Stained Glass Window

Tamarack

On the Dacks.....

Alan and I did a leaf peeping trip yesterday to Malone and back, with many side trips along the way.............

Really we were looking for moose, but the only one we saw was on the side of a brick chimney. 

Alan did see a White-tail buck near the town of St. Regis that could easily have passed for a moose. He declined to even try to count the tines on its antlers. Wrong side of the car for me, but it takes a biggun to make him exclaim like that. Bet that's a deer not too many people have seen in its lifetime.

The trees in some places were nearly bare, but up around Tupper Lake and points north even the maples were flaunting red locks like a girl with a mirror. 

In this autumn season and early in the spring the forest reveals the secrets of its species makeup. The rest of the time you have to look closely to tell the trees apart.

In summer everything is green. The evergreens make themselves known by the darkness of their needles, but everything else looks pretty much the same. In winter greys and browns rule, stark against the snow.

Beech

However, now in this time of decline, even the beech trees, which tend to blend, have turned the rich brown of a doe's pelt, only shining as if each leaf had been polished one-by-one. They stretch pointy fingers toward the road as if waving goodbye to passing humans.

Bright maples look as if someone had taken a carton of construction paper from a kindergarten closet, snipped it into leaf shaped pieces, and tossed them into the sky. You couldn't name all the colors even if you tried.

Yellow poplar and silvery-gold tamarack glow like candles, especially among the dark pine groves they often augment. Yesterday even the lichens shone bright pewter on the banks along the highways, all puffed with the importance of getting pumped for winter.

Oaks are more subtle than the big name trees, but their reds and browns shine like burnished metal. Sometimes each leaf has as many colors as any maple, stippled in bands of red and gold and brown. 

It was cloudy and rainy in some spots, but that just made the bright trees pop.

After a few hours of such largess, eyes are nearly sated with it all, until a tree watcher is ready to be home asleep, to dream all night of dazzling colors. 

Today a cold harsh rain is falling, and even walking the busy doggies is a misery. So thankful to have memories of yesterday's fire of autumn leaves to warm the corners of my mind and keep the cold at bay.

Holy Beaver

Was my late boss's favorite exclamation back when I worked as a vet tech. Whatever happened with the dogs or cats, it was "Holy beaver," every time.

That was pretty much what we said when we saw this luxury beaver condo up in Franklin County today. I figure they watch lumberjack competitions and curling from Canada on it.....

Betwixt

Some of our big trees for Merri. On the right a Colorado Blue Spruce
On the left the Honey Locust The tower on the house is seventy some feet high....

It's not hard to get out and about before the sun comes up these days...in fact it is harder to wait for sunrise to walk the busy doggies. It comes up so darned late and so far to the south now.

Honey Locust. Lots of pods this fall

This morning, although a few crickets buzzed and whined of winter soon to come, no birds were awake yet, not even the crows or robins. (It is odd this warm, weird autumn, to stand in thickly humid weather and hear White-throated Sparrows whistling up Old Sam Peabody out in the bushes.)

As I put Finn on his short term tie...he barks if I leave him in the house while I take Mack out to his.....I heard, down in the neighbor's brushy jungle, a coyote pup singing a short and thready song. Hmmm....might be a good idea to leave the yard lights on this morning. Mack needs time to run on the cable or he goes all Jack Russell terrier in the house, which is never a good thing. I just as soon he didn't turn up on their menu though.

I heard more howls from the east faint but not far, while the roosters began to crow in the old heifer barn to the west.The guinea fowl were calling buckwheat long before the sun came up. I stood a long time under the Winesap apple tree, just listening to what was happening so early in the morning.

It was as wild and countrified a wake up as anyone might desire.

And yet.....to the east where the coyote pups were trying out for chorus, some implement of man's work was beeping a warning as it backed up to something somewhere.

I had to listen hard and sharp to even hear those coyotes calling....trucks grumbled one behind the other up and down the Thruway. Trains squalled warnings at every crossing to the north of us and there are very many trains. Only to the south was it quiet. Only there did the sound of commerce going at it hammer and tongs not quite drown out the dawn.

We are so betwixt here in the valley....surrounded by all things natural and comforting...besieged by all things metal and mercenary...and needing both to survive the days.

I would shrivel away to nothing without the wild and the gardens and creatures.

And I would get awful hungry without food, and cold without clothing, and tired of not traveling without fuel, and really, really miss all the other goods and services carried by the trains and cars and trucks that roll past in an unending river of stuff.

Guess we are required to have it both ways in the modern world.....oh, well, we need never get bored, that's for sure

I have a Confession to Make

See these guys? Back in the day I had dogs that would put them right in your lap if you so desired, and sometimes even if you didn't desire. Mike would work the worst bulls and meanest cows we had...except number 171, who had it in for him...and he did the best he could with her. We had dogs that got 'er done. Even Gael, who was pretty much a wienie, at least wanted to work, and tried her darnedest.

However this guy.....this cute, fluffy, nicely housebroken little leg breaker....butter wouldn't melt in his mouth and all, but he will knock you over in a heartbeat.

Yeah, he is scared spitless of them. Good thing I don't need a good stockdog, because I sure don't have one.

Evolution

One by one the porches on this place...this house has more porches than a toad has warts....and pretty darned warty porches at that....are being rebuilt and painted and made all spiffy and nice, mostly by Alan with help from his dad.

This rebuild was somewhat more exciting than is necessary from a mother's point of view.

I didn't get photos, but before this was started the porch decking was completely rotted and falling off the house and there wasn't a whole heck of a lot holding the roof up. At one point an inopportune movement of the skid steer tore the roof loose from the house and nearly dropped it on the kid.

Not good.

It is pouring today, so the mostly finished....some flashing needs to be placed...photo looks kind of grim. However, it is a gigantic improvement over its previous state.

They had an extra railing post and set it on the front like the figurehead on a ship so I can hang plants on it next summer too.

Ain't it handy having a guy who works construction hanging around with nothing to do but fix our stuff? And a handy dandy assistant too.....

The Peggy Channel

S-T-R-O-N-G Coffee

We were innocently drinking our instant coffee just a little bit ago, when Finn decided that we needed something a little stronger.

So he tossed Snoopy up in the air and with utterly perfect aim, landed him in the coffee water.

As you can see, Snoopy is barely recognizable as himself after a couple months of entertaining Finn. I'm afraid that coffee will be a little too strong for me.....

Thunder in Autumn

Last night about bedtime I saw a news report from up west in NY. Lightning strikes at the rate of 200 in a short time!

By the time it got here a bit later it was impressive enough, but nothing like that. Prolly only 199 strikes for us. It was bright enough that when I stopped at the window on the stair landing I was blinded by a flash and had to stand for a bit until I could see again. It was such a humdinger of a storm that poor Peggy had to come upstairs for a hug.

Cape May lighthouse

This morning the Internet was all jumbled up and it took a while to get connected and get the Farm Side off to the paper. Was the UN or our trusty government messing with my connection or was it just the storm? Probably the latter, since I don't have much damaging information under my control.

This week's Farm Side is about a new ballot initiative in Massachusetts, which will ban a number of traditional animal confinement systems.

You can read about it here

And here

And here. Note the sources and amounts of money involved here. Who says you can't buy votes? Even if buying votes is technically illegal, you can buy advertising and sometimes that amounts to the same thing.

Meanwhile, it's foggy and warm and pretty quiet this morning, perhaps because of the fog.....have a good day as you go about your travels. With my writing job done for the week, I'm not sure how I'll spend the day, but no doubt there is something that needs doing.

Beach bling

Running Away to Sea

We've been talking lately about Cape May, NJ.

How the hawk watch is there, and fall migration is supposed to be pretty spectacular.

This tiny, thumbnail-sized crab really made my day

Saturday night, Alan said, "Let's go tomorrow."

So we did. 

The drive down was uneventful if long. Cape May is something pretty unexpected for New Jersey, more like you might expect a small town in Maine to be. Lots of sea food restaurants, wonderful dunes, people on bikes and walking, and the sea......

Green-winged Teal

Yeah, that does it for me. The sea. You could see the light from miles away...

You don't want to know how much sun block, plus hat, flannel shirt, etc. was needed to get me through a day of tromping along sea shell and sand paths, wading down the deep sand to the beach, and staring up at eagles and warblers. Let's just say on the way home the sunblock melted and ran in my eyes.

It hurt.

However, what a beautiful place. The birding didn't really measure up to Montezuma. Maybe the time of day...noon is not the best for birds....

Or the big crowds....there were a lot of people.

But for whatever reason, we saw few species that we don't either see at home or at the swamp. They were tame and close though, all the better for photography,

And it was so pretty...so unexpected....so nice. On the way home we listened to a Harry Potter book on Audible and a good thing too. As nice as the drive down was the return was equally horrendous. Traffic! Terrible, terrible traffic!

Still, it was a day I will remember for a long time to come. Alan is getting pretty good with that camera.....photos are labeled as to which of us took them....

The Camera Bag Saga

I promised you the story of this camera bag for yesterday, but we ended up doing a wild road trip, so here it is today.

We had done most of the big loop around the various impoundments at Montezuma Saturday, when we decided to stop at the new viewing area near the Thruway. It is a great place to look out at some previously hard to see areas around the swamp.  

There, unattended on the deck, was this nice Nikon camera bag. Alan peeked inside but didn't see any ID. We puzzled what to do. We didn't want to just leave it there to be stolen, but we didn't want to look like we were taking it either.

And yes, a guy who pulled up right after us said, "If they were dumb enough to leave it, they deserve whatever they get."

Since we didn't share his opinion, Becky found a phone number for the visitor center and Alan called them while I watched over the bag.

The nice lady at the center said to just bring it down and she would put it in the lost and found.

So we did.

Once there we turned it over and she searched the whole bag. Hidden deep inside were business cards for a photographer, whom she called right away.

The lady who owned the bag hadn't even realized yet that she had left it (with several lenses inside), at the refuge, but she sure was glad that she would be able to come back and pick it up.

And we were kinda glad that we saw it first.