In Another World

Cold, clear, and sunny this morning. Managed to trip over the dog, no harm to her, no improvements to me....but I will be okay. Just a few bumps and bruises. Concrete is not forgiving.

Meanwhile, there is another world parallel to ours, which we experience pretty much every day. Alike in some ways, different in many others

It is astounding how the county has changed in the past 20 years or so. We used to have to go to Lancaster, now Lancaster has come to us. Used to be dozens of small English farms were scattered everywhere. Fifty or sixty cow dairies, pastures, small square hay bales, and concrete silos or Harvestores. Farm machinery auctions and cattle sales were abundant and a lot of fun for participants and spectators. 

Almost all of them are gone now, leaving a handful of larger farms and hundreds of little Amish sawmills, tiny dairies with communal milk houses, goat, sheep and horse farms and greenhouses. 

Like everything in life it has its good and not quite as good aspects. We share the roads with both tanker trucks, flying along taking up most of the road and wagons with a milk can or two, horses limping along at a snail's pace. It can be very scary driving at night. No matter how slow you go it isn't easy to see unlit farm wagons drawn by bay or brown horses...at least most of the buggies have some form of light now.

On the other hand it is good that the land is farmed still and nice to be able to buy produce along the road. We froze many pints and quarts of winter squash this year thanks to a neighbor who sells his less than perfect ones along the roadside. The better ones go up to the big auction up west.

One way or the other change is constant....might as well embrace it.

All the Sauce that's fit to Print

While enjoying the first rhubarb crisp of the season I pondered an age old question. Is rhubarb a vegetable or a fruit? Because if it is either, then maybe this amazing concoction of sugar, butter, cinnamon, oatmeal and flour, along with, of course, some rhubarb, could be considered a healthy snack, rather than the breakfast of slackers.

The first definition of fruit I came across read thusly, “the sweet and fleshy product of a tree or other plant that contains seed and can be eaten as food.”

Hmm...I can see rhubarb failing pretty resoundingly in most of those attributes. It certainly isn’t sweet, having a pucker factor that is off the charts for sourness. It’s pretty fleshy, but doesn’t grow on trees. No seeds either. It can indeed be eaten, but so can tofu and that certainly isn’t fruit.

Then how about a vegetable. Veggies are even better for you, right?

The same source said, “a plant or part of a plant used as food, typically as accompaniment to meat or fish, such as a cabbage, potato, carrot, or bean.”

Nope, not a bean, although certainly part of a plant used as food. Not served in accompaniment to meat or fish either and much tastier than cabbage, when served with enough brown sugar to ward off the tang.

I decided to pursue this conundrum a bit farther.

According to Wikipedia, that sometimes flawed guru of the Internet, the plant is an herbaceous perennial with poisonous leaves. Okay, I knew the part about the leaves. As virtual toddlers at our grandpa’s knee my brothers, cousins, and I all learned that you don’t eat the leaves.

We also learned the culture of the plant, following grandpa around his tangled and magical garden, which was much given to wild things and sour things that could be mystically turned into culinary wonders by his partner in life (and grandchildren), my dear grandmother. He grew red currants, which are berries, so sour they would knot your eyebrows if you ate them without sugar.

However, what amazing jelly grandma made with them. I wish I had a patch today. Back when that garden was growing on what now is a barren city lawn, I learned to use currents to extend raspberries, which were always hard to come by, to make jelly as lovely as if only bramble fruit was involved.

Grandpa also grew pinksters, the wild azaleas of the mountains, which produced showers and fountains of pristine pink blossoms every single spring. I saw my first Ovenbird under one of them a fistful of decades ago and have never forgotten. Good thing, because they are gone from the lot along with the fruits and flowers.

Rhubarb is certainly perennial. You can spot the foundations of long gone farm houses by the lilac bushes still waving purple and white blooms above the fireweed and burdock. And by the seed heads of the rhubarb patch that provided desserts for farm folks whose names might be carved in stones in some long forgotten cemetery nearby. The people are gone and maybe forgotten. The buildings have long since fallen into their foundations or been consumed by flames or cannibalized for lumber.

However, the herbaceous perennial still thrives.

I soon discovered that the Chinese were thought to have used the plant medicinally for centuries. Certainly without the addition of some sort of sweetener it rivals the bitterest of remedies. The plant was mentioned in an herbal remedy treatise that was written 2700 years ago, and is said to have come to Europe via the Silk Road, where it arrived during the 14th century.

According to the Rhubarb Compendium, “Marco Polo, who knew all about the Chinese rhubarb rhizome, talked about it at length in the accounts of his travels in China. So much of interest on the past of Marco Polo is accounted for by the fact that in those days Venice was an extremely important trading center, and that as a result of eastern Arabic influence, Chinese rhubarb was already widely used in European pharmacy, especially in the school of Salerno.”

The plant is said to have first been cultivated on this continent in Maine around 1790 from whence it soon spread to Massachusetts and beyond, eventually arriving in my grandpa’s garden in Johnstown, NY sometime during the last century. However, another account claims that the plant arrived via seeds sent to a man in Philadelphia during the 1730s.

I was astonished to learn that there is a Rhubarb Triangle in England. My thoughts first sprang to mysteriously vanishing desserts. Certainly the huge dish of rhubarb crisp I concocted for a visit from our boy and his girlfriend disappeared in a most confounding fashion. However, the one in England is a 9-square mile area where the plant is grown in the dark in greenhouses, supposedly rendering a sweeter and tenderer product. The stalks are plucked by candlelight to keep the plants as dark as possible.

I kinda like the stuff we grow in the flowerbed right out there in the sun and all but to each their own.

Either way rhubarb is tasty when prepared properly, but none of this answers my question about my unconventional breakfast.

Imagine my dismay when I discovered that the part of the rhubarb plants that we turn into desserts and sauces and wonderful pies is in fact a leaf petiole.

A stem.

Nowhere have I seen stems mentioned as health food, although a good timothy stem to chew while walking out to the hay field is probably a fine aid to rumination of the mental variety.

I guess I will have to admit that rhubarb crisp for breakfast is at least as decadent as potato chips and milk, which are known around here as the breakfast of champions.

But, wait. There’s oatmeal in it. What could possibly be healthier than that? And butter is a fine, upstanding, dairy fat, said to contribute to a healthy body weight and all.

Whew, I was worried for a minute there.

Last Year's Show Lamb and this Year's Happy Girl

Peggy and her lamb, Fire, who is a very nice lamb indeed.

Because I Can

Another old Farm Side....

Moose Quest

Did someone mention Maine? If you’re a farmer, you probably thought of potatoes, Katahdin sheep, or maybe lobsters, which although not exactly farm animals, are included under the heading of farms, fisheries, and forests.

And if you are us, you thought about moose. We want to see one, and have been chasing the Adirondacks in hot pursuit for years. Thus the other day when our intrepid lad suggested that he and I go to Maine to look for moose, I figured I would learn a little
about the state’s agriculture while having a heck of a time. And that is just what we did.

We did not see any potatoes though, not so much as a single French fry in a fast food parking lot. We did, however, spot a couple of Ring-Billed Gulls perched on a lamp post
as if they were waiting for them.

Does that count?

In case you were wondering, potatoes came to the New World in two large cedar chests,
sent in 1621 to Governor Francis Wyatt of Virginia at Jamestown, by the Governor of Bermuda, Nathaniel Butler.

Potatoes are the second most popular food item in America. We each eat around 135 pounds a year, about a potato a day. I’ll bet we consume the majority of them in the same form desired by gulls too. 34% of the 46 billion pounds raised in the USA each year are consumed as frozen products, as in “Do you want fries with that?”

We saw no Katahdin sheep either, although we saw a good number of the regular, fluffy white kind. I remember the Katahdin brand of sheep from the days of attending sheepdog
trials and trying to train my own Border Collies up to some semblance of usefulness.
They are hair sheep, no need for shearing, and used largely for meat production.
Michael Piel developed them in Maine with an eye toward clearing power lines
and rights-of-way without spraying or mowing. In the sheepdog world they are sometimes bred to produce flighty, challenging, sheep that make the dogs sit up and take notice.

We saw a lot of wild country, and many pretty and prosperous looking farms. We passed streams and ponds and lakes, each filled with limpid, whiskey-colored water, sliding along all smooth, and pretty as a doe’s eyes looking out of the tangled woods.

We saw Long Tailed Ducks, which were once known as Old Squaws. I’ll bet I’m not the only birder who sees a flock and has to mentally change gears to call them by their new politically correct name either.

There were Snow Buntings too, pretty tan-and-white birds, which are a great treat for our local Audubon Christmas Bird Count some years. (However until then, the far, far north is a good place for them and their chosen weather.)

But no moose.

We saw busty mountains, draped with shawls of lacy snow, shouldering aside the clouds

that circled their majesty in the cold autumn air. I guess they like to take a higher view of things or something. Mount Washington is pretty impressive by the way and I just loved Mount Katahdin, after which the sheep are named.

Across all the New England states the oaks still clung bitterly to their leaves, releasing them a reluctant twigfull at a time. They whirled in the wind, trending up more than down,
bamboozling birders into looking for winged rarities. If I had been counting birds there would have been a lot of hash marks in the line labeled “flying oak leaves”.

We discovered that farm houses in Maine are connected to barns and outbuildings by enclosed walkways. What does that say about winters there, I wondered.

Still no moose.

So we decided we would go to Moosehead Lake. Gotta be moose there, right?

Said lake is accessed via the so-called Golden Road. The Garmin, which in our minds we referred to in slightly less kindly terms, insisted that the GR was a virtual expressway, going around the lake, and taking us out to another road.

She lied. 

The Golden Road is a logging road, built to accommodate log trucks, which are reputed to travel at high speeds, claiming the right of way over people from NY driving Camaros. (Everyone offroads in muscle cars, right?)

Thank goodness it was Saturday, when the loggers are parked for the weekend. However hunters traveling at supersonic speeds made up for any lack of logging excitement.

The GR is paved in just enough places to lure the unwary into proceeding down her rocky, muddy, pitted, potholed, lumpy, bumpy, no-guardrails-over-hundred-foot drops, and no shoulders length.

If you are crazy enough you can drive on her at speeds approaching ten or fifteen miles an hour.

Naturally we did so. 

For fifty-nine miles.

Because, through road and all.


Then came the checkpoint, manned by a dour fellow with a strong Canadian accent. Seems that after the first 59 glorious miles, the “highway” becomes a toll road.

14 bucks for the two of us to proceed….to Canada...which is where the road ends up.
(See, it is a through road, just not quite what Lady Garmin bamboozled us into believing.)

We declined the pleasures of foreign travel and turned around to drive 59 miles back to civilization.

Time to go home. On the way south we passed bogs full of Tamarack trees spreading golden skirts across watery purple dance floors. Winterberry Holly lent brilliant red candles to light the show.

Milkweed by the acre, for all the world like autumn cotton, was setting seed for next summer’s Monarchs.

What with the 75 MPH speed limit we saw a lot of roadkill too, mostly porcupines and foxes, but at one point a deer, actually suspended in a tree where it had been flung willy-nilly
by someone going faster than was wise.

No moose though.

We will be calling it MooseQuest, this strange desire to see the great even-toed ungulate
of the Northwoods.

And someday, just maybe, we will actually find one.

Unsaved

For nearly 22 years I was paid....modestly...but paid....to write editorial content on agriculture. I scanned news from all over the world for trends, items of interest, differing viewpoints, and everything I could find on agriculture.

At first when I started this blog, I delved into the same realm, but as time went by I saved most...not all, but most...of the politics side of things for the paper, and the stories of home and wild nature for here.

However, with that outlet for opinion and news gone now, I am afraid interspersed with birds, dogs, cows, and grand babies, you may find more of that other stuff here now...like the story on solar yesterday.

Same deal on Facebook...I apologize..... I am a terribly opinionated animal.

Nuff said. 

Meanwhile, this is interesting in light of this. The latter story is an old one, but probably still matters. I suspect that the harassment intended to disperse the crows may be doing them a favor in light of the disease. Tens of thousands in close proximity seems likely to increase the sharing of sickness. 

It won't be long until the crows spread out on their own anyhow, as nesting time will soon be here. They can be downright staggering on winter roosts though. Used to be a big one over by the old county courthouse in Fonda and holy cow! Noisy, messy, and incredibly numerous.

BTW, I get a lot of my personal weather information from crow-go-out and crow-go-home time here at the farm. They head west every morning, probably from that big roost in Amsterdam, and back east every evening or late afternoon. Departure times and height of flight are highly variable depending on atmospheric pressure and precipitation, or so I assume. 

Anyhow, brace yourselves......I am no longer saving things for the Farm Side

Kee Kee Birds

Horned Larks

From out of the far, far, North, the little kee kee birds come down, crying, kee, kee.....no, I had better not share the rest of this joke of the boss's.

Snow Buntnings

But yes, riding the rural roads this time of year offers lucky opportunities to see Snow Buntings, Horned Larks like those in the video, and every now and then a Lapland Longspur.

I love seeing them. The Horned Larks were dusting along the road up by Ridgedale Farm and were really cute. We saw 300 or so Snow Buntings just down the road, plus a few other flocks along other roads today. 

Know Before you Go.....Solar

With the wild proliferation of solar arrays across valuable farm land, scrub land, and pretty near everywhere else, and with solar companies approaching and pressuring farmers to lease or sell, it is important to know the potential ramifications of signing a deal.

Below is an excellent article, which brings up some issues I hadn't previously considered. We have been approached by at least seven or eight companies, so there has been a lot of research done by Northview folks. The solar company reps who call, write, or stop by in pickup trucks don't seem to like that very much.

Considerations when leasing to a solar company.

Here is one I have shared before, but good info.

Good luck to anyone who gets involved. The money looks good but the details are way above my pay grade. 

Short Ma, Tall Blankie

Becky crocheted me this amazing lap blanket in three days! Used almost three skeins of I wanna make a blankie yarn.

It is warm and amazing and I love it.

Thanks Beck!

We were Friends

We started our blogs the same year and "met" on a blog promotion site where people looked at your blog if you looked at theirs. The Poodle (and dog) blog, kept cropping up on the list I was served and I guess Northview Diary popped up on Jan's.

Over the years we became the best of web friends. She sent me stories I could use and I did the same for her. I subscribe heartily to her philosophy that if the dog dies the book isn't worth reading. (Take that Old Yeller!)

We "got" each other's humor and saw serious issues in much the same light. She was a better blogger than I will ever be and I tried to never miss a single one of her wonderful posts. Golden Poodle Awards, Lizard brain awards, all so much fun. I love learning from my blog friends and Jan was a talented teacher.

I can't tell you how horrible it was to read that she had passed away in a terrible and senseless accident. The day has changed direction and not in a good way.

Condolences to her family and to all of you who knew her through her blog and her delightful Facebook presence. Rest in peace, Jan Williams and know you were loved. 

Here is a link to an interview her daughter gave.

And here is a Go Fund Me if you can help with the financial strain on the family.

A news story. 

Wet Feathers

Didn't turn the yard light on for dog walking this morning. Snow gathers all the light and brings a glow to all it covers. You can see just fine out there. There is no dark.

Walking out the door with tiny Mack Attack I could feel it brushing gently on my shirt, uncovered head and the little dog too.....it felt like wet feathers.

So quiet was the morning that I could hear it too, rustling and shuffling and snuffling .....like wet feathers....

The Good, the Bad, and the.....

A bald Eagle is almost always a "good" bird
The boss spotted this one along Riverside Drive the other day
and he posed obligingly. 

Not "bad" exactly, but we weren't thrilled to find one in the driveway last nigh

Came upon this scene the other day while chasing ruffies

Not really weird, just hunters picking up their dogs after a hunt

Just plain weird. 

This defines weird.

Found in a state park where we bird almost every day.
The possible explanations shared on the Facebook group "Sh*t birders see other than birds"
were downright enlightening....
and scary.....

Aliens have Landed

Take me to your leader

Polar ice cap landing zone

The ship

A tiny alien toupee 

A wee alien den high in a tree

Or maybe it's Treebeard

Ruffies

Light Morph individual

Liz and I have been birding together a couple of times a week lately. We have a great time hitting the river and the back roads to see what we can see.

I have many photographs of what is probably this same bird over
the past five years up by Dykeman's Dairy. It is reliable
and tame and feels like an old friend. It is often joined by a dark morph beauty.

Another shot

This winter has been an extravaganza of Rough-legged Hawks. There is an area over toward Charleston and Root, where it seems as if there are a couple every mile or so.

One day we got seven on one list and saw two more shortly afterwards.

As they run to charcoal and grey colors it is not easy to photograph them but they are birds of great beauty.

They are not worried by snow or wind

Sure is cool to see so many.  My favorites are the dark-morph ones....

Dark morph Rough-legged Hawk on Lynk Street today

Superb Owl Sunday

Alas, we can't seem to find any owls at all this year, superb or otherwise.

It was Meant with Love

One of our offspring was sometimes called "bezoar" as a child, although I mentally spelled it "bezore".

I once used that moniker in the doctor's office, and our pediatrician asked, "Do you know what that word means?"

Naturally I answered in the affirmative.

"Of course you do," he replied, shaking his head, and making it obvious that he had come to know us well indeed.

Nobody likes it when their children are ill, but if we had to deal with such...and with three asthmatics, we sure did...Dr. Konieczny was the man to visit. Our children were safe in his capable hands.

And he got us. He understood that an awful nickname like hairball could be used with great affection and fun. I suppose though that it was rough to be a middle kid whose nickname, Beezey, got changed to Beezer, and then swiftly morphed to Bezoar in the minds...and mouths...of her siblings and her terrible mother.

Now her online moniker is Breezey375, no mention of hair, or balls, or cow stomachs, because cows are where we found them back in the day.

Today is her birthday, and despite the terrible abuse she endured as a child, or perhaps because of it, she has come to be a truly compassionate, sweet, loving, caring person.

Sarcastic too.

Happy Birthday, Becky, it was all meant with love. 

An Old Farm Side

That I stumbled upon while reading emails from my late best friend...been missing her something awful lately even though it has been three years now. This column ran in 2011. We still have little Jack and he is still full of beans...

Jack and Tyler

Horses are surely not the focus at Northview. However it seems as if there have always been a couple stabled in the reinvented garage that serves as their barn. Some of them were ridden daily, adventuring around the land, chasing cows down from the field, exploring trails and woodlands, doing half passes at the trot and changing leads every stride like dancers.

Others were driven to cart and wagon. One harness pony often took me jogging with the dog of the day running alongside for miles and miles. I can’t tell you how much fun that was, with butterflies dancing and dandelions dazzling yellow all around, as we whirled down the farm roads. Selling that pony was a mistake. He ended up in a wonderful home, but he was quite a guy.

In recent years the horse du jour has been an almost-small-enough-to-be-a-mini dark bay pony named Jack. Jack was purchased as a pasture ornament and has served admirably in that capacity. He is handsome just standing still, with his hugely fluffy black mane puffing up between his little pricked ears and his sweeping tail behind him.

However, it is when he is in motion that his real decorative abilities come to the fore. Although not many hands high, he has a trot like a war horse in a medieval movie. He flings his feathered fetlocks out before him and then races to catch up. With tossing head and snapping black eyes, nostrils flared and snorting, he makes quite a picture when Becky takes him out for a jaunt in hand.

I am right fond of Jack and talk to him whenever I pass the stable. He always sticks his head out his stall door and nickers nicely back too.

He recently lost his best friend. It was a lesson for me in animal understanding that, although I have learned it a time or two before, always strikes me anew.

A couple of years ago Liz was given an older horse. He was a fine, tall fellow, kind of a pinky-gold and white paint named Tyler. She kept him at a boarding stable for a while, then in a pasture up near her home, then eventually brought him here to stay. He and Jack buddied up as horses usually do.

For some reason he never liked me. It is my habit, when the horses call to me, to toss them each a flake of hay or a handful of green grass, or a piece of apple from the tree positioned so handily right next to the door. Jack would always greet me like a long lost friend, chuckling and chortling deep in his throat. Ponies like to eat and he is surely all pony.

Ty would stand with his head over his door, but never took food from my hand, spooked if I tossed it in the stall with him, and snapped at me if I got too close.

 He loved Liz though.

Sadly, not too many months after he arrived he began to display odd symptoms. First he was lame in one foot, then another. Next he seemed to suffer from the cold more than is normal so she was forced to buy him a blanket. (The other day I took that blanket off the clothes line to fold it up and put it away and didn’t know how. Of all the horses that have shared my life since I bought Magnum when he was 2 and I was 21, none has ever needed a blanket.)

Then tall Ty, who turned out to be much older than he was originally represented to be, somewhere close to thirty, began to lose weight. Liz tried everything. Had his teeth checked several times. Horses’ teeth emerge slowly as they age and are worn down and sometimes get sharp edges from wear. When this happens chewing can become painful (you know how it feels to bite your cheek). Sometimes acute weight loss follows until the teeth are “floated” or filed so there are no edges to pinch and pain.

Tyler’s teeth were always fine.

She tried soft tender hay. Old horse grain with special ingredients. Green grass and lots of it. He would pick up and start to look better, filling everyone with hopeful optimism, then slide back into the slow decline.

Finally a few weeks ago one of our veterinarians came to the conclusion that he had cancer and just wasn’t going to get better. She told Liz, “You’ll know when it’s time.” Then she worked up a regimen of palliative care to keep him comfortable as long as possible.

The day came though. The old boy was miserable enough to not even want Liz to handle him.

She made the dreaded call, set up a time and on the morning of the day, took him out to his yard to graze one last time. It was sad. Even a few weeks ago, when she loosed him up there, he would trot that big boy trot of his back and forth up the fence, just floating along like a race horse and yelling for his pal, Jack.

This time he simply stood in one spot nibbling desultorily at the frozen grass.

Jack did plenty of hollering though. He has a piercing little whinny and he called and called. He couldn’t see Tyler and he didn’t like it one bit.

After a while our kind and compassionate veterinarian, who seemed to feel as bad as Liz did about the whole affair, did what was necessary. 

Jack yelled some more.

Right up until the second that his dear friend passed on. And then he stopped. He couldn’t see or hear, but somehow he just knew.

Every time a horse has ended its days here, the other ones always knew.

 Every single time.

It has always amazed and humbled me.

Every time.

Now Jack only whinnies when he sees me or Becky and is hoping for some spoiling. 

We make sure that he gets it.

I Tawt I Taw a Snowy Owl

We did see this one......in March of 2018!

We were returning from a little birding excursion yesterday, having successfully found and photographed Glaucous and Iceland Gulls, which made me pretty happy.

Cute little Iceland Gull

We had also seen a number of Rough-legged Hawks, which are wintering in the area. We are literally seeing more of them than of Red-tailed Hawks, which is pretty surprising.

Anyhow, we were tooling along Logtown Road, hurrying home for brekkus, when I spotted a white shape in a distant tree.

"I think I saw a Snowy Owl, back there on that Amish farm!"

And so the boss, good guy that he is, turned around and we went back.

Alas and unfortunately........