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Saturday, April 19, 2014

Pony on the Lam

NOT taken yesterday, lol

Knees flung high and ears pinned back she bolts, freedom in her cross hairs.

Swings by mistake into the heifer yard and stands there, head high and back, snorting down her long, black and white nose.

At the fence that sprang up all around, mane snarled around her ears, forelock blowing in the sharp east wind.

Woof.....woof...snort, snort, whistle, pause to grab a hank of grass, eyes rolling at the prison guards as they approach, treats in nervous fists, halters hanging on arms like spaghetti. 

Throws back her head, to pivot, whirl, and race again, divots of dirt and grass springing from her flying feet.

Halts against the fence again, a wild stallion silhouetted on a mountain ridge, except she's just a little mare, caught by accident against a cattle panel fence.

And none the less adamant because of that.

"No, I will not go back.

No barns for me!

I'm free, I'm free, I'm free.

Don't touch me! Can't you see that I am a mustang now, all wild and woolly, I'm free, I'm free.

Oh, well, if you must insist, gimme another treat and I'll let you buckle on my halter....


But, dang, that was fun. Let's do it again sometime." 

*****Um, no, let's not.....

Friday, April 18, 2014

The Real Stuff on the Bundy Ranch


Lots of misleading and downright wrong information out there on this. Some of it is malicious and some of it is because this isn't something people deal with every day.

However, there are some real good articles written by people who understand what is going on and can make it a little plainer for those of us who don't live near ranch country.

Beef Magazine....a clear explanation of what is going on.

Oregon Green Blog's take on it. 

The BLM on solar power.

Another One




And another one.

Buried tractors that is.

The boss has been rounding up old, derelict machinery for disposal.

Been doing pretty good too, for one guy working alone, with everything else that is going on.

Then it all went south. The JD 4430 slid off the hard ground and buried its butt deep in a rut, with an 892 chopper firmly in tow. With no other tractor, there was no way to get it out.

Enter a kind neighbor who brought his tractor up to pull it out. And got stuck.

So he brought his other tractor up to get them both out.

And then they had to use the skid steer too. Yeah, it is the worst kind of muddy here....the frost going out of the ground, raining, snowing, wet since last year kind of muddy.

Glad the chopper was about the last thing to be dragged down here.

Glad we have nice neighbors.

Glad I was in the house waiting to take yet another meeting and didn't have to go play in the mud too. 

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Throwback Thursday


I talked to this young man last night until almost midnight. Nice visit about the birds, botany, and dialect of the area where is is working now. He has a mean ear for an accent and should fit right in.


Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Snow in April

2012...no daffs here yet
Kind of a bewildering betrayal, especially coming on the heels of eighty-degree weather. It really felt like spring for a while there. Still, this is to be expected in the wilds of Upstate.

We button up the barn again.....not being neophytes to the vagaries of spring in NY, we hadn't stripped things down any farther than to pull down a couple tarps off fans, and crack a few doors.

No biggie to put it all back the way it was.

Since the weather prognosticators got it right this time, the boss has already brought in extra firewood. Extra blankets on the beds. Long johns washed but not put away. (Wouldn't that be folly!)

 Bama's day out the other day....six or seven luscious hours in the barnyard, soaking up sun and gobbling up hay...are just a memory now. We let her out and not Moon so they wouldn't fight and knock each other down. Still pretty slippery even with most of the snow and ice gone. Now she is back in her stall, safe from the weather and warm.

 Spring, it makes a young man's fancy turn to thoughts of love, and an old man's fancy turn to thoughts of homemade spaghetti and meatballs with lots of good Parmesan cheese on top.


Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Can You See Him?


I went out the other night to try to get a photo of the woodcock. No luck there. By the time I went in the house for the camera he had stopped peenting.

I did however, get a magnificent shot of a distant cow flop. In the dusky dimness, just before the sun set, it looked like a bird....really it did. Maybe an odd duck. No, wait, that was the photographer*. I deleted that puppy darned quick I can tell you. Talk about embarrassing.

Anyhow, as I came down across the bowling green I saw this wild beast rampaging in the brush in the old horse pasture.

Can you see him?

Is he a stag? A wild horse? A jackass....no, wait, see above*. 

Or could he be a manifestation of imagination springing from the roots of a wild rose encampment?

What's your best guess?


Rainy Night in NY


We missed the eclipse because it was pouring last night. And because we were asleep, which is a tremendous hindrance to successful photography.



However, we didn't miss the advent of real spring. It was here this morning when we went out. Oh, I know we are returning to wind and rain and even the dreaded "s" word, starting tonight and lingering who knows how long. However, that little rain brought red buds to the maples across the river, green to all the hillsides, and blooms to the wild plum trees. The air is fragrant with it, the birds are frenzied with it, and it puts bounce in our steps and vigor in our plans.




Not much else exciting going on....just year end book work and new career set up. The boy is way down south, having driven through the season yesterday, starting here where it is barely beginning to green and the box elders are just showing first bud, to green grass and cherry blossoms and loads of mockingbirds everywhere.



.

I know I couldn't begin to do his job, but I envy his proximity to the ocean, the presence of real, honest to sunshine spring, and the amazing birds he must be seeing.

I suspect that while we are piling the layers of sweatshirts back on, he will be slathering on sunblock and sporting a tee.

Monday, April 14, 2014

How Sweet it Is


The back porch where we keep the barn boots is abuzz with Carolina wrens. Such noise! Such drama! I cut a porthole in the plastic over the screen door the other day, in order to be able to look out when it is warm, but not lose all its insulation and wind break value when it gets cold again.

I thought they were complaining about a cat and so shut off the inside light so they wouldn't see me and tiptoed over to see what was causing the commotion.

No cat. Just love in the air. She is perched on an old bar of metal outside the window. He is flying in and out of the porch with a bit of some sort of fluff, trying to convince her that the half-built nest inside the hard hat is a condo on the beach. 

She is looking at him like he is nuts and nattering about moving to Nantucket.

Such wealth! Not only did the silly things survive the winter, but they are setting up housekeeping ten feet from my kitchen sink. 

Did I mention that they are loud? He is alternating between something like the buzz of a distant jack hammer and the beeping of a backhoe in reverse. They make me laugh.

Pretty Horses


Ralph's son and daughter-in-law and their delightful daughter (Grandbaby fix...we saw both grandbabies the same day!!!) took us to visit a local horse farm on Saturday. There were lovely foals and handsome mares everywhere we looked.


The owner was gracious enough to let me use these photographs from our day of visiting the thoroughbred farm, where the 2003 Derby and Preakness winner, Funnycide, was born.

It was great fun to try to capture good shots of the antics of the babies....of course I missed more than I managed, but you can see how entertaining they are.....Thanks guys.





One of the stallions

Sunday, April 13, 2014

I Love To See the Little Birdies

Especially around the house and barns and buildings.






THIS however, is ridiculous!

This is only part of the flock of turkey vultures that were perching on the barn roof and in the dead elm tree this morning when I went out.

Shoo! Shoo! Just get the heck out of here!!

Sunday Stills...the Color Yellow

So glad that Ed resolved his computer challenges and was able to continue with Sunday Stills.

Under this old hard hat, which has seen several states
and all sorts of jobs, is a brand new Carolina wren nest


A square in the quilt Grandma made for Alan

Becky's crochet yarn

Gold finch changing his colors
.


I have learned so much and greatly enjoyed the weekly goals in the game.

Here are a few yellow things from this week at Northview.

 

Friday, April 11, 2014

Quick, Quick, Go Watch This


Mallard ducks checking out a heron nest in front of a nest cam. Really funny....especially if you have Becky to narrate, which alas I can't share. 

I Had to Laugh

Can't complain about the birding. New for the year species almost every day
And they put on a fine show for my dear friend yesterday.
The Carolina wren came right down to visit

I was walking over to the barn to help with chores yesterday. Speaking of which, chores are absurdly easy now. As we get all the babies moved up into the "new" (think 1960s) part of the barn, and get a new routine established it takes less and less time and effort to feed, clean, and bed everybody and milk the one cow that is milking.

Anyhow, I was thinking how we, and everybody we have talked to about our change in circumstance, had this silly idea that we would have a lot more discretionary time after the cows went.

The Lord is laying on the lovely these days. What a great season!

Hah! Meetings, taxes, building things, cleaning things up, inventing those new routines, talking with officials about elderly relatives who have been having terrible issues with .....stuff....the days are as busy as ever, or maybe even busier.

 Only a few people have my cell number, but the house phone just rings and rings. And it is almost never the kids or my mama or friends I want to talk to for a while. Nope, it is lenders, and telemarketers, and people from the county about that home health care situation. 

Hopefully all this will level off when the taxes are done, and the upcoming Sprout Brook Auction done, etc. etc.  The boss is one of the auxiliary auctioneers for that one, and has to sell fishnets and hookers all day. (Well actually he sells farm stuff, but there is a long story about the f&h that we tease him about every year.)

Meanwhile, if this is retirement......please may I go back to work?


Even in the evening......

Thursday, April 10, 2014

Working for Uncle Sam


....today, as thousands of folks across America are, particularly small business people.

 So far the phone has been out of order, the printer won't print, and there is a weird smell in the house..............which offered an excuse to at least open up the sitting porch to let in some fresh air. Been closed since last fall.

Robins were not thrilled to have me step out there, but they will just have to deal.

Spent a couple hours fighting with the printer. Old Windows XP computer, old printer, which has always been too complicated to do the simple jobs I need done. Finally got it to print if I only put one paper in at a time. Thank goodness our favorite bookkeeping person is patient with such foibles.

Wish us luck, cuz we are sure gonna need it.


Wednesday, April 09, 2014

Calling all Western Folks


Any insights on the rancher vs BLM story in Nevada? Already have some good friends helping educate me on this, but I could use all the help I can get. There are obviously a lot of sides in this complicated issue, and public grazing is not exactly a familiar concept in Upstate NY.

I'm planning on covering this for next week's Farm Side.

Thanks in advance.

Tuesday, April 08, 2014

Here's Lookin' at You

A̶b̶b̶e̶k̶i̶r̶k̶
Tequila



Lars

Neon Moon

Zipper

Bama Breeze

Castiel
There's one in every crowd....Cedar Key

Why Did the c̶h̶i̶c̶k̶e̶n̶

Very large oops.
Although you can't see it, that left tire is buried completely in mud

er....deer, cross the road?

We don't know, but it's a good thing I was with the boss yesterday. We were hurtling down one of those huge hills over on the very aptly named Corbin Hill Road....don't know of any Corbins, but they sure have hills....

When I saw a deer come bolting up the edge of the road down at the bottom...He didn't notice her.

All I could do was stammer, "Look out, look out, look out." (Do warnings in triplicate carry more emphasis?)

He heard me and reacted quickly enough to save us from would have been a certain collision with at least one of what turned out to be deer in triplicate. Looked like a doe and two of last year's fawns.

They were panicked, whirling and leaping in terror as they hurtled across in front of us. They were a lot more worried about whatever was behind them than they were about the road.

He barely got stopped in time by the way. And of course the guy behind us in the big white truck never saw them and was outraged about the way he hauled on the brakes and set the Durango's nose down like that.

Gotta tell you, besides being afraid of something behind them...it was noon....you expect them to be stupid at twilight and dawn, but not noon...they were starved right down to nothing. Their coats had faded from the usual dark grey of winter to the exact pale color of the dead Canary grass they popped out of. And shaggy. Fur hung in untidy swatches. 

If all the deer wintering down there look that bad I don't imagine there will be much of a fawn crop this year. I kinda wondered why they looked so poor. Although it has been a very prolonged and cold winter there hasn't been all that much snow and there are plenty of alfalfa fields, lots of leftover corn, and acres of woods for them down there. Maybe they were just having a bad hair day. Or maybe there was a pack of coyotes out in that grass.

Two trips to the Lykers pond in two days.
I have been off the farm more in the past week than I have in the past six months.

Anyhoo, although yesterday was not perhaps one of the best we ever experienced, whomever owns the backhoe above has worse problems than we do.


Monday, April 07, 2014

Timberdoodle or Conserving the Grasslands


A few smudges of low-lying cloud, curled and shuffled by daybreak breezes.

Almost-silhouette of a bold-singing robin, so dark yet, too dark for color or light. Still, I can find him by the denser darkness where he perches, not twenty feet from my head.

Off to the south in the old horse pasture, a soft, nasal peent! resonates gently.

It is so noisy here that it isn't easy to hear, but he's out there.......the timberdoodle.

Also known as the American woodcock, one of our favorite birds of early spring.

I think he actually returned the day before yesterday. Thought I might have heard a whisper of sky dance wings just before dawn. 

Yesterday I was sure. He whirled and whistled right above my head as I walked the other doodle, Daisy the Doodlebop dog, as Alan calls her.

Sheer delight. There is nothing else to name it. Like the deepest mystery of the wild woods come calling at our doorstep.He is so welcome to his little corner of our pasture and the tiny, icy pond.

 I have a friend who writes often, of the grassland farming of Upstate NY and what it has to offer birds and wildlife. Not too many yards...certainly not enough...from our eastern boundary looms a housing development, row upon row of matching houses on tiny lawns carved out of field and forest that was also once a farm.

Mention has been made over the years that Northview Farm would fit right in with the developer's plans, room for hundreds and hundreds more little boxes of humanity.

Imagine, should we be unable to hang on to this ground, or should the kids have to sell it when we are under it, what that would mean for the birds and animals that share it with us. 

As I sit here this morning, typing at my kitchen table, I hear robins, white-throated sparrows, chickadees, the woodcock, the Carolina wren and others that have slipped my mind. By the time the sun comes up many other species will join the list. 

Just here at the house, we have five kinds of woodpeckers, nuthatches, finches, a lingering list of the northern sparrows, and literally dozens of others. 

Well over sixty species are counted here on the farm each year. 

Just yesterday I saw something BIG! and white! And flapping across my view from the living room windows. Alas I didn't have my glasses on, but it was either a swan or some kind of heron. Did I mention it was big!

There are more kinds of birds out on the fields proper and a number of species I don't recognize yet, by call or flickering outline, flashing through the leaves. I am sure with more expert ears and eyes than mine the count would hit at least seventy...some breeding, some just passing through or stopping to grab a snack.

The decline of upland birds in America is marked and documented and drastic. A wildlife biologist sat at this very table a few years ago and linked the dramatic decline of the whippoorwill to the decline of small farms. And when is the last time you heard one?

As farms fail, bobolinks, night hawks, and many other once-common species continue to dry up and vanish. I worry.....The number of viable small farms that have given up and gone out has left an alarming panorama of vulnerable acreage just begging for development. Mile upon mile of it. Should the economy by some amazing sleight of hand, somehow recover....how fast will the houses follow?

Top twenty common declining birds...some of these used to be common here. Some of them still are.

Whippoorwill research, author of which told me about a lot of this.



Sunday, April 06, 2014

I Miss Sunday Stills...

So here are some early Sunday morning shots from the pond up near Lykers. Never been there quite so early before.



Update!!! It's back!




Saturday, April 05, 2014

Lookin' Out my Back Door



For those of you old enough to remember the song...we used to play it back in the band days. I do not smoke whatever engendered those lyrics, so we make do with the birds and wild things here in NY. It was always a happy, foot stomping good song, just the same. We played a lot of CCR...the boys were all good musicians, but three major chords suited me just fine.

Now the view out the back door is far different than in the music days.


A soft rain is falling. Warm, gentle, damp, and soggy. I keep listening for the woodcock, but no peent rings from the horse pasture yet. If you see him, tell him he's way late.

I was hoping to see a duck or two for my annual all-farm bird species count. When I was walking the delicate Miss Daisy, didn't a pair of mallards quack noisily right over my head. Nice of them. I see teal every darned day, but I'm not good enough on ducks to know which ones at the distance. Fast flying little bullets that they are.



And the turkeys are strutting out on the hill. Too dark and rainy for much of a photo, but you get the idea. Lots of ladies in the rose bushes, two big Toms flashing their wares, and a little jake puffing his tail when he thinks he can get away with it.

Spring truly has arrived and not a minute too soon.