates us stocking the pond with all of those plump trout. She's going to be really excited about the chickens we're getting this Spring/Summer. Mink's apparently are extraordinarily gifted at getting into chicken coops and raising hell. Think of all of those eggs to eat, topped off with the occasional chicken dinner! Of course, I'm the one responsible for designing and building the mink-proof, fox-proof, coon-proof chicken coop. But hey, no pressure. As we keep telling ourselves, they're just chickens.

A Perfect Late Winter's Day

2009-03-06T12:37:00.000-08:00

Moose tracks in deep snow up on the trail.

The view from up here on a perfect Winter day.

Thursday turned out to be the sort of Winter's day that seems to make all of the snow and cold weather and crappy driving conditions worthwhile. Particularly if you're retired and can get outside for some relaxed snowshoeing. If you have to work, well maybe not so much. But anyway, the day dawned sunny and mild and stayed that way all day. When I say mild I mean the mid 20s F (-5 or so Celsius). There was no wind and a full sun so it felt like it was a lot warmer. The dogs and I took a long walk up through the woods, enjoying the balmy weather and checking out any new tracks or other signs of animal activity. Some fresh moose tracks followed the trail for some distance and there were other mysterious scents that the dogs thoroughly investigated. Other than that there was nothing of note really, just the feeling that Winter may be on its last legs and Spring may actually appear sometime in the next few weeks or months. In that same vein, on Groundhog day back in early February everyone in the region was encouraged when the groundhog apparently saw his shadow. There was dancing in the streets when people got the word that there would be only 6 more weeks (as opposed to the usual 6 more months) of Winter. Our current weather is keeping that hope alive. At this rate we may get to plant the garden before July. Who says global warming is all bad?

Up a Tree With No Place to Go

2009-03-02T07:18:00.001-08:00

Well I'm back from a stint of work in Burkina-Faso, West Africa as of Saturday and slowly adjusting to the 80 to 90 degree daytime temperature differential. It's about 20 F (-10 C) here during the day and it was between 105 F to 110 F (45 C) where I was working. When we would get back to the hotel after a day of working outside in that heat, our 80 F hotel rooms seemed like heaven. I would have liked it even cooler in my room but 80 F was about all the air conditioner could manage. As part of my readjustment to the somewhat cooler climate of our fair Green Mountain state, I took the dogs for a walk up through the woods this morning, shivering all the way and trying to readjust to walking with snowshoes. It would have been a pretty uneventful short hike except that on the way back Nella started frantically running around a pretty good sized white pine tree and barking excitedly. She never barks when she trees squirrels so I went over to investigate. And there was Pauly the Porcupine about 25 feet up the tree and ambling out on what looked like a pretty fragile limb as he tried to put a little distance between himself and Nella. Imagining what would happen if the branch broke and the two dogs jumped Pauly, and having no desire to spend the rest of the morning pulling dozens of porcupine quills out of the dogs' snouts, I quickly called Nella and hustled the reluctant dogs back onto the path towards home. As usual when something interesting happens up in the woods, I didn't have the camera, so I missed getting Pauly's mug shot. Nonetheless, I've posted a picture that should let you readers imagine the high drama that the dogs and I lived through this morning. The porcupine in the picture seems somewhat smaller than Pauly who is a pretty good sized animal. Also it was snowing this morning, so you'll have to imagine snow falling around the porcupine in the picture to get the full effect of our few moments of terror. O.K., maybe not terror but at least mild concern.

The "Will" to Survive

2009-02-11T18:09:00.001-08:00

I came across this tree during a walk awhile back and was impressed by its survival skills. I guess you can't talk about a tree's "will", not in a Nietzschian sense anyway. But still, there's something both touching and impressive about this determined tree. Was it knocked over by one of its fellow falling trees? Bent by a vicious ice storm? Just a little twisted from birth? We'll never know, but this is one yellow birch that just won't give up. Perhaps a lesson for these troubled times although I hope we don't end up as bent and bowed as our tree after our national economic mess has played itself out.

A Killer's on the Loose

2009-02-07T14:11:00.000-08:00

Barry settles in for an evening of hunting.

A closer look at our steely-eyed killer. (I couldn't edit out the branch obscuring those steely eyes.)

And if you're a mouse you should be afraid. Very afraid. Especially if you're a mouse who lives around the foundation of our house underneath the deck and the screened porch downstairs. If you live down there, bad things stalk you at every turn. There are the peanut butter baited mouse traps inside the house that the cruel owner strategically places around the basement, and then there is Barry the Barred Owl. Barry loves mice, as appetizers, as main courses and as desert (dipped in a little maple syrup I presume). This is the second year in a row that Barry has shown up in late Winter (please let me continue with my delusion that it's now late Winter and not mid Winter), perched in our birch tree and hunted the mice that live beneath the deck. Last year we actually saw him swoop and snatch. He showed up again today for the first time this year and although he has done a lot of swooping, we haven't seen him snatch anything yet. Catherine and I were again impressed at how big of a bird Barry really is. He must be over 20 inches from head to tail, and he has a really impressive wing span. Tonight would be a good night for Rocky the Flying Squirrel to stay home, forget about the bird feeders and just watch a little T.V. Even if he is hungry. Because if there's one thing Barry likes more than mice, it's flying squirrels. (Dipped in a little maple syrup of course.)

How Cold Is It?

2009-02-04T19:22:00.000-08:00

Our recent heat wave has given way to some bone numbing cold as a cold air mass has descended on us thanks to the good graces of our Canadian neighbors. In no particular order then, here are some answers to the question in the title of this post.

It's so cold the camera froze up when I tried to take pictures for this post.

It's so cold that not only will the car not start, it implodes as soon as you turn the key.

It's so cold you can't speak while outside or your tongue freezes solid, swells up, and you suffocate.

It's so cold the dogs are watching videos on how to use a toilet so they won't have to go outside for a walk.

It's so cold the trout in the pond are wearing sweaters. They'd start a fire, but they live under water.

It's so cold you have to dress in 26 layers to go outside and 12 or 13 if you remain indoors.

It's so cold they're thinking of extending the Kelvin scale into negative numbers.

It's so cold even Florida is beginning to seem mildly appealing.

It's so cold that exposed skin can get frostbite within 5 minutes. And that's in the house!

It's so cold that each increase of 1 mph of wind speed increases the wind chill by a factor of 1 million. (Or maybe more. I mean, who knows when it's this cold?)

Those are just a few examples of how cold it is. I'd list some more, but it's just too damn cold!

Heat Wave Rocks Vermont!!

2009-02-03T18:11:00.000-08:00

This ice shelf is doomed if these temperatures persist!

Larry, Moe and Curly, our Adirondack chairs, contemplate the effects of Global Warming.

The river is once again open for navigation.

The dogs plow through the newly warmed snow.

Yes fans, in another sign of rampant global warming, the temperature got up to 38 F yesterday! To avoid heat prostration, I only wore my swim trunks and a a t-shirt on my daily walk with the dogs although I did need snowshoes. (Pictures not available unfortunately.) The snow pack is still about 4 feet deep after all. The warm weather was welcome after the rude awakening I got upon my return from Ethiopia. 75 F (23 Celsius) and sunny all day in Ethiopia. 0 degrees Kelvin and snowing here in Vermont. Takes some getting used to, but now I'm re-acclimated. And since my typing fingers have thawed (what with our heat wave and all) I'm back with some new posts. The pictures above really tell an eloquent story about the recent one day thaw here. If you look really, really closely, you can see some of the snow flakes at the very bottom of the snow pack melting. Kind of makes you anxious for Spring.

Why I like Working in Africa

2009-01-08T16:18:00.000-08:00

In a picture from last year, the Christmas tree contemplates its brief life. (The holidays and the Christmas tree are gone now, alas.)

The near arctic temperatures in the river make Africa all that more enticing.

Why do I like working in Africa? In a word, Winter. Not that I don't like Winter; I do. But the Winters hereabouts can get pretty long and, here's a shocker, it's usually pretty warm and sunny in most parts of Africa. It certainly is in most places where I end up working. That's probably because I'm usually not too far from the equator although Friday I leave for Ethiopia which is several hundred miles from the equator. This is my first time to go to Ethiopia, but from what I've read, it has perfect weather this time of year. Unbroken sunshine with highs in the 70s and lows in the 40s. Heck, that's Summer weather here in Vermont. In any case, I'll be gone for two weeks which means two weeks of no posts. But don't worry. Even though I won't be blogging, I'll be thinking about all of you snowbound readers as I soak up the rays.

Icecapades

2009-01-06T12:29:00.000-08:00

The ice bridge to nowhere reaches across the river. Just one more inch.

Ice goblins huddle under the bank.

More huddling goblins!

A delicate ice shelf hangs over the river.

The same ice shelf seems to plot the Winter stock market, apparently oblivious to our recent economic train wreck.

Ice mushrooms at the foot of a tree.

As you can see from the pictures, "Icecapades" doesn't entail me doing triple lutzes out on the pond. (Not for the foreseeable future anyway.) Heck I don't even know what a triple lutze is, but apparently it's a big deal in ice skating. No, icecapades for me means all of the weird and beautiful things that water does this time of year particularly down along the river. Hope you enjoy the photos.

The Winter Wood Shop Beckons

2008-12-31T14:02:00.000-08:00

The family car infringing on the "wood butcher's" lair.

I may not be much of a wood worker, but I do know how to buy lots of tools!

As you regular readers know, Winters up here in the North Country are long, cold and dark. As we begin to forlornly count the days until Spring, it helps to have a hobby to stay occupied. And now that the holidays are fast slipping away, we are once again sinking into that three month period of the year where everyone up in these parts focuses on these essential hobbies. Why are hobbies so important you might ask? Because intense activity is the only way to escape cabin fever, stir craziness, snow hallucinations, paranoia and snow blindness. Anyone remember "The Shining"? Case closed, and oh by the way, writing your first novel is not a recommended hobby. My hobby is wood working. Real wood workers would call what I do "wood butchering", but at least it keeps me busy during the long Winter months. Last year I completed a built-in entertainment center and library for our t.v. room. It turned out pretty good, if you turn the lights down real low and squint sideways that is. This year I'll be making a side table/stereo cabinet and a coffee table for the living room. My wife, Catherine, is very keen for me to get started as she has been without her stereo for almost a year now, and I have to complete the side table to be able to re-install it. I guess that means that an alternate title for this post might be "Wife beckons to get busy in wood shop." The good news is that I was able to get enough high quality rough cut lumber from a local mill to finish these projects. The bad news? The garage isn't heated and it's hard to do woodworking with mittens on.

Pies for Christmas

2008-12-25T13:39:00.000-08:00

The pies, set amidst christmas decorations, grace the family heirloom china cabinet.

The great American classic, apple.

Up close and personal with three berries.

Tis the season to over-consume, and for me that means pies. My Mom, a phenomenal cook, made great pies and I guess that set me on a lifetime path of pie appreciation. My wife is also a phenomenal cook, but she's not particularly interested in cooking pies. Which means that I am the pie cook in our household and I have been trying to perfect my skills off and on for years. I did two pies for our Christmas dinner this year, an apple (using my secret recipe) and a three berry pie (blueberries, blackberries and cranberries). For the first time I made lattice tops. All of this of course is to approximate as closely as possible a Norman Rockwellesque Vermont Christmas. And it seems to be working out. We've got the snow, the cheery fire and now the pies. The good news is that the pies seem to have turned out pretty well. The bad news? Looks like I'll have to share them with the rest of the family. I guess Christmas isn't all it's cracked up to be after all.

White Christmas out the Wazoo

2008-12-23T16:45:00.000-08:00

The cars new body work.

The dogs plow through the powder.

My snowshoe gets swallowed by the new snow.

The ice and snow close in on the river.

Well, the storm has passed, and we've pretty much dug our way out of the house. With the worst of the shoveling out of the way, I'd like to make a holiday prediction; we will have a White Christmas (notice the capital W). Of course, we almost always do up here in the North Country, but you never know. There was that sappy movie with Bing Crosby back in 1954. In the movie, Bing's character visits a ski resort owned by an old Army buddy. The resort is about to go bankrupt because of a lack of snow. This fictional ski resort is located in, you guessed it, Vermont. I know, pretty unbelievable. We all know that ski resorts go bankrupt on a regular basis, but from a lack of snow in December in Vermont? Boy, movie audiences back in 1954 must have been pretty gullible. When they made the film everyone knew the whole storyline was preposterous, but it did give Bing a chance to sing that song. I guess everything good comes with a price. In any case, this year the skiing and snowboarding over the holidays promise to be phenomenal what with 2 feet of new powder on the ground. I'm not much of a Winter athlete myself (not much of an athlete at all really), but I encourage everyone who does enjoy Winter sports to make the trip up here and enjoy our White Christmas. Even if you're not into Winter sports you're still invited. You can help me finish the shoveling.

Nor'Alberta Clip'Easter

2008-12-21T12:47:00.000-08:00

The Christmas tree and lights soldier on during the storm.

The weather folks around here talk about two types of typical Winter storms, the "Nor'easter" (see previous post) and the "Alberta Clipper". An Alberta Clipper is a fast moving storm system with very cold air but very little moisture that zips out of Alberta, Canada and right across our region. Usually they move fast, bring only 3 or 4 inches of snow, and drop the temperature by about 10 degrees. I mean, they are from Canada after all; how could they not bring cold? I'm not sure whether the "clipper" part of the name comes from the idea of "getting clipped" as in tangentially hit or from the old clipper ships which moved very fast just like these storm systems. In any case, for the last 10 hours we've had an "Alberta Clipper" and an old-fashioned "Nor'easter" meet head-on right over our house. (Hence the title of this post.) That means lots of cold air from Canada running headlong into lots of warm moist air from down South. The result, again, lots and lots of fluffy snow. 12" so far and no let-up in sight. The bad news is that it's projected to snow continuously until 4:00 p.m. Monday. The good news? The last 12 hours of that will be only "light snow".

Bambi the one-horned deer

2008-12-20T13:12:00.000-08:00

Our visitor looks for browse under the old apple trees. Good luck Fella!

A decent look at our deer's unbalanced rack.

Last year we had a good sized young spike buck transit the yard all Winter. I saw him under the old apple trees several times but never got a photo. He actually had the longest pair of spike horns I've ever seen, about 10 inches long. Well, this evening another or the same young buck crossed the yard via the old apple trees with an even odder rack. This deer had a small two-point horn on one side and nothing (or just a little stub) on the other. As you can see from the pictures, he looks pretty fat and appears to be in good shape which is important at this point in the year. It's a long slog till Spring. Maybe this is the same deer as last year, and he just has a different irregular rack. Pretty hard to tell from up on the deck, and I didn't feel like running him down to take a closer look. After all, the snow's pretty deep .

p.s. After originally posting this I had an additional thought on how Bambi might have gotten his wretched rack. He could have had the right horn broken fighting with other bucks during the rut.

And now...A moment of Zen

2008-12-17T14:22:00.000-08:00

The house on a pre-holiday Winter's night.

We've had a light, fluffy 6" snow over the last 18 hours and the house looks quite inviting all lit up under this new blanket of white. Almost postcard perfect, so I thought I'd take the outdoor Christmas photo and post it tonight. Indoor Christmas photos coming soon.

Moon Over Vermont Redux

2008-12-12T16:17:00.000-08:00

What can I say? We had a beautiful full moon as a backdrop for our newly lit Christmas tree tonight, and I couldn't resist trying to get a decent photo. Maybe one of these days I'll actually succeed. I promise it was much more impressive in person.

Nor'easter

2008-12-11T19:07:00.000-08:00

What a Nor'easter looks like on colorized radar. Blue is snow and as you can see the storm's epicenter is right over our house.

As seen from the deck.

And then the sun came out. You can almost hear the Hallelujah Chorus playing in the background.

I'd like to take this opportunity to educate the readers on a quaint weather phenomenon up here in the North Country, "The Nor'easter". Despite what the name Nor'easter might lead you to believe, this phenomenon has nothing to do with the holidays as in, "I won't be home for New Years, Nor'Easter". No, this phenomenon is primarily a matter of snow and lots of it. The name 'Nor'easter' is a New England colloquialism that loosely translates to "S**t, not more snow!" (In reality the name is derived from the direction the wind blows during one of these legendary storms.) Now, despite the fact that Nor'easters bring plenty of snow which blows in from, you guessed it, the Northeast, we have our friends down South to thank for this particular brand of miserable weather. That's because a Nor'easter results when a depression forms in the deep South, picks up lots of moisture from the Gulf and then makes its way up the Atlantic coast before slamming into the cold air that hangs out up here in the North Country for most of the Winter. At some point the storm will come to rest right over our house where it will proceed to dump a whole lot of frozen moisture. Given their geographic origins, maybe we shouldn't call these things "Nor'easters", but Stonewall Jackson's revenge. In any case, we have been enduring our first Nor'easter of the season over the last 24 hours and it hasn't disappointed, dropping about 9" of wet snow and freezing rain. The only thing that would have made this any better would have been a long power outage. Guess we'll have to save that for later in the season.

An Early Evening Visit From Rocky the Flying Squirrel

2008-12-10T14:44:00.000-08:00

Rocky takes center stage in another one of my stunningly bad wildlife photos.

All of you regular readers will remember Rocky the Flying Squirrel from last year. We hadn't seen our little gliding buddy for months and I feared he might have ended up as a dinner for Barry the barred owl. Apparently barred owls love flying squirrels, in a culinary sort of way. But Rocky appears to have survived the Summer, and he showed up at the bird feeder this evening around 05:30. Perhaps he's been coming to the feeder regularly and we just didn't see him. I'm guessing the flying squirrels are out earlier in the evening these days because the days are so short. It gets dark pretty early after all, around 11:00 in the morning most days. (Just kidding. It gets dark around 5:00 p.m.) In any case, Rocky was pretty fearless, letting me click several mediocre photos and even shine the flashlight out the window to get a good look. I'm surprised the flash on the camera and the flashlight didn't bother or scare him. Maybe he was just really hungry.

Channeling the Teutonic Fertility Gods

2008-12-07T12:15:00.000-08:00

Paul Bunyan prepares for the sacrifice of the vestal tree.

The deed is done.

Catherine, affectionately known as "The Mule", lugs the tree towards the house.

A short break for the beast of burden.

The tree newly installed on the deck. Tomorrow, lights!

Hope that title got your attention. Despite the titillating and overblown title, all this post is about is Christmas trees. Christmas trees are apparently a German tradition brought to us by those savage barbarians who used to slink around the Black Forest just looking for a Roman legionnaire to slaughter. One thing led to another and presto, evergreen trees, real and fake, are now in every American home during our much beloved holiday of outrageous materialistic excess, Christmas. Originally the "Christmas tree" was a prop used by the pagans to mark the Winter solstice. The Winter solstice is that day in the year when for one brief moment you seem to think that Winter is O.K., what with the holidays and beautiful snowy landscapes and all. Shortly after the solstice of course everyone sinks into a deep "when will Winter end" depression that generally lasts through June up here in Vermont. Beyond that, I don't really know if the Winter Solstice evergreen has any fertility connotations as I imply in my title. That was just a cheap marketing ploy in the spirit of the season. In any case, up here in the North Country we take our Christmas trees pretty seriously. That might be because we have quite a few evergreens growing around the region and Christmas presents a good opportunity to thin our overgrown forest. Catherine and I take the Christmas tree tradition so seriously that we have two trees, an outdoor tree and an indoor tree. Today we went and cut our outdoor tree which we will display proudly on our deck until shortly after the first of the year. At that point the outdoor and the indoor trees will be unceremoniously dumped in the woods somewhere. That usually happens around the same time that the holiday champagne runs out and the "when will Winter end" blues set in.

In Praise of Chocolate

2008-12-05T16:10:00.000-08:00

A Champlain Chocolate Family Portrait

The destination for tonight's pilgrimage. The sign says it all.

When we lived in Paris, I used to walk by one of the best chocolatier in the whole city on my way to and from work. Hevin was his name and chocolate was his game. And what a game it was. Good lord that was good chocolate! Well worth the $40 or $50 a pound that it cost. But all good things eventually end, and our access to Hevin chocolate abruptly ceased when we moved back to the States. Enter stage left, Champlain Chocolate, our local Vermont chocolatier. Their small factory is up in Burlington and although their chocolate isn't quite Hevin heavenly, it's pretty darn good chocolate and the sales people are infinitely more pleasant. They have a big retail store near Stowe, one of our big ski towns, and we try and go by half a dozen times a year to get a big chocolate fix. Christmas is one of those times obviously, and we buy enough chocolate to both send out care packages to deserving family members and get us through the holidays. Lucky us, tonight was the night for our Christmas run. As I post this I have just finished eating enough chocolate to be both very content and slightly nauseated. It may be another couple of hours before I can eat any more. Chocolate is, sadly, one of those exquisite pleasures that the many scolds in our society would like us to feel guilty about. It's fattening, it's too overtly sensual, it's expensive and unnecessary, it contributes to global warming, it's not free trade, it contributes to diabetes and on and on. In this regard chocolate is a lot like sex. Most everybody loves it and would like to have more, but somehow we're not supposed to. The good news is, I've pretty much freed myself of any feelings of guilt associated with societal scolding, and there are 10 pounds of chocolate in the house. Now if I could just get back to Paris to visit Hevin...

Surprised by Winter

2008-12-04T10:49:00.000-08:00

First of all, my apologies for the lack of photos for this post. I got back from Benin on Monday and have been adjusting to jet lag and the 70 degree temperature differential. It was 105 F in the shade there most days whereas it has been around 35 F here during the day. I prefer the latter. I'm not the only one going through an adjustment period. On my walk today I saw, of all things, a male kingfisher. I had seen what I assume was the same bird back at the end of October before taking off on my trip, and at the time I wondered what a kingfisher was doing hanging around here so late in the year. Waiting for all of the ponds to freeze over I guess because that's what's in store for our fishing feathered friend. Our pond still has a narrow band of unfrozen water and the river hasn't frozen at all of course. Still, I wonder how our kingfisher can find enough to eat. On the other hand, lots of migratory birds hang around longer than we might expect. Catherine saw a great blue heron a couple of weeks ago and they are also migratory fishing birds. I'm hoping that this kingfisher is just hanging around a few extra weeks and will soon be on his way. The alternative is that he is a youngster who somehow missed his family's migration and now doesn't really know what to do except hang around the steadily freezing pond. We'll just have to trust Nature on this one.

And then...it was Winter

2008-10-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

No,not a black and white photo. Just a black and white landscape.

The sun setting on Fall just a short week ago.

I had intended to do a post entitled "And then there were none", referring to the leaves. That would still be an appropriate title of course, the vast majority of the leaves are gone, but a funny thing happened on the way to that post. It snowed. We only got about 2-3 inches, but 50 miles to our West in the Adirondacks they got over a foot. So the shovels are out, I finally got the last of the wood stacked on the porch and the garden is definitively put to bed. I leave again for Benin, Africa today where the temperatures are about 100 during the day with a humidity of 63 percent. That contrasts with a high of 39 degrees here yesterday. Just a 60 degree differential. Shouldn't be any problem at all acclimating. I'll be back 1 December. Hopefully it won't snow so much while I'm gone that I can't find the house when I get back.

Table Manners of the Eastern Chipmunk

2008-10-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

Not having access to reusable, sustainable and all organic shopping bags, the eastern chipmunk uses its cheek pouches to haul the groceries home.

I have sometimes been accused of stuffing too much into my mouth, scarfing my meals down in a matter of nano-seconds. I blame this habit on the Army where before any meal no one says "bon appetit" as the French do, but rather "get it and go" as in, why are you taking so long? But even with my tendency to scarf food, I'm an amateur food-stuffer compared to the eastern chipmunk. I offer the photo above as evidence.

Fade to ... Yellow.

2008-10-15T13:08:00.004-07:00

Say hello to yellow.

Framed by our quaking aspen, some late season reds and oranges peek over the treeline .

Even the ferns are turning yellow.

A highly colored beech behind the house.

After a pretty good color season so far, the maple trees are really starting to shed their leaves and leave the stage to the aspens, birches and beeches. All of these trees tend to have yellow leaves in the fall although the beech has a pretty pronounced brownish-orange tinge. I miss the reds of the maples, but the new stars of the show look like bright splashes of flame across the backdrop of the hemlocks and firs. We're headed to southern Vermont this weekend, and we'll see if the colors down there are worth any pictures.

The "Bounty" of our Harvest

2008-10-08T13:55:00.000-07:00

Our Winter stock of corn. Could be grim.

None of our pumpkins won first prize at the county fair.

The apples on our old apple trees seem to do fine without any help from us.

Just a random shot of the house.

O.K., American Gothic we're not although we did spend a lot of time, energy and money on the garden this year. With mixed results I have to admit. The greens and the tomatoes did pretty well. The cucumbers threatened to overwhelm us. The herbs and our first year strawberries on the other hand were pretty much a bust. The black-eyed peas that I planted (late unfortunately) grew tall and strong and produced narry a bean. The pumpkins and the butternut squash produced only laughter or pity. The corn I planted was, happily, only for decoration because there wasn't enough of it to keep a chicken alive through the Winter. Still and all, we did get our raised beds built, the strawberry patch promises many more fruit next year, and we learned a lot from our mistakes. It would have been a pretty satisfying year except that with what we spent on the garden, we could have financed our vegetable needs for the next 10 years at the supermarket. On the bright side, we don't have to actually live off of what we raise.

Fire Season

2008-10-07T06:35:00.000-07:00

One of our first "cheery" fires burns happily away.

Some of the colors that accompany the coming of cool weather.

A lonely adolescent merganser makes a pit stop on the pond as he flees the coming of Winter.

It's fire season here in the North Country in more ways than one. On the one hand, with the coming of cool weather, cheery fires are burning in fireplaces and wood stoves all over the region. On the other hand, lots of buildings tend to burn down at this time of year, mainly because of all those cheery fires in fireplaces and wood stoves. That and the electric space heaters. It can be a grim choice here in the Winter, either freeze to death or burn up in a raging inferno that was once your house. We've opted for the second option and have had fires the last three days.

Encounters of a Porcupine Kind

2008-10-04T14:14:00.000-07:00

On our way to see Pauly the porcupine.

A porcupine showing off the latest in pain inducing coiffures.

Four of the little gifts Pauly left Nella. The dark end is the business end.

Late this afternoon I took the dogs out for their last walk of the day, and we decided to do a short loop up through the woods. When we were 20 yards or so from where the trail runs into the neighbors gravel road before looping back into the woods, the dogs took off in a flash and accosted something on the road. I called them back and went up to investigate. By the time I got to the road, a large porcupine had scrambled into the treeline on the other side and was busy climbing out of reach. The porcupine climbed a good 30 feet up the tree before stopping. Now safe from the porcupine's quills, the dogs barked and jumped up on the tree, ready to tear the porcupine limb from limb (as long as the porcupine stayed up the tree with his rather painful defensive mechanism). In the initial encounter Nella managed to collect a half dozen quills which I pulled out before heading home. The quills are not only sharp and numerous, they are barbed at the end, so pulling them takes a little effort. Nella was very brave and let me jerk them out without so much as a whimper. The good news in all of this? It wasn't a skunk we ran into.

Out of Africa and into Peak Color

2008-10-02T12:33:00.000-07:00

When I did my last post, Summer was in full swing, but the first colors of Fall were starting to peek out from under a blanket of green. What a difference a month makes! I returned from my working jaunt in Benin, Africa to find Fall in firm control and the colors rioting across the landscape. The question of course is whether we are already at "peak color". Up here in the North Country the concept of "peak color" is much debated and very important. Peak color is a mythical moment when the Fall colors are their most vibrant, most beautiful and most plentiful. It's a fragile moment that a strong wind, too much rain, not enough rain, above average heat, above average cold, inadequate sunspot activity, earthquakes or large swamp gas releases can adversely affect. There is never broad agreement each year about when we have reached peak color although most people can come to an agreement about when it has passed. As a flatlander, I have never had the privilege of witnessing peak color although native vermonters promise me I will some day if I manage to live here for at least 20 years. Still and all, I would have to say that in our little corner of Vermont we have reached peak color or something very close. That's not true West of us where Lake Champlain moderates the temperatures, and peak color is probably long gone up along the Canadian border. We're going to take a drive up the Mad River Valley this Sunday to see how the colors look over there. Updates to follow.

p.s. It was the rainy season in Benin and apparently it's the rainy season here as well since it's rained every day since I got back.

And so it begins...

2008-09-02T08:50:00.000-07:00

Can you find Winter in this picture?

How about here?

Ah, there it is, lurking in the first colors of Fall.

Fall is easily the best season here in the North Country. The colors can be extraordinary, it's football season, the air is crisp at night but comfortable during the day and everyone has that contented feeling from knowing the hay is in the barn and the hard work of Summer is over. The only problem with this is that you have to make a conscious effort to forget the fact that Winter, a hard Winter, is just around the corner. So we bask in the fleeting beauty and pleasantness of Fall while willfully ignoring what is just around the corner. In other news, I'm off to Africa today for a month. When I return the Fall colors will be at their peak (even if I'm not) and I promise everyone the full treatment of beautiful pictures. See you in a month!

Summer's almost gone...

2008-09-01T14:36:00.000-07:00

The neighbor's son with his first trout.

The late Summer garden.

Ditto.

Our late season wild flowers around the pond.

The daily swim.

Indian Joe Pye Weed, a beautiful late Summer flower around the pond, much beloved by the bumble bees.

The folks around here call the period from 15 July to 15 August "High Summer". Other regions of the country may employ the same term, but I first encountered it here. The weather didn't really make it feel like "High Summer" during that stretch this year, but we are now enjoying some really nice warm sunny days with moderately cool nights. So even though the dates have come and gone, I thought it would be nice to capture the feel of "High Summer" with a few photos even as Fall is pushing its way into our consciousness a little more each day. More about that tomorrow.

The Big One that Didn't Get Away

2008-08-25T15:07:00.000-07:00

The 36 inch, 20 pound trophy trout. (Actually just over 14 inches and we didn't weigh it.)

The exhausted angler can finally enjoy the fruits of his labor.

As you regular readers know, we've been having some trouble catching any of the big trout that I so carefully stocked the pond with this year. Those darn fish have turned their noses up at everything from power bait to worms to the best artificial lures known to man. Even though my older son and his wife did catch a couple of pretty good fish earlier this Summer, the really big one kept getting away. Then my second son, a professional bass fisherman, came to town with the grit, discipline and know-how to catch "Moby Trout" himself. (He's not really a professional bass fisherman and as for grit and discipline that was mostly an inhuman ability to endure swarms of mosquitoes while he fished. Still, he is an avid fisherman and he did bring some real knowledge and determination to catching a big trout.) I'm happy to report that after a mere 48 hours of continuous fishing with no sleep or food, my son caught a really big trout which we happily grilled and ate. As you can see in the photo above, the fisherman ate most of his catch. That seemed only fair. After all, he hadn't eaten for 48 hours.

A Perfect Summer Day at Shelburne Farms

2008-08-22T14:30:00.000-07:00

Surveying the immensity of "The Barn".

No, not a manor or a chateau, but the "barn" at Shelburne Farms with Mt. Mansfield, highest peak in the state, in the distance.

Chasin' chickens, a favorite Shelburne activity.

Vermont prides itself on being something of a throwback to the 19th century, a sort of quint rural oasis in a vast desert of malls and sprawl. This image we have of ourselves is true in many ways and our refusal to rush headlong into every new permutation of growth and culture in America is the one thing that has preserved the charming beauty of our state. Of course, as a rural oasis we have our own theme parks. One of the most enjoyable of these is Shelburne Farms, about 10 miles south of Burlington. We took some of the grandkids there today to enjoy the scenery and pet the animals. This is no ordinary farm and one look at the barn will tell you that the whole thing sprang from the imagination of someone with a lot of money to burn. That in fact is the case and I leave each of you to read the history and mission of the place on their web site (www.shelburnefarms.org). But even though Shelburne Farms were clearly a fantastic and impossible manifestation of what agriculture "should" and "could" be, our day there was extremely pleasant. The animals and people were friendly, the skies were blue and we got some good information on raising chickens which is one of our projects for next year.

Why the Green Mountains are so Green

2008-08-11T17:06:00.000-07:00

The view from sunny Vermont.

Greening up them Green Mountains with torrents of rain.

In a word....rain. Or perhaps I should say precipitation since 10 feet of snow in the Winter isn't really rain. And as far as precipitation is concerned, we get about the same amount of annual precipitation as Seattle, Washington, a city known for its dreary rainyness. That would be in excess of 35 inches a year. To give you some idea of how much rain that is, just west of Seattle on the Olympic peninsula is the only temperate rain forest in the world. That rain forest gets a little more rain than Seattle and Vermont but not much. But even with our significant average precipitation, these last couple of weeks up here in the North Country have been an exercise in learning to live with "higher than average" precipitation. It has rained, and rained hard, every day for almost two weeks. We've had every kind of rain there is, drizzle, steady, pouring, cloud burst and even rain of biblical proportions. The good news? We haven't had to water the garden for some time now. The bad news? I need to use a boat to walk the dogs.

The Water Lilly Fiasco

2008-08-04T14:32:00.000-07:00

The struggling water lillies.

Waiting for his princess (or prince I suppose).

Also looking for that first kiss.

Last year Catherine and I painstakingly planted 8 (very expensive) mail order water lilies at one end of the pond. They did great! They had big leaves and several were starting to flower when something, we suspect Tommy the turtle, ate every last shred of them. Still, three survived and came up this year, and I tried to protect them with a bit of fencing. They seemed to be doing O.K. although there were no flowers. Then we had some hail and really heavy rain. Now most of the leaves have been torn off and the whole project looks pretty forlorn. On the plus side, successful or not, the frogs love the little lily pad corner of the pond. We're wondering what we should do next year about these things. Updates to follow.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

2008-07-22T15:59:00.000-07:00

What the well dressed handyman is wearing these days.

Catherine shows off her new hat.

Our family has tended to have offbeat visitors show up at the door and throw our routine into chaos. From the deaf-mute battered wife when we lived in Texas to the pregnant woman on Christmas eve at our old house here in Vermont to the 10 year old autistic runaway who just walked into the house during my son's recent visit, we've been a magnet for disconcerting problems that seem to appear out of nowhere. And now this. A needy, apparently domesticated , lost pigeon. The pigeon showed up on the deck around 11 this morning and wouldn't leave with any amount of shooing. Catherine said seeing me chase the pigeon around the deck with the broom was quite comical. I call it heroic. We eventually came to the conclusion that if Bruno the bear eventually left, the pigeon would certainly tire of our rather boring lifestyle and fly off to more interesting climes. With that reasoning we decided to leave the bird alone, and we went down to work on the garden fence. Then the trouble really began. The pigeon flew down and insisted on landing on our heads. I could get it to stay on my shoulder as I finished up a last thing or two on the fence, but it really wanted to be on one of our heads. I'm happy to report that when I got up to the house I successfully shooed the pigeon off of my head long enough to get inside the house. It then roosted on the top of our umbrella for a short time and now appears to have left. We're thinking of renting Hitchcocks "The Birds" for this weekend.

The Sky is Falling!

2008-07-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

The hail roils the pond.

Grapefruit size hail on the deck. (The photo distorts the dimensions.)

We're relatively immune to natural disaster here in Vermont. (Some people think the taxes here are a natural disaster, but that's another issue.) There are no earthquakes, volcanoes or hurricanes (at least not recently). We can get wind storms although what sometimes passes for heavy wind here is just a stiff breeze out in say Kansas. (For example, one of our local weatherman has a tendency to exclaim, "With winds up to 40 mph!") And there is some flooding along our local rivers, but most of our communities aren't build in the floodplain of one of the world's mightiest rivers. I hope the people who live along the Mississippi watershed don't take offense. You'll imagine our surprise then when yesterday it started to hail, threatening our crops, our homes, any cars parked outside and our plans to run out and get a creamee. You always hear about "golf ball sized hail" and "soccer ball sized hail", and although I did exaggerate for the photo caption, the hail was marble sized. Fortunately it didn't last long and didn't appear to take out my corn. If it had I'm afraid we might have starved this Winter. Of course the really discouraging thing is that it's July and we're already getting freezing precipitation. Gonna be a hard Winter.

Moonlight Over Vermont

2008-07-15T18:25:00.000-07:00

Everyone (I hope) has seen a beautiful moon rise above the horizon on a crystal clear night. You just feel like you could reach out and touch it. We're fortunate because the moon rises just opposite our deck, and on clear nights like tonight, when there's not a cloud in the sky and the moon is almost full, the view can take your breath away. It's even better in the Winter when the air is almost painful in its crystal purity. Wait a minute; in the Winter the air is painful in its crystal purity because it's somewhere around -100 F. Or at least that's what it feels like when you see that impossible moon, go outside and take a deep breath. Vermont has quite the marriage / romantic getaway industry, so a moon like the one we have tonight is a real treat for all those couples who came up here to capture some of our "romantic magic". I'd like to say that my wife and I fell in love, lo these many years ago, gazing at a full moon while in Vermont, but that wouldn't be true. We were in France and I don't really have any particular recollection of the moon, full or otherwise. I guess I was just blinded by my wife's radiant beauty. (Geez, I ought to get some points for that one, don't you think?) Anyway, I digress. This photo isn't great, but I hope it gives you a little idea of how beautiful it is looking out over our yard this evening. And if, wherever you are, you're gazing at the moon too, here's an interesting factoid for you to mull over. It's the same moon as the one we've got up here in Vermont!

p.s. "Moonlight Over Vermont" is apparently the name of an old song (1940s?) about which I know nothing.

Snakes and Compost

2008-07-12T16:28:00.000-07:00

Gary waiting for prey that is a little smaller than me.

Up here in Vermont we are hard-core recyclers (or try to be although we draw the line at reusing dental floss). That means composting all of your kitchen and yard scraps which Catherine and I dutifully do. Someday we're supposed to get the richest soil on earth from our compost pile, but so far all we've gotten are a bunch of really healthy weeds. But anyway, yesterday I headed out to the compost pile to dispose of some leftover bait worms. This was a good deal for the worms as they were originally destined to help us catch our trout. Apparently, however, the trout we bought and stocked this year are from that rare sub-species of rainbows known as "Really Finicky Rainbows". They nibbled at the worms just like they nibbled at the power bait and then went on about their business. Which led to the liberation of the leftover bait worms. Not only were the worms lucky to be released, I was releasing them onto the compost pile, which for worms is like being dropped off in heaven. Worms apparently like nothing better than working their way through compost and turning it into the world's richest soil. As I went to empty the worm container, I was surprised to see a garter snake coiled on top of the compost pile. We have three garter snakes that we know of. Two hang out by the house, and this one lives down in the garden. Oddly enough, when I went back to the compost pile several hours later, Gary the garden garter snake was still hanging out on top of the compost pile. That's when I snapped these pictures. Today he was there again which leads me to one of two conclusions. Either the compost pile is a really good hunting spot for garter snakes or Gary ate the 8 to 10 worms I dumped yesterday and hasn't felt much like moving ever since.

"I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. Demille."

2008-07-12T11:50:00.000-07:00

I've posted pictures of both Tilly and Tommy the turtles before, but I couldn't resist posting this closeup of Tilly that I snapped this morning. As is typical, she was out sunbathing when I went out for my late morning walk. Being a turtle, she can't run off, startled, when I walk up on her. So she good-naturedly posed for this photo which captures (cover your ears Tilly) her pretty primitive nature. One of my grandsons, who is enthralled with dinosaurs, was also enthralled with our two snappers and wanted me to pick up Tommy one day when we happened on him in the yard. Not wanting to pester the animals more than is necessary and being very fond of my fingers, I demurred. Biologists will tell you that all of us share many genes with amphibians and reptiles, proof of our common ancestry. If you look closely at Tilly in this photo you can see the resemblance. She's doing exactly what I do after any large holiday meal. The similarities are uncanny!

The Great White Trout Beckons

2008-07-08T18:02:00.000-07:00

Thar she blows!

Success! (Kind of.)

Despite earlier setbacks, my son and his wife persist in pursuing the elusive mammoth white trout that (we fabulate) lives in our pond. They managed to get one of the great white's school mates. The big one however is still out there, and we still haven't caught enough fish for dinner.

Fragile Beauty

2008-07-07T06:06:00.000-07:00

Dragonfly

Damselfly

Dragonfly

And no, when I say "fragile beauty" I'm not talking about myself. Even though many consider me to be quite a beauty, I'm not that fragile. What I'm talking about is the fleeting beauty of the Summer season with it's tremendous burst of life. Every plant and animal is intensely focused on accomplishing their reproductive business before Winter returns everything to the deep freeze. It is obviously this reproductive business that gives us the flowers and fruits of Summer, but it also gives us the wispy, fluttering, buzzing beauty of the insects. I exclude all deer flies, black flies and biting midges from the ranks of the beautiful even though I'm sure that in their respective communities they have their equivalent of beauty queens. As a tribute to the fragile insect beauty of Summer, I offer the photos of dragonflies and damselflies above. My daughter-in-law tells me that what distinguishes the two is the way they hold their wings when not flying. The damselfly apparently folds its wings back along its body whereas the dragonfly holds them straight out. Dragonflies and damselflies begin life as eggs in a body of water, hatch to become nymphs and eventually emerge as the zig-zagging insects we are familiar with. Once they emerge, they have only a few weeks to "hook up" before they die. It's the sort of situation that gives great urgency to your dating activities. Reminds me a little bit of our single-minded focus in high school.

Trout Master Baits up a Hook

2008-07-02T17:57:00.000-07:00

"Gee, is this thing snagged or what?"

"Let me just maneuver this thing out of the way..."

"...and lean in. Hey! Is that a trout I feel in there?!?"

As some of you may remember, last year we stocked the pond with 25 trout 6 to 8 inches long. They were easy to catch, almost fighting to be the first on the hook if it was baited with Power Bait, a mysterious industrial product that is irresistible to fish and pregnant women. Heck, we thought, let's load the pond up with 10 to 12 inch trout and have fresh trout for dinner anytime we want. All we have to do is use a little Power Bait right? So for tonight we had planned our dinner around the fish we planned on catching this morning during a prolonged fishing session. Something, alas, went awry with our plan. Apparently the 10 to 12 inch trout couldn't care less about Power Bait. To them it's more like weak bait or revolting bait. We did catch several 4-6 inch shiners that are native to the pond. (I'm not sure that 'shiner' is the correct identification, but I'm not a fish expert as our fishing expedition established beyond a shadow of a doubt.) In any case, we ate no fish tonight and the closest we got to any trout was when my son caught his hook on a branch in the water and had to wade in to free it. The sequence of photos pretty much captures the day's frustration.

Summertime

2008-07-01T17:42:00.000-07:00

The ladies plant some new perrenials.

Pests during all four season.

A fledgling bird we startled down by the shed.

The male evening grosbeak who has been feeding his fledglings at the feeder.

Benny's daily closeup.

I just thought I'd post a random selection of photos we've taken over the last few days and which capture the feeling of Summer here. The weather has been great for a week, not too hot, neither too sunny or too cloudy and not too humid. Many of the birds are showing up at the feeders with their fledglings, and the beaver gives us a daily show. The grandkids are having a great time, and I believe maple creemees are on the menu for Thursday or Friday. Wish you were here.

Benny the Beaver Bounces Back

2008-06-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

Benny makes for some bushes, presumably for his evening meal.

Keepin' his head above water.

Just when the dogs thought it was safe to go back to the water, Benny the Beaver has returned for what may be an extended stay. Nella, our border collie mixed breed, is obsessed with Benny and plunges into the pond as soon as she hears a fish jump. She then swims around in circles going after every trout and minnow that breaks the surface in her immediate vicinity, hoping to snag her first beaver. Meanwhile Benny will be swimming nonchalantly at the other end of the pond. He doesn't seem too troubled by the presence of humans, and I could have gotten some pretty good photos if I had had my camera late this afternoon while walking around the pond. But of course one of the laws of amateur photography is that you never have your camera with you when the best shots present themselves. I did get the photos above, which are passable, from the deck using the new super-duper zoom on my new camera. They were taken while 75 - 100 yards from the pond. O.K. photos I guess. I mean you can tell it's a beaver or at least a large swimming rodent. Still, I'm disappointed so far in the quality of photos from the new camera. We'll see if they improve as my familiarity with the camera improves.

River Dance

2008-06-29T18:28:00.000-07:00

The family surveys the raging river.

Nothing says Summer like a boy, a dog, a stick and some water to throw the stick in.

Searching for good beaver dam sticks and/or rocks.

One of the construction engineers strategically places a rock on the "beaver dam".

My oldest son and his family arrived for their annual visit yesterday and today we all headed down to the river for some serious play. There are three grandkids in this bunch. The oldest is a girl who is 9. Number two is a boy who is 7. The youngest, another boy, is 4. With a couple of sticks and the river, the kids can keep themselves occupied for hours, blissfully leaving the adults to sit in beach chairs, sip coffee and take pictures. We did however collectively undertake something more serious this year, the construction of an ersatz beaver dam. This was motivated by the desire to deepen one of the shallow pools along the river in the hope of transforming it into a swimming hole or at least a deep wading pool. The dam got off to a really good start and everyone had a good time contributing logs, sticks, rocks and gravel to this first phase of construction. We even appear to have raised the water level in the pool behind the dam by 3 to 5 inches. Wow! Who knows, if our dam is good enough maybe Benny the Beaver will come back, finish off the dam and settle in. We'll see.

How does our garden grow?

2008-06-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

The impressive corn, bean and sunflower patch. We're thinking of installing an ethanol refinery.

Tomato plants and marigolds.

View from the pond.

The bed of greens.

Strawberry bed. We just planted these this year, but they are already full of fruit.

The "hanging gardens".

Not too bad, thank you for asking, although we don't have any cockleshells in our garden. Catherine is the head gardener and landscaper in our household, so the garden layout and plant selection is pretty much hers. My contribution to the garden is essential if less glorious and consists primarily of "grunt" work. I can't even lay claim to doing all of the grunt work, as Catherine was the one who filled half of the raised beds with soil and compost once I got them built. (You'd think as a society we could come up with a more politically correct name for sweaty manual labor than grunt work, something like "tactile value-added activities". If you have any good suggestions, please share it in a comment.)

Last year we just threw some seeds and seedlings in the ground so we could say we had a garden and the results were mixed at best. The tomatoes and herbs did great; the corn was pathetic. In fairness, however, our time last year was pretty much consumed with getting the ground roto-tilled and the fence and arbor built. Actually growing anything was really just an afterthought. This year we have done better and so far the results are encouraging, for Vermont that is. We know that in most of the country gardeners are already on their third or fourth crop whereas we are still at the stage of oooing and aaahing over every flower that appears on the tomato plants. We'll really be excited when some tomatoes actually appear. Still, our strawberry plants are robust and full of berries, the greens are ready for harvest and the corn even shows promise. Heck, it's already 3 or 4 inches high! I promise photos as the harvest starts to come in.

Ansel Adams...Move Over! or Gadget Guy finds Nirvana

2008-06-26T16:22:00.000-07:00

My rather shapely foot.

My first decent bird photo.

The new camera as seen by the old camera.

Wish I knew the name.

Nella watches for the bear.

Zazou helps me look for wildflowers in the river.

Beautiful but unidentified at this time.

Ditto.

Orange Hawk weed.

Tall Meadow-rue

Wild strawberries.

Nightshade?

As you can see from the eclectic selection of photos above, I put the new camera into operation today. I didn't have the best conditions for a photo shoot; it was cloudy and rainy all day, or as us artists say, I didn't have "good light". Still, I thought I owed it to the readers of the blog to show what the future holds now that I have the right photographic stuff. I also couldn't resist playing around with my new gadget / toy / essential accessory of modern life.

I should perhaps first give everyone the specifications on the new camera. It's a Panasonic DMZ 18. (I guess the model name comes from the fact that it was built in a demilitarized zone.) It has something like 87,000 mega-pixels. For the uninitiated, a mega-pixel is 1 million pixies, and we all know that a pixie is a small faerie with magical powers. Apparently with a digital camera, when you click the shutter all of those little pixies furiously paint whatever they see during the brief instant that the shutter is open. That means that my camera has 87,000 x 1 million pixies painting each time I take a picture. Obviously, the more pixies painting, the better the picture. Fortunately the camera comes with an automatic brush cleaning feature which makes the pixies pretty much maintenance free. It's amazing how today's technology can harness yesterday's superstitions to make our world a better place. Otherwise the camera is pretty straight forward although it does have more computing power than what was needed to send a man to the moon in 1969. I wonder, how they were able to take such good pictures during those missions to the moon? Everyone knows pixies can't survive space travel.

Anyway, not having, as I mentioned, "good light" today, I thought I would concentrate on photographing some of the wild flowers growing around the place. I threw in the other stuff just to show off. Enjoy.

Ready For Our Close-up

2008-06-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

The new camera arrived late this afternoon. I promise to post lots of pictures, good and bad, tomorrow. I know everyone is breathless with anticipation.

We finally cave-in...

2008-06-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

A newly minted lawn cowboy rustles up some grass clippings.

Find the grass-cutting Waldo in this scene. This gives an idea of how much grass we used to cut with the push mower.

The beast waits for a chance to cut more grass.

View from the rear.

When we bought our place in the Fall of 2006, it came with an old lawn tractor. When I say old I should say 17 year old lawn tractor. After a lot of fussing and fiddling and spending money on parts, I got the thing to run three times during the early weeks of the 2007 mowing season. When the old thing refused to start anymore we thankfully got rid of it. But that posed the question of whether we should replace it. We had an almost new push mower, and using it seemed much more environmentally responsible than buying a big ole lawn tractor. Plus, if our bathroom scales were anywhere close to accurate, we really needed the exercise. So last year we put in the exquisite wildflower meadow to cut down on the total mowing area (see earlier post), and we mowed our 1.5 to 2 acres of grass with a regular old push mower. Wasn't even self-propelled. We felt pretty darn virtuous (and pretty darn exercised) I have to admit. But then a funny thing happened this year. As the mowing season began in earnest, the more we mowed, the more our virtue began to have a bitter taste. It would take us 4-5 hours to mow the lawn which we basically did an hour at a time over 4-5 days. Then we'd get a day or two off and start over again. On a recent visit our daughter asked us what in the world we were thinking. (That's what children tend to do when their parents are doing something completely irrational.) We defended ourselves of course mentioning in no particular order global warming, noise pollution, our carbon footprint, dying polar bears, the global food shortage, Chinese child laborers and a few other things that I can't remember right now. But late at night lying in bed, too sore to sleep because of all the mowing, we would dream of a lawn tractor. Then Sears had a sale, and we became weak and went out and bought the darn thing. Funny thing is, the tractor uses less gas to mow the lawn than we used to use with the push mower. Wish I'd known that last year!

p.s. For you gear heads, the tractor runs a 24 hp, 2 cylinder, Briggs & Stratton Intek engine coupled to a hydrostatic transmission. The cutting width is 42 inches.

An Old Friend Returns (Along with some of the usual suspects)

2008-06-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

A female kingfisher with a recently whacked fish.

The dark bands on the female's breast make the kingfisher one of the rare birds where the female is more colorful than the male.

Male kingfisher showing off his uncolorful breast.

The rose breasted gross beak waits for the purple finches to finish at the feeder. (Click on the photo to get the enlarged version.)

The gold finch waits on the purple finches to finish at the feeder. Notice a pattern here?

Last year we had a pair of banded kingfishers who took turns perching on the dead tree that overlooks our pond and a stretch of the river. It was pretty exciting to watch them dive into the pond and return to a branch with a fish. Then they would unceremoniously whack the fish on the branch to kill it before devouring it in one big gulp. I guess the kingfisher doesn't like for the fish to squirm as it slides down the bird's gullet towards oblivion. Anyway, we had started to despair of seeing the kingfishers this year since we hadn't had any sightings. Then they showed up a few days ago, forgoing the fish in the pond and hunting up some frogs along one bend in the river. They are large and beautiful birds with colorings similar to a blue jay. They are a bit larger than a jay however. Oddly enough kingfishers nest in mud banks along a river as opposed to in a tree. Most kingfishers live in warmer (read tropical) climes and there are many species worldwide. I'm even seen a couple on my trips to Benin, Africa. There's just the one species up here in the North Country, however, and we're glad to have them. They need to start cleaning out some of the over sized minnows in the pond. The minnows have been gorging on the food supposedly destined for the trout and some of them are now approaching the size of small tunas.
In other bird news, we appear to have 4 pairs of mating purple finches, a pair of mating goldfinches and a pair of mating rose-breasted grosbeaks in the woods right around the house. We surmise this because they show up at the feeders almost every day. I say "mating" pairs, but in all honesty we haven't gotten back their responses to the Kinsey survey so who knows what their coupling arrangements are? As soon as we get the surveys back, I'll post the data to the blog.

Moose Mania!

2008-06-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

Maggie the moose doing her best horse impression.

Again with the horse look. (The bushes behind Maggie the Moose are about 7 ft high and 8 ft wide. Hopes this gives a idea of scale.)

Now that's a moose profile!

Maggie's had enough of the bright lights.

The big day finally arrived! We have seen a moose in our yard! Things all started off as I was finishing up my lunch out on the deck. Suddenly a large moose ran up the road, apparently startled by a car, and I watched it go by as well as I could. Unfortunately the view was pretty much blocked by trees. The dogs got as excited as me and we peered through the trees towards the back of the house for a while hoping to catch a final glimpse of the beast. No such luck, however, and I turned around a bit dejected. But lo and behold there was an adolescent moose standing near the now famous wildflower meadow and staring at me up on the deck. I quickly hustled the dogs inside before they could catch sight of the moose and then snapped the photos above with my decidedly crappy camera. After pretending to be a horse and posing for a couple of photos, the moose sauntered off and into the forest. About five minutes later a second, larger moose appeared across the pond headed in the opposite direction. I couldn't get any photos before she disappeared into the brush and trees between the brook and the road. So here's our hypothesis. The pair of mooses were a mother and her one or two year old calf. They were crossing the road when a car startled them and they scattered, the mother up the road and the calf into our yard. So there you have it. Our first confirmed siting of Mrs. Bullwinkle and her daughter Maggie. Such excitement here in the North Country!

The Wildflower Experiment or Crazy for Daisies

2008-06-16T14:29:00.000-07:00

The vast expanse of the "wildflower meadow".

Even vaster in this photo.

Last May Catherine and I had two large areas totaling almost half an acre rototilled with the plan of turning these patches into our "wildflower meadow". We had been convinced that this would be a good idea after being hypnotized looking at the website for "American Meadows". Still in our hypnotic trance, we spent an obscene amount of money on wildflower seeds and then in our freshly tilled plots followed the sowing instructions for the seeds to the letter. This included pulling, in tandem, a very heavy roller by hand over the newly tilled half acre, like two mules. (Try it and see if that doesn't test your marriage.) We then waited expectantly. And waited. And waited some more. Finally in late Summer about half of the area we had rototilled and sowed bloomed with mostly Cosmos. These are nice enough flowers, I guess, but they were primarily pink and Catherine's not crazy about pink. To say we were disappointed at the fruits of our labor is a bit like saying Hitler was disappointed when that Stalingrad thing didn't work out as planned. O.K., maybe he was a bit more disappointed than we are.
The mix of seeds we planted last year contained both annuals and perennials, so we re-rototilled the sections where almost nothing had come up and left the rest to see what the perennials would do . And low and behold this year daisies appeared in great profusion! Not hundreds of dollars worth of daisies which is what they ended up costing us, but enough for us to start talking again about our "wildflower meadow". Of course we never replanted the sections that we re-rototilled, so they now look like someone went out of their way to plant a "nasty weed meadow". The "nasty weed meadow" is thriving so far and we've invested no labor or money in it at all. Go figure.

There Will be Blood...from turtles

2008-06-15T14:36:00.000-07:00

Our freshwater leech.

Another look. Apparently the French like them sauteed with a little butter and some garlic, but of course the French will eat anything.

The new Tilly digging her nest (we think).

Disgusted she makes a break for the pond.

Back in her element.

We discovered a second snapping turtle, smaller than the first, digging away in our pumpkin patch today. This was a good 50 feet from the edge of the pond. More surprising for us was what we discovered on the turtle's shell. A big, black leech. Very odd. The leech was a freshwater leech and we're guessing our pond is well supplied with the little suckers. Snapping turtles (according to a couple of websites) are one of the preferred hosts for freshwater leeches although they will gladly load up on fish, frog or mammal blood. Hmm, I knew there was a good reason we didn't go wading in the pond.
As for the turtle, we've decided she was trying to dig a nest before we rudely interrupted. The poor thing finally gave up (minus the leech which I obligingly removed) and trundled back to the pond. We've had to do some rethinking on our turtle names with the discovery of this new, smaller snapper who appears to be a female. As a result she has assumed the mantle of "Tilly the turtle" and our original, bigger turtle will henceforth and forevermore be known as "Tommy the turtle".

Tilly the Turtle Takes in some Sun

2008-06-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

Shy Tilly hides her head in the weeds.

A good look at Tilly's 14 inch carapace and crocodile-like tail.

Walking around the pond just a couple of days ago I almost tripped over Tilly the turtle. That's not recommend when the turtle in question is a good sized snapper. Having recovered my composure, I went back to the house for the camera and took the pictures above. Tilly seemed unconcerned about my presence or the the dogs polite sniffing. She seemed intent on basking in the warm Spring sun and stayed right where she was for several hours. She kept her head under the weeds, but we were able to move a few aside and take a look. Her head is the size of a large avocado and very impressive. Catherine has seen other turtles in the river, probably Eastern painted turtles, but I have as yet to see any besides Tilly. If I do see a different turtle on one of my walks, you'll be the first to know.

No-see-ums, Blackflies and Deer Flies

2008-06-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

Biting midge or "no-see-um".

Black fly up close and personal.

A deer fly sitting down to eat.

Deer fly after having eaten (burp!).

What well dressed Vermonters are wearing these days. (In a sad note, the gentleman modeling this outfit died on a hiking trip from black fly and deer fly bites he received on his hands.)

We pride ourselves up here in Vermont on living in something of a bucolic paradise. Compared to other areas of the country we are quite spoiled as there are no fire ants, poisonous snakes, scorpions, horse flies, alligators or tarantulas. Until recently there were no ticks or fleas either although that is changing. Still, I've never gotten a tick in Vermont and never found one on our dogs. We've never had a problem with flea control either, on me or on the dogs. All of these entymological and reptilian advantages come thanks to our brutally long and cold Winters. So even at the cosmic level there is no free lunch. And in this regard our "lunch" is even more costly than it seems at first blush. For if we have none of these other pests, we do have a few of our own. We have, for example, no-see-ums which are biting midges. They live up to their name. You can't see em' and they can really bite. We have black flies, a miniature version of the deer fly which we also have. The deer fly is a miniature version of the horse fly. We don't have horse flies, generously leaving that particular insect pest to our neighbors in the South. As with horse flies, black flies and deer flies (also known as yellow flies) have a proboscis with multiple barbs that they plunge into your skin, the better to drink your blood. Being barbed, when the proboscis is removed it causes a fair amount of pain and leaves an ugly welt about the size of a golf ball. O.K., I'm exaggerating, but they do leave big welts. The welts itch painfully for about 8 hours or until you bleed to death from scratching. Black flies and yellow flies need water, like a pond or a river, to breed. That means we are particularly well served here on the old homestead what with our river and our pond. And I thought nothing could make me look favorably at mosquitoes.

p.s. I forgot to mention that only the females of these different species drink blood.

Benny the Beaver Bows Out

2008-06-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

A beaver demonstrating what they intend to do all of the trees on your property.

A sleek beaver shows off its tail.

Here's another big event I missed during my seemingly interminable business trip. A beaver showed up and started setting up house in the pond. He dug out a little burrow on the bank of the pond and the dogs started alerting on the burrow opening every time they passed it. Finally one day the dogs stuck their noses in the burrow entry and Benny took off out the back door, landing with a big splash in the pond. There was no calming Nella our mutt after that and she remained obsessed with the burrow over the succeeding days. We were a little worried about a beaver setting up house in the pond; they are voracious vegetarians and ecologically insensitive lumberjacks, eating and chopping down everything in sight. Had the pond been bigger it would have been a different matter. As it turned out, Benny got tired of the dogs rousing him out of his burrow and he left for calmer climes after a few days. More than likely he was a young male beaver who had been chased out of his family and needed to establish a territory of his own. We're hopeful he found a suitable place not too far away.

Moby Trout

2008-06-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

A rainbow begging to be caught and grilled.

The obligatory taxonomic drawing.

What we hope to see in the pond later this year.

A mythic giant rainbow trout. After stocking our pond with 50 rainbow trout 10-12 inches long, that's what we're hoping to end up with later this Summer (minus Ahab and his band of blood-thirsty whalers). Stocking day was June 2nd, so, of course, I missed it because of my business trip. I haven't even been able to catch a glimpse of our fish in the depths of the pond since returning. Catherine says they're big though. Last year we stocked 25 rainbows 6-8 inches long. They seemed to be thriving until the grandkids arrived for some fishing lessons. Despite (or because of) practicing catch and release, we must have killed off half of the fish letting the grandkids catch and release them. The predators got most of the rest of the poor things although I do believe a handful survived until the pond froze over. They probably ended up as mid-Winter meals for the mink or the otter who both made forays under the ice. We stock rainbows because they are more resilient in warmer waters, and at the height of the Summer our pond warms up more than a river would. We have brook trout in the small brook that runs along our house (how appropriate) as well as in the river. Our river is one of the best trout streams in the state, so we're spoiled when it comes to fishing. Our rainbows have already turned up their noses at commercial fish feed and are gorging on aquatic insects. They should really start to taste good within a couple of weeks or so, and the first time one of them gets to our grill, we'll let you know how they taste.

Bruno the Bear Gets Busy

2008-06-10T09:34:00.000-07:00

Amateur photo of another Bruno raiding bird feeders North of us.

What Catherine saw through the living room window.

A bear about the size of Bruno.

I'm back from my work trip to Benin, West Africa, and during my absence Bruno the Bear started hanging around the house, looking for bird seed handouts. We saw Bruno once last year in early May and had kind of given up on him this year. Of course as soon as I took off for a month, he appeared, again and again, to the point where Catherine had to go out on the deck and chase him away on the last of his four visits. He was clearly becoming habituated to being around the house as the barking dogs and rapping on the windows didn't phase him in the least. Even when Catherine chased him off the last time, he kind of hung around the side yard, really put out at having to leave some bird seed unfinished, while Catherine yelled and flapped her arms at him. He finally climbed the old maple tree to get over the fence and shambled off. Needless to say we haven't refilled the bird feeders in several weeks and Bruno seems to have stopped coming by. We think the bear is a Bruno as opposed to a Brunehilda since he has shown up without any cubs the two years we have seen him. I'm guessing he's three years old since he appears to weigh about 150 to 190 lbs. We're going to refill the bird feeders this week and see if Bruno has crossed us off of his regular route. We'll keep everyone informed.

Vermont Goes to Africa

2008-05-10T14:01:00.000-07:00

Benin, previously known as Dahomey (when it was a French colony and before that an independent empire) and also previously known as The Slave Coast for the obvious unsavory reasons.

Well that title is pretty misleading. The state of Vermont is not going to Africa. I mean, can you imagine squeezing a whole state into an economy class seat for 24 hours of travel? Not a pleasant thought. So Vermont is not going to Africa, but Flatlander is. For a month. To Benin. I have a part time job that takes me to Africa a few times a year. While I'm away I doubt if I get any posts up on the blog. Internet access can be sketchy in Africa, even in major hotels in the capitol, and how surrealistic is a blog about Vermont being posted from Africa? I'm afraid all of this adds up to my depriving you avid fans of Four Seasons in Vermont of any posts for a few weeks. My apologies.

You know its Spring in Vermont when...

2008-05-10T13:35:00.000-07:00

There's a new parasol on the deck for eating outside.

The garden has new raised beds that are almost ready for planting. The traditional "plant your garden" day here is May 31st and not having any cold-frames (yet) we stick with that.

The last bit of ice and snow on the pathway to the front door will be gone within 24 hours. (We hope.)

The weather's been nice enough to build a new gate for the garden.

The dogs seem to be tired and wet all of the time from swimming in the pond and the river.

But most importantly, you know it's Spring when yards start to fill up with firewood. It's very important to get your wood early enough so that it has time to dry before heating season starts. There's really no time to lose either. After all, Winter's just around the corner.

Exotic Birds

2008-05-08T16:21:00.000-07:00

Our Evening Grosbeak.

Rose Breasted Grosbeak between takes. (Read on and you'll get it.)

Evening Grosbeak in a decent photo.

I know many of you find my bird-watching pastime to be extraordinarily tedious, but no wolves or bears showed up at the house this week, so I am going to write about birds. Beautiful birds as it turns out and more specifically grosbeaks. We have two types of grosbeaks here, the Evening Grosbeak and the Rose Breasted Grosbeak. They are brightly colored and somehow exotic looking, as if they should be living in some tropical rain forest as opposed to the north country here in Vermont. And yet, here they are. They're migratory birds and today was the first time we have seen them back here this Spring. The Evening Grosbeak is so named because they are party birds who get up late and then stay up till all hours eating fermented birdseed and getting sloppy drunk. The Rose Breasted Grosbeak, oddly enough, has a bright red breast. They get a lot of work in nature films playing slaughtered birds shot by careless hunters. Their red breast looks like a gunshot wound, so they don't even need makeup. It's a good gig if you can get it.

Tilly the Turtle

2008-05-05T16:11:00.000-07:00

A Snapper Ready for Action

Our snapper Tilly napping at the bottom of the pond in an admittedly poor photo.

When we bought our house, the previous owners told us there was a snapping turtle that lived in the pond. I wasn't convinced for a long time since I walked around the pond a couple of times a day and never saw any sign of a snapping turtle. Then one day last July our daughter-in-law Nancey saw Tilly for the first time. We all got a good look at her as she lolled around the pond and basked on the shore during the next couple of weeks. Finally one day she made a quick meal of Catherine's carefully nurtured water lillies and then disappeared, moving on, we suppose, to one of the other ponds in the area. Snappers apparently can travel pretty good distances overland. I hadn't given her much thought since then until I noticed her sitting on the bottom of the pond during my walk this morning. As you can see from the photo, she had her head hidden under some pond plants, but this was unmistakably our snapper. We now wonder if she didn't hibernate this Winter deep in the mud at the bottom of the pond. We'll never know, but I do know I'm going to put some wire fencing around the two poor water lillies that are trying to come up.

Talkin' Turkey

2008-04-28T16:46:00.000-07:00

Tom struts his stuff.

Tom and a friend,

Tom the turkey and his small flock have been making themselves much more visible in the last few days. Tom is a big tom (pun intended) who I presume is the leader of the flock. First Catherine saw a turkey hen two days in a row pecking at the bird seed that has fallen off our deck. Then around noon today Tom and two other turkeys sauntered across the lawn just below the house. Later this evening the whole flock of 8 turkeys crossed in the opposite direction before strolling into the woods to roost. Despite being Ben Franklin's favorite bird, turkeys are pretty darn ugly, a cross between a vulture and a big chicken. Ben, as you remember, wanted the turkey and not the bald eagle to be our national bird. I can't remember why. Less war-like? Skittish and wary? Easier to hunt and better to eat? In any case, the turkey has become our national bird in a sense. It is after all the traditional meat for both Thanksgiving and Xmas. In a certain sense I guess Ben got his way after all.

Eastern Phoebe's Return

2008-04-27T18:08:00.000-07:00

An Eastern Phoebe

The nest under the eaves, soon filled with chicks we hope.

Last year we had a pair of Eastern Phoebe's raise a brood in a nest that is just under the eaves of our roof as you leave our front door. Phoebes are migratory birds, so we were anxious to see if our couple would be back this year. And good news, they've arrived and have started fixing up their nest! We're looking forward to watching them raise another family this year. Phoebes don't come to feeders, but since ours have set up house at our house, so to speak, we get to see a lot of them. They perch in the pine trees just off our deck, swooping down on insects that have the misfortune of passing too close. We're seeing a lot of our migratory bird friends now. The red-winged blackbirds, grackles and sparrows are all starting to show up in force. A Canadian goose was grazing on the lawn the other day and a pair of mallards have been on the pond or the river for the last three days. The ducks and the geese will move on, but many of the others are back for the Summer.

Spring....At Last!

2008-04-21T17:26:00.000-07:00

Just a little snow left on the wildflower patch.

The snow-free garden...Ready for our blood, sweat and tears.

Common mergansers. Male in front, female in the back.

Yes, it is really Spring up here in the North Country. The wait seemed interminable and was agonizing, but now it's over. Just a week ago I was still walking the dogs in snowshoes. Today I started working in the garden and the yard, and the snow is quickly fading from memory. (See photos above.) We had our second set of ducks on the pond, three common mergansers. There were two females and a male. (Must be members of that polygamous sect down in Texas.) Male and female mergansers look very different, like different species really which is rather surprising. They dive and catch small fish and this group of three cruised our pond for a good 45 minutes, scarfing down minnows and newts. I've come to the conclusion that what with the otters, the minks, the snapping turtle, and the predatory birds all looking for something to eat, it's tough living in our pond. But of course the predators have problems and predators of their own, so we shouldn't be too hard on them.

Otto the Otter cleans up the Pond

2008-04-15T17:56:00.000-07:00

A river otter fresh from a swim.

Very cute...unless you're a fish or an amphibian.

Looking out from our deck at about 3 this afternoon, Catherine noticed something on the pond. At first we both thought it must be a duck. After all it's time for the ducks migrating into the region to start making pit stops on the pond and river, and we saw plenty of them last year. A glance in the binos quickly disabused us of that idea however. What was frolicking and diving in the pond was a good sized river otter. It dove and swam for some time, coming up every once and a while with something in its mouth. We can't say whether Otto had caught the last of our poor trout, a big minnow or some unsuspecting frog just emerging from hibernation. He even got up on the bank at one point before swimming off towards the river via the pond's drainage culvert. I'm guessing Otto is one of our permanent residents; there are some den holes along the far river bank that may well be where he lives. It was an exciting animal to watch for 20 minutes or so, and I'm sure he'll be back. Particularly after we restock the pond with trout. As is often the case, I gleaned the photos from the internet.

Mud Season

2008-04-12T14:07:00.000-07:00

The yard as seen from the shed. Hard to tell where the pond starts.

Typical mud season road.

Why we're buying a 4WD car this year.

The river has gotten over its banks.

The yard flowing into the pond.

A tough Winter for the canoe.

Unfortunately to get from Winter to Spring up here in the North country, you have to go through Mud Season. Mud Season is that quirky time of year when all of the snow pack is melting, but the ground has only thawed down about 6 to 12 inches. What's that mean practically speaking? All of those thawed 6 to 12 inches turn to mud. This is a particularly quaint phenomenon on any of Vermont's 12,000 miles of dirt roads (see photos above). We're fortunate because we live off of a paved road although it reverts back to dirt about 100 yards past our house. I did however have an exciting first hand encounter with muddy back roads on Wednesday when I took the car to have the snow tires taken off (always a big moment of renewed hope around here). Needless to say, without 4 wheel drive it was exhilarating (and terrifying). Our yard seems to be turning into one big mud patch as well. As you can see from the pictures, the yard has become one big sheet of flowing water.

Maple Syrup Creemees!

2008-04-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

Boiling the Sap.

Nectar of the Gods and Vermonters

The sap is running these days up in our neck of the woods and the syrup is boiling in hundreds of sugar shacks big and small. It's "Sugarin' Season" and a sweet season it is indeed after the Winter we've just been through. Sure, there's still 2 feet of snow pack on the ground over most of our yard, but it was over 50 today and the sun was out, so we decided to head to Bragg Family Farm for the first maple creemee of the season. The local "delicacy" up here this time of year is syrup on snow, but quite frankly I am sick of snow, with or without maple syrup. An ice cream cone on the other hand sounded just right. How right it was is hard to explain but just let me say that my creemee was extraordinarily delicious. They weren't boiling sap at Bragg farm today. They still use buckets to collect sap and were out getting another load collected from their 50 acre "sugarbush". (Why a sugar maple forest is called a sugarbush is unknown to me.) Our neighbor down the road was boiling however, and you can just see the steam escaping from the top of his shack in the photo above. He uses plastic piping to collect his sap which is the most common system these days. With the plastic piping you don't have to trudge through the woods with a collecting tank on a wagon emptying buckets. Gravity brings the sap right to your sugar house.

The Flu Comes to Paradise

2008-04-03T13:02:00.000-07:00

We thought we had escaped this year's cold and flu season intact, but first Catherine and then I came down with a pretty vicious case of the flu. Obviously the picture above is not me, but it does give a pretty good idea of how I feel. Catherine has pretty much recovered, and at this point it appears that I may survive as well.

Garden Fence Appears, Spring is Near!

2008-04-01T15:24:00.000-07:00

The newly visible garden fence with the "rainbow of hope" visible just above to the left.

For the first time in months we are able to see the top of our garden fence. Despite a disheartening "1 step forward, 1 step back" dance with Mother Nature, I think this time we may have really turned the corner. Yes I know, we've had 6 inches of snow in the past five days, but over 10 inches of snow has melted in that same time period. It was over 50 degrees today, and incredibly there are no freezing temperatures forecast for the next few days (although it won't be in the 50s). Let the melting begin!

Coyote Crap

2008-03-26T18:11:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. This is decidedly slim pickings for the blog, but I can't just keep putting up posts that talk about how much we wish Spring were here, although we do. I think the coyotes will be happy when Spring arrives as well because from the looks of this coyote scat, they've been reduced to eating a lot of scavenged or leftover bones. In the meantime the dogs and I still strap on the snowshoes and wander out each day to see what we can see in the forest. We've seen lots of turkey tracks from a small flock of about 6 birds over the last few days in addition to the signs of coyotes. There was one sign of Spring today. Our golden retriever took her first swim in the river which is now almost completely free of ice. Stay tuned in the days ahead for a post on maple sugaring. The maple sugar season is about to take off for real after a false start about two weeks ago. The next 10 days are shaping up to be good weather for the sap to run and all of the local sugar makers should be firing up the evaporators.

Winter Project Nears Completion

2008-03-20T18:41:00.001-07:00

O.K., so it's not really "near completion" in the strictest sense of that phrase. On the other hand the bottom portion of the entertainment center / library is in and functioning. You can tell it's functioning because there is a T.V. sitting on it with all of the associated "home theater" boxes installed just beneath the T.V. I still have to finish the drawer fronts and add the upper library shelves. I'm guessing three more weeks, but who knows how long it will ultimately take. After all I'm both lazy and retired. I have to officially thank my son Neil who helped me carry two sections of this monstrous thing up from the shop.

Bent Birches

2008-03-17T18:19:00.000-07:00

All over the North Woods you tend to bump into bundles of bent birches. (See photo above.) They're not always in bunches of course; bent or bowed birches are just as likely to be individual trees. I've often wondered what caused the bowing of the bent birches. Is this a genetic defect? It sometimes appears to have no environmental cause so I guess it could be genetic. On the other hand the bunch of bowed and bent birches above (how's that for an alliteration Whitney?) could possibly have been bent over several years from the weight of successive snows. Whatever the cause of birch bowing and bending, birches are, in my mind, the most beautiful trees in the North Woods. They are lithe and graceful and the paper birches have that surprising bright white bark. I'm not the only one that really likes them either. The sap suckers love the paper and gray birches because I regularly find the birds' geometric pattern of sap holes on those trees. (See one of my earliest posts.) If anyone has a theory on how the birches get bent, I'm all ears.

March Mink Madness!

2008-03-15T07:57:00.000-07:00

The river bank where I saw Mathilda. (Note the 3+ feet of snow pack.)

Mathilda during an earlier photo shoot. (Actually a photo from the internet.)

Yes, we had a real life mink sighting this morning during our regular walk. Mathilda the mink saw me before I had a chance to get the camera out and she quickly scampered down the river bank and into a snow den. Mathilda was smaller than I imagined, about 20 to 24 inches long. Of course she may have a mate around who is bigger. Who knows. What is clear is that our property is a good territory for mink with all of the fish in the brook, the river and our pond. There are also lots of amphibians and birds for the mink to hunt. They will hunt waterfowl and I'm sure they're happy to raid any bird's nest for some eggs. Who knows, maybe we'll have a litter of mink come Spring. I'll keep everyone updated.

Waiting for Godot . . . and Spring

2008-03-11T14:18:00.000-07:00

Scanning the southern horizon for signs of Spring.

Sunbathing Vermont style.

My daughter and daughter-in-law, who live in Boston, have started complaining recently about being tired of Winter, having cabin fever (although they live in a condo) and being just desperate for Spring to arrive. Well, I've got news for them. Spring has arrived in Boston, at least compared to Vermont. I mean come on, there's no snow on the ground in Boston, most days it gets above freezing and their flowers are showing signs of wanting to bloom. Hell, up here in Vermont we call that kind of weather "High Summer!" (Not really, but it does sound suspiciously like June weather.) Up here it still gets down into the single digits at night, 3 F last night, and it looks like I'll be wearing snowshoes to walk the dogs for at least another 4 weeks. Yes, we're still waiting for Spring up here and with it the sugaring season and of course our beloved "Mud Season". I promise everyone at least one blog entry on both of those ...if they ever actually occur this year.

p.s. The pictures above were actually taken last July during a heat wave when it was possible during a brief two week period to go outdoors without getting instant frostbite.

The Great Lady Bug Suicide Pact

2008-03-08T09:37:00.044-08:00

Several lady bugs getting ready to "drink the kool aid".

Up close and personal.

Our house has a lady bug infestation. That's not necessarily a bad thing; I mean, lady bugs are beneficial predators of destructive aphids and they're pretty cute. They don't eat wood like termites either. So all in all we are very accepting of lady bugs except....except when they go through mass die-offs in the house. Apparently lady bugs can over winter in the walls of a house and we are beginning to think that we have the equivalent of a massive lady bug city in the walls of our house. That would be O.K. if these over-wintering lady bugs woke up in late March and headed to the garden. Unfortunately, many of them seem to have seasonal clocks that are out of adjustment and so dozens of them show up in the living room everyday wondering if Winter is over. Unfortunately Winter is not over, and so after hanging around on the windows, the table, the floor, my computer and who knows what else, these unfortunate early adventurers die, littering the living room floor. We hold a brief memorial service and then vacuum them up. Zazou our Golden Retriever likes to eat a few every now and then as well. So there you have it, another reason to hope for an early return to Spring up here in the North Country. To stop the lady bugs from taking over the house!

Spring Comes Early to Vermont!

2008-03-02T16:49:00.000-08:00

World class icycles

Our locally grown glacier slowly curls off of the roof.

That Spring will come early is at least our fervent hope, disappointed so far. As a matter of fact we had the coldest temperature of the year two nights ago, -14 F, and we have gotten a fresh 20 inches of snow in the last 6 days. This has been the snowiest year in recorded history here in Vermont. That includes a record breaking 48" in February. In fact it hasn't snowed this much here since the pliocene era approximately 1.5 millions years ago. Here at our place we've gotten a total of about 10 feet during December, January and February. The snow pack is now a solid 4 feet. In other news, the suicide rate is sky-rocketing across northern New England, and most migratory birds have canceled plans to leave the South before Spring 2009.

Where's global warming when you need it?

The Heartbreak of the World Class Athlete

2008-02-29T14:05:00.000-08:00

Broken bindings - Broken dreams

World class mountaineer in this case. As you can see from the photo above, my trusty Tubbs snowshoes gave up the ghost during this morning's walk. I guess that means they're not that trusty after all. But trusty or not, I am now forced to give up my preparation for an ascent of Mt. Everest during the 2008 calendar year. And I was just getting ready to head to Colorado for some real altitude work. I've canceled those plans since altitude conditioning can be rather expensive. It's too late however for me to cancel the desert training portion of my preparation which is scheduled to start on 15 March in Burkina-Faso, Africa. I'm not sure why there even is a desert training module for the ascent of Everest, but my sponsor (Northrop-Grumman) insists on it and they are paying the bills after all. After locking myself in my bedroom and crying for several hours, I pulled myself together, went downtown and ordered a new set of snowshoes. As some of you may remember, Tubbs used to be made in Vermont. No longer. Tubbs shoes are made in China now like almost everything else on the planet. Fortunately, a company named TSL took over the Tubbs factory and TSL is making great snowshoes just an hour north of us in Burlington. I ordered a set of their snowshoes and they'll be here next week. I'll keep everyone advised of my Everest training schedule for 2009.

Wood

2008-02-26T18:29:00.000-08:00

The Trees

The Forest

The House nestled in the Forest

Wood from the forest waiting to burn

Wood burning.

Working in my wood-shop the other day it occurred to me how central wood is to our lives here in North-Central Vermont. My house is built of wood and surrounded by woods. Those woods shelter and provide habitat for the animals that are of such abiding interest to me. Working with wood is my hobby. And if that weren't enough, we use wood for about half of our heat. Many of the people in this area make their livings from wood. There's are numerous loggers, saw mill operators, and furniture manufacturers all right here in our small town. But in the midst of all this practicality, we shouldn't forget the most important role of wood in our lives which is adding beauty. That's why we live here. The beauty of the forests and the mountains. We are not the hollow men; we are the woodsmen.