2008 January Archive at Beside the Stream

Archive for January, 2008

Yampa the Gander

Published on January 21, 2008 in Colorado women and birds. 0 Comments

Yampa the gander came to Suzy’s household through friends who took a raft trip down the Yampa River in Utah. During the first days of the trip, a domesticated goose joined their party or, as it turned out, a gander. He’s a gander with gusto. He stood on the bow of their kayak through the rapids. He bedded down on the beach near them every night and made friends with everyone. By the time their 148 mile run was done, no one wanted to leave him at the take-out in the desert, so they put him in the car and drove him to Suzy’s.

Suzy didn’t want Yampa to be lonely, so she got two goslings, Berna and Lillo from Bernalillo, New Mexico. Berna died, but all summer Lillo and Yampa swam happily in the stream in front of Suzy’s house, and were carried upstairs to sleep on the deck every night, where it was safe.

Everyone knew that winter would be a problem, so Christy built them a goose house.

and that worked out fine until the stream froze.

There was a little patch of open water left, but that was not Yampa and Lillo’s idea of reasonable winter accommodations. So they ran away down the road to the hot springs half a mile away.

And that’s where they’re spending the winter.

Old Fashioned Riprap

Published on January 20, 2008 in riparian edge. 0 Comments

How many times have you been walking along a stream when you came upon a car dump right next to it?

Chances are that streamside piles of chassis aren’t strays: they’re the solution to a real estate problem. Streams and rivers are often used as plot boundaries, which makes sense until you consider that streams and rivers move. The water velocity is higher at the outer edge than the inner edge of a curve, so the bends of a river are always pushed out and downstream. Over time, that stream or river writhes like a snake.

When people own land bordered by a stream or river, the landowner on one side of the stream owns a larger lot, over time, and the landowner on the other side of the bend loses ground year by year. Across rural America, landowners tried to stop streams or rivers from moving their beds. For most of a century, the cheapest solution was to cable together old chassis and secure them to the side of the stream.

This isn’t a dump; it’s riprap.

Feeding Ancestral Puebloan Turkeys

Published on January 19, 2008 in Merriam's wild turkey. 0 Comments

It is embarrassingly easy to make friends with turkeys in the winter. I put out about 4 cups of cracked corn from Towaoc every day, and often a dozen or thirteen turkeys come by to eat it. I think there are eight females that all flock together, and a separate gang of four or five males who started visiting when I started putting out corn.

Today about fifteen minutes after I tossed the cracked corn into the pine needles, a male comes by with a silly looking beard. He starts eating and I lay down in the snow about eight feet away to take some pictures.

I’m thinking “what a handsome turkey you are (wish I had on ski pants)”

as the snow melts through my jeans, and suddenly there are two turkeys in my viewfinder

three

and by the time I sit up it’s a turkey convention.

These turkeys know that I put out the corn–they’ve watch me do it. And they fell for it just like a five-year-old falls for hot chocolate spiked with cream.

A Singing Crow

Published on January 18, 2008 in birds. 0 Comments

To make up for those unfortunate shots of crows as carrion eaters, here’s a crow cawing with all his heart.

The Kindness of Strangers

Published on January 17, 2008 in Colorado women, Snow storm and horses. 8 Comments

Suzy lives beside a stream at 8,200 feet, and the storm last week left her with piles of snow.

About a mile and a half upriver of her house there’s a mesa on Ute Mountain Ute land; the tribe kept a herd of horses up there last summer. When the herd was moved last fall, one little yearling was left behind. She has been toughing it out alone every since, and was doing OK until the deep snow came and she got stuck. Since then, Suzy’s household has been taking the little horse hay every day. She was getting terribly dehydrated without access to water, so Suzy’s renter skied out with a five gallon bucket of water that morning.

I snowshoed and Suzy skied on a trail through deep snow–it looks reasonable except if you fall off this path you’re floundering around in three or four feet. It’s a little sketchy for my old dog, who steps on the back of my snowshoes for an assist every chance she can. We went over the river and through the woods,

across the fields, we turned left and right and I’m thinking that if this little horse depended on me to carry her hay every day she’d be a goner.

To get on top of the mesa is so steep and soft that the dog can’t make it, so Suzy keeps them down below while I snowshoe up and look who’s here:

poor little guy can’t get anywhere, doesn’t have any food. She’s totally wild, and would run away if she could (when there was no snow, there was no way to catch her, and now there’s no way to move her.)

And that strand of hay hanging from her mouth is from Suzy toting those bales by backpack. Suzy said, we named her Thankful. I think she really is.

The Lost Art of making Hot Chocolate

Published on January 16, 2008 in recipe. 0 Comments

When people talk about hot chocolate, they are often referring to envelopes of powder that they mix with milk or water. THAT IS NOT HOT CHOCOLATE. That is something that was sold to you under false pretenses.

I did a little research and found that real hot chocolate, as taught to me by a Vermont grandmother, is a lost recipe. This hot chocolate is so good that if you have a child in elementary school, you’ll get a reputation. Your child’s friend’s siblings will have heard about it. Whole grades of young kids will be aware that you make the best hot chocolate in town. This is absolute truth.

Don’t let the ingredients scare you.

There is milk, of course, and sugar, cocoa (which has recently been recast as a health food) and then my trusty carton of heavy whipping cream, the key ingredient. Since your brain is 60% fat, you might think of the cream as brain food. In hot chocolate, it is indispensable: it makes small children moan. In the winter, this hot chocolate can be a staple snack for kids when they come in from playing. When teenagers come back from skiing, hot chocolate rules. If you need to gain 10 pounds, have it daily. Otherwise, it’s worth skipping lunch for, because this is the hot chocolate your grandmother warned you about.

In a small saucepan, make a pile of cocoa, and half that of sugar. Don’t be stingy, maybe 4 TBS cocoa and 2 TBS sugar.

Add about as much heavy cream as dry ingredents, and wisk them together. This is your chance to get out all the lumps, so make it into a nice smooth sauce. Taste it and maybe add more sugar. Or not.

Put the heat on high, wisk in the milk, and keep it sort of moving until it’s warm.

And you’re done. The thing about this snack is that you get maximum credit for minimum effort. One sip, and you understand what the whole hot chocolate thing is all about. And it couldn’t have more calories than french fries… could it?

Elk on the way to school

Published on January 15, 2008 in elk herd and roadkill. 1 Comment

Normally about 200 elk winter in the valley, and five years back in a particularly deep winter the wildlife biologists counted nearly 500. This winter, there are plenty: I took these pictures from the car window on the way back from dropping Sam off at high school. On the right side of the road is a herd of females.

Elk travel in such tight herds that they’re easy to tell from the horses or cattle. They stick together when they’re grazing or moving, and when the herd lies down, their rumps look like a pile of boulders. They can jump standard fences without even trying–an elk fence is 10 feet tall–and they’re big: a grown-up lady can weigh in at 500 pounds, while a studly male can be 700 pounds. (They’re officially called cows and bulls, but I’m not sure that’s entirely respectful.) I took these photos from the driver’s seat window, and then I rolled down the passenger seat window for this Mom and her yearling twins.

She told them to scoot, seeing as the car was pulled onto the shoulder.

So they did.

The elk are spending the winter in the valley near the river, like they always have. But it’s a hard winter every year these days, not because they starve but because the cars kill so many.

There was a car accident and a dead elk last night on the road to town. These animals are too big to be left beside the road so the Department of Transportation has a special elk truck fitted with a winch and a bed that carries two elk with room to spare. They got the first one moved lickety split, along with another than had been thrown into the ditch and frozen. (The following picture has been cropped so it’s not gross).

We’re OK at living with elk, but we’re not so good at driving with them.

Where the Corn came from, and gardener’s porn

Published on January 14, 2008 in gardening and what they eat. 2 Comments

I called the feed coop this morning to find out what kind of corn I had bought for the wild turkeys. I thought I would be walking into the old Vermont joke where a lady tourist asks a farmer “Could you tell me the name of this flower?” And he says, “Ma’am, in these parts we call ‘em ‘wildflowers’.”

But it wasn’t like that at all. Instead, the woman on the phone yelled: Joe, where’d that corn come from? Towaoc, he said. I asked, Is it genetically modified? She yelled, Joe, is that GM corn? Nope.

Towaoc is a tiny town on the Ute Mountain Ute reservation, 60 miles due west. According to the 2000 US Census, the population is 1,097 and it’s 94.4% Native American. And perhaps one of the reasons that corn was so cheap–$20 for 100 pounds cracked, sacked and loaded–is that family income in Towaoc averages $18,796.

If I was a turkey and could pick out which strain I’d want those Indians in Towaoc to grow, I’d go straight to the Seed Savers Exchange, a catalogue that specializes in really old varieties. Seed catalogues are like gardener’s porn, and every gardener has a pile hidden somewhere. The specimens are all impossibly perfect… is it airbrushed? So plump and bodacious, and the pictures all glisten… do you think they spray them with oil? When the snow is deep some of us succumb to temptation.

Not me. I only look at seed catalogues when I’m trying to figure out what kind of corn I’d like if I was a turkey. The Mandan Bride for sure, and I think the Black Aztec. And we can’t stop there: some Indian beans

Either the Hidatsa Red and the Painted Pony, or the Hidatsa Shield Figure and the Rattlesnake Snap… hard choice. And finally

I have to drop all pretense that I have the slightest interest in vegetables and get down to the serious business of choosing a sunflower for next year; I’m leaning towards Torch.

Across the Stream

Published on January 13, 2008 in riparian edge. 0 Comments

I’m inaugurating Stream Photo Sunday, with a weekly photo that shows how the stream changes through the seasons. This week, a lot of deer are using this ice bridge to cross to the other side.