Color me Mountain

 I'm a valley person. Grew up in the foothills, but moved to this valley very young....and kept coming back here time after time. Farming is good in river valleys, warmer, moister, better dirt all around.

Mountains are cold and bony, hard and stony, and unforgiving of crop production. Hike the hidden high places and you will see skeletal remains of failed homesteads, foundations drifted over with leaves; vines and trees clawing at chimneys, and pulling them down. The mountains were hard on the folks that settled this area, while the valleys gathered them in and helped them grow..

Mountains are irresistible though.

In my life, there have always been forays closer to the peaks, some lasting longer than others. I lived in a cabin once for a few years...up there....

And to folks who love them, no matter how far from the mountains we move in time or space, they always sing that seductive song every time we see them in the distance.

It grows louder and louder the higher we climb until we can hear it all around us...or see it, because mountain music can be seen, smelled, heard, and felt.

We experienced it strong and fine this past Sunday. Good to know it's always there. 

Turn up your Sound

.....For the full experience of this second short clip of Auger Falls. It was so loud that it was hard to converse even high above the water where we were. 

Alan was here before and he says the water was relatively low yesterday. I guess when the spring runoff is taking place it shoots right to the top of the rock channel and is more than exciting enough for Adrenalin  junkies .

Far as I'm concerned, low water is plenty enough for me. 

Not Moose of the Adirondacks

Notopthalmus viridescens...okay, okay, Eastern Newt

If I Kill it

Then it's mine, right?

Cuz  I brought home dinner!

I'll share!

Moose Hunting in America

Indian Lake overlook

Another one of those days when our son got up and said, "Let's go....Montezuma or the 'Dacks?"

Well, we just did Montezuma and he loves the Dacks, so off we went leaf peeping and hunting for moose. What with the season of love for even-toed ungulates well under way, there have been a number of moose sightings recently, as near by as Broadalbin and Northville.

Long Lake

We were optimistic...well, not really. The odds of actually seeing a moose are extremely thin, but we saw a lot of other good stuff and had a lot of fun. 

We drove to Tupper Lake and checked out the Wild Walk. Way too crowded for our taste so we passed it up and headed back south.

Great Blue Heron Tupper Lake

First we went hunting for the Cedar River Flow. I was taken camping there at least forty years ago and have looked for the place several times since without finding it...no cell service up there so no use trying to look it up. I never remembered to look it up at home...

The road sparkled like magic...or new-fallen fluffy snow

A handful of the fine sand from the road.
You can see the garnet, quartz and other minerals in my hand...do click

This time we drove and drove and drove on a road we had taken once before and given up on. This time after 17 miles of twisting, winding, climbing, falling narrow dirt road we found it.....

So profoundly changed that without the sign I wouldn't have known it.

So we took a short hike and some nice photos and enjoyed the amazing scent of the woods and then....

We headed south again.

Along the way Alan pulled into a little trailhead north of Wells and we hiked a ways up hill and down to Auger Falls.

None of these photos begin to do justice to the wild, whipping, churning water. The ground shook. It was scary, but so worth the hike.

Rainbow over Auger Falls

And then we came home tired, but full of images of red and gold and wonder.

Fiery Skies and Clever Guys

Sunset yesterday was amazing. We were done for the day but when that pink and golden light came shining through the windows I went right back out to see. It was gorgeous!

It faded to pink as the sun set and a skein of geese came honking over. I tried for photos, but by then it was just too dark. Not too dark to see though....so lovely against all that cotton candy pink and blue...and never too dark to hear. There is no sound as evocative as the haunting cry of passing geese.

As you know, we have already seen some heavy rain and more is quite likely. I stepped outside to find this....what you gonna do when your baling twine needs protecting from the weather???? 

Why, put it in the gas grill of course...

What else?

I mean, seriously?

Will Joaquin?

Trying to reason with hurricane season

That is the question. After a dry couple of months we got all the missing rain over a day or two.

Pretty rough on the driveway. 

I have a little straight-sided bucket outdoors that acts as a sort of low tech rain gauge. Just under five inches of water in it right now. I pretty much trust that figure because the water in the garden pond was way below the bottoms of the plant pots and now they are well down into it.

Everyone is speculating wildly on the course of Hurricane Joaquin. They say he's a bad one.

They say he may make landfall here.

Or maybe not. He may bring a lot of rain and beat us up inland or he may go on a pelagic tour and count Jaegers and Petrels off the coast.

Either way we are getting ready. Making the obligatory visit to the grocery store for milk and bread. Getting the hay out of the baler chamber and wrapping it all up in a big hay canvas. BTW Alan, someone made sure that the canvases at the barn are folded up neatly ready to use or put away....I'll bet you can guess who.

One of those tarps is coming over to the house in case of emergency. 

Meanwhile it is the most beautiful day you could imagine. Cool, crisp, breezy, with very clean air. 

While I was hanging up laundry I watched the sky for a bit though, and it was fairly boiling. Ropes of jet trails tangling with whipping cirrus clouds and the whole mess so dizzying I felt like tipping over.

Wow! It may be nice down here but stuff is happening up there.

Guess I will put the brightest face on it I can and hope that our wanderers get home safe and Joaquin feels like an ocean voyage..

And maybe Ol' Joey boy will blow in some interesting birds.

Take care!

Research

This week's Farm Side sources.

World Dairy Expo

Punkin Chuckin

The World's Largest Corn Maze

Agriculture is important work, but it can be fun too.

Wouldn't you Think

That these deer would not want to get this close to a freezer? Because, yeah, that is a freezer there.



However, there is also a garden...the fawns are in it..... and I guess they must figure that it's worth the risk.

Hold on to Summer

This may be the last warm day. Heavy rains tonight with colder temps to follow. It's downright dry, but I can't say I like to see the rain get started. It tends to forget how to stop.

When we went to sleep yesterday local farmers were chopping corn in the dark, headlights on the machinery lighting up the night. I saw a video one area farm shared of the corn shivering and shaking as it was gathered by the corn head to be chopped for silage. 

It sure took me back. If I chopped all day, watching closely to line up the rows of corn with the openings in the head, come sleepy time I would see corn shaking before my eyes all night.

 It always bugged me, but then I didn't chop all that much corn, being more of a hay specialist. Sometimes I went a whole summer and only sheared one or two shear bolts on the chopper. The boss was kind of proud of me. And although it required a bit of concentration to keep track of the tractor engine, the chopper head....feed rolls, little pointy-toothy-pick-up things, the chopping mechanism itself, the direction of the discharge chute, how full the wagon was, and whether all the wheels were still on everything and still turning, I more or less liked chopping hay. After a few years at it I got almost as good as a 13-year-old boy at backing the chopper up to a wagon so I could hook it up myself...and then along came a boy and I didn't need to do it any more. 

Never had to do any of it in the dark though, although the guys did. However, I can remember at least one time when the kids were small and we lived down in town, packing all three of them up and going up in the fields after ten PM to find the boss who hadn't come home...I was real scared I'll tell you.

He was fixing a forage wagon head by flashlight, so he could get the load off before all the chains were pinned by the weight. He was not in any way a happy man....

Anyhow, on farms around here it's hurry up, hurry up, beat the bad weather and get 'er done.

I spent a few minutes on the sitting porch this morning...been too busy for much of that lately...and picked up a year bird-Field Sparrow-but I have a bad case of too restless to sit still.

And you know what that means. Something is up weatherwise.

The boss needs to get a load of hay off today. Guess I, or Becky and I, will put it on the elevator because the hay is too high up near the roof to just dump it in.

So I guess today will involve hurrying up to hang on to the last vestige of summer before things change.....

Blue Monday

The color, not the farmer. We couldn't have asked for a nicer weekend. For me hitting Montezuma for a few hours of birding with Alan is like shopping in the Big Apple for ladies of a different stripe. Seeing a real ooh-ah bird was just frosting on the cake. And having a good friend, who birds the area often, reluctant to even believe that we had seen it was pretty cool too.

Then yesterday we got to see a number of favorite farm and professional friends at a customer picnic provided by our longtime...thirty years worth...favorite farm vet (and particularly good friend outside the business world as well.)



That all made for a splendid day. Alas, I was so sleepy by 8 PM, after several nights of not sleeping well, that I totally missed the totally awesome eclipse. I wanted to see it so bad, but I just couldn't stay awake anywhere near late enough.

Today it's back to the fall is here hurry up. Tomatoes to process, lotsa laundry, plants to clean up and bring in safe from the coming frosts.

Puppy to pet and clean up after, grumpy baby off to visit her other grandma and grandpa who will see to the spoiling for the day.

Hope you have a good one!

A Big Day

Female Northern Harrier on the hunt. Photo by Alan

Like Darth Vader all in brown that was almost black she sailed low over the marshes, teetering on long, straight wings.

Slowly, slowly she slipped up on the pool of puddle ducks, then, BAM! she stooped, looking for a cheap meal.

Teal etc. explode out of the water. I took this one.

With a thunderous clapping of wings and a flume of flying water a hundred puddle and diving ducks hit the air....Green and Blue Winged Teal, Redheads, Wood Ducks, a Mallard or two, a single Mallard/Black Duck hybrid (probably, purple speculum, light tan bird)....she put them all to flight.

Duck soup. Just for fun if you want to, click and embiggen this one
 and see how many species you can find.
And let us know, because we are far from experts and always looking for advice!

The Northern Shovelers and Grebes just sat, unconcerned by her attack.

All day she plied the open water, putting the small ducks up and hunting kind of casualy, but we never saw her take one.

The female Northern Harrier was not the high point of another day at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge though.

The big bird so far....we are still going through photos looking for lurkers in the cattails...was a large brown shorebird we spotted in the last big pool on the right. We looked.

And looked

And looked at it for quite a long time. Other birders pulled up behind us, trained lenses on the nearly empty space, and moved on uninterested. But we were curious.We took pictures.

At home I looked up what might be available ...birds that occur regularly at the refuge....and when I saw a photo of a Hudsonian Godwit I thought, "Yes! That's it!" 

Put it up on FB Bird ID and so it was. Another exciting lifer for both of us. There are more sandpipers and shorebirds to be sure of and more duck photos to pore over.....

We saw:

Canada Geese
Ring Billed Gulls
A Blue Jay
American Goldfinch
Tree Swallows
Mallards

Great Blue Heron
American Crow

Bald Eagle
Red-winged Blackbird
Northern Harrier
Green Winged Teal
Pied Billed Grebe
American Coot
Wood Duck
Blue Winged Teal
Northern Shoveler
Killdeer
American Wigeon (another lifer)
Greater Yellowlegs
Great Egret
Mallard/Black Duck hybrid...probably
Rock Dove
Redhead

Hudsonian Godwit

It was a great day! Thanks, Alan!