2008 February Archive at Beside the Stream

Archive for February, 2008

Turkey Beauty Revisited (and two new words)

Published on February 29, 2008 in Merriam's wild turkey. 0 Comments

I know you must be eagerly awaiting the promised head shots for the gobbler beauty contest. The truth is much stranger than I had imagined.

The two new words are caruncle and snood.

See how this tom has a pierced eardrum? He must be deaf in his left ear. The snood is the small growth between his eyes and his beak. It’s just a little thing when he is relaxed, but it grows as long as five inches when he gets excited. The snood will flop over his beak when he struts for hens, or has dominance struggles with other toms. But when he’s hanging around feeling happy it’s not very impressive.

This male has a lovely snood and wattle, the pink sac of flesh hanging under his chin and on his chest. Turkey wattles don’t look like much unless they’re thinking about women.

This turkey has a winning wattle and beard combination. The beard is a modified feather that hangs down to the ground; the hens sometimes have little ones, and adult males take a few years before their beard brushes against the ground.

This turkey doesn’t want to play. His beard, snood and wattles can’t be rated, but he gets the prize for caruncles, the little fleshy red tabs on the blue skin of his neck.

snood /snud/ –noun

1.	the distinctive headband formerly worn by young unmarried women in Scotland and northern England.

2.	a headband for the hair.

3.	a netlike hat or part of a hat or fabric that holds or covers the back of a woman’s hair.

4.	the pendulous skin over the beak of a turkey.

–verb (used with object)

5.	to bind or confine (the hair) with a snood.

[Origin: bef. 900; ME: fillet, ribbon; OE snōd]

car·un·cle /ˈkærʌŋkəl, kəˈrʌŋ-/–noun

1.	Botany. a protuberance at or surrounding the hilum of a seed.

2.	Zoology. a fleshy excrescence, as on the head of a bird; a fowl’s comb.

3.	Anatomy. a small, fleshy growth.

[Origin: 1605–15; earlier caruncula < L: small piece of flesh, dim. of carō (gen. carnis) flesh; for suffix, see carbuncle]

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

Time: three weeks

Published on February 28, 2008 in deer herd and time. 1 Comment

This is the deer path across our field today, and 21 days ago.

The snow isn’t so deep anymore, but everyone sticks to the paths because it takes less energy.

They’re just as strict about using paths in the forest.

Here’s a place where the deer path going up the hill intersects the deer path going across the hill. See the X?

21 feet of snow

Published on February 27, 2008 in Snow storm. 0 Comments

Up at the ski area, they carefully measure how much snow has fallen. This year they’ve gotten 21 feet. The first storm dropped a solid 6 feet of snow; it has accumulated steadily since then, and it disappears as well through sublimation. There hasn’t been a melt, but so much snow has sublimed that 21 feet of snowfall is more like six or eight feet of accumulation, and less where the wind hits it. These are some shots at 10,000 feet.

This provides a new twist on the old snow-covered mailbox photo

You can see there is a lot of snow compared to a dog

Here is each individual snowstorm, layer after layer, worn away by the wind,

and the most remarkable sight is one that doesn’t even register. When you see a field, it is completely untracked.

There is not a single animal that walked across this field, marring its perfection. When snow falls this deep, it is a perfect blanket.

Water Quality - color

Published on February 26, 2008 in water. 0 Comments

Algae is blooming at the head of the valley.

The water is almost fluorescent green right where the rapid mountain stream slows down to fill a series of deep pools surrounded by cliffs. The river is from a forested watershed, but I’d guess a bunch of nutrients washed into the water somewhere upstream. Fertilizer from the golf course? Wastewater? The cliffs hold warmth from the sun, increasing water temperature and allowing the phytoplankton to go wild on those extra nutrients. Above we have the water entering the canyon, here’s the water in the pools

and here is the water as it enters the valley floor:

Twenty miles downstream the same day, the water is clean. The excess nutrients grew phytoplankton that was eaten by fish and insects and other living things. What a world we live in.

A photographic Interlude

Published on February 25, 2008 in deer herd. 1 Comment

Peggy Potter’s Bowls

Published on February 24, 2008 in working out of the house. 1 Comment

Peggy Potter started painting bowls years and years ago. This is the official story: Miss Peggy Sparks married Sparky Potter, and they raised three children on a hillside in Vermont where Sparky made signs and Peggy taught piano and painted bowls. And nothing has changed in the long years since then except that one of the kids became a rock star, Peg no longer teaches piano, and both of their businesses have gone international.

This is the story of Peggy’s bowls:

There is a mill in Granville, Vermont that is one of two mills in the United States that makes extra large wooden bowls (the other is the Holland Bowl Mill in Michigan). The Granville mill machinery is a hundred and fifty years old–the mill sold its first bowl in 1857–and these solid old-time bowls are made from the trunks of large maple trees. Some of the bowls are perfectly clear all the way through. And some of the bowls have color streaks, and are sold as seconds. Peg takes the seconds, paints them, and seals them with layers and layers of food-safe varnish.

She first preps the bowls and paints the bottom, and then she paints the inside,

adds a nice trim and gives it four to six coats of food safe polyurethane, depending on the wood and the color. And then she calls it done.

Peggy makes a heckuva nice bowl.

Durango does disaster

Published on February 23, 2008 in Small town life. 2 Comments

There was a fire downtown, and three businesses burned.

Durango has a flair for disaster, and has had a good stretch this winter. A few weeks ago two kids skiing down a ridge in town were caught in an avalanche. There must have been a dozen rescue vehicles there, and since the kids were wearing avalanche beacons they were in fact rescued. Most of our firemen have attended avalanche rescue workshops, so what could be better than rescuing an avalanche victim within city limits? As it turned out, that was just a warm up.

Downtown was filled with fire trucks and firemen from towns as far as thirty miles away. A three building fire that threatened to engulf a city block had everyone working together.

There were stockpiles of oxygen tanks and of water

and our firemen were heroes, every one.

Beauty and the Beholder’s eye

Published on February 22, 2008 in Merriam's wild turkey. 0 Comments

If you’re looking at feathers or thinking of dinner, it’s easy to see that this bird is a beauty

but eye to eye, it’s a different story. The naked red and blue skinned head, the exposed eardrums, the lavender mask on his face and that tuft on the growth between his eyes… it takes some adjustment to see this turkey as handsome.

We’ll have a turkey beauty contest as soon as I get some head shots.

Ditch Water 2

Published on February 21, 2008 in water. 0 Comments

Our irrigation ditch is typical of the water distribution system in this region. Here’s the ditch today, very low:

You can see that the ditch is unlined. There are stones in the walls to reduce erosion, and the bottom is earth. It’s really no more than a trough dug in the earth that the river is diverted into. It looks like a casual system until you see the water gate across the road.

This picture is from November, and you can see that the ditchwater is being diverted towards us where it joins the stream that flows into the river it came from–this water just became return flow at this point. During the growing season, the gate is usually open. From here, the water would flow through a siphon under the stream and continue for miles and miles in ditches down the valley.

There is another big ditch that runs miles and miles along the other side of the valley. This ditch is empty during the winter… and it’s another honking big water diversion.

Can you imagine how much water is soaking down into the ground from these ditches??

You’re right; it’s a lot. So much water soaks into the ground from these giant ditches on both sides of the valley (and from the channels that feed off these ditches) that the wells in the valley are actually fed by ditchwater seeping down to the groundwater. The ditch systems are over a century old, and haven’t been updated since then except for the gates. Lining the ditches would save huge amounts of water, but the valley wells would run dry. This little local conundrum is repeated in valleys across the arid west.

Breatharians: Mule Deer in Winter

Published on February 20, 2008 in deer herd and what they eat. 0 Comments

Breatharians, who claim to live on sunlight and water, seemed like an absurd impossibility until I see mule deer in winter. With so much snow on the ground there is nothing for these mule deer to eat except twigs. I looked up research papers on mule deer diet, and found that in the winter the deer live on a starvation diet of twigs and lichen, and lose 20% of their body weight. One of the species whose twigs they enjoy is gambel oak, and the mountain behind us is covered in it. So these deer really do live on almost nothing for the season… on twigs.

For Christmas this year, I put out the old pumpkins and gourds we grew for Halloween mistakenly thinking that since deer eat pumpkins in the garden if they can, it’d make a nice holiday treat for the herd.

It took more than a week for ten deer to eat four old pumpkins. The deer didn’t seem hungry, and clearly weren’t thinking of Christmas.

It’s not that the deer didn’t like the pumpkins; it’s that they didn’t really want them. And they didn’t need them.

The winter continues, and our little local band of mule deer continues to eat almost nothing.

The neighbors feed the birds a few cups of seeds and cracked corn each day, and the deer path across our property went to their feeding station.

For a few days last week nearly a dozen deer started moving obsessively back and forth along the path, back and forth. There was a frantic note to the herd’s restlessness. Bob put out about 4 cups of alfalfa pellets at the start of the path, and the whole scene immediately calmed down. We didn’t add very many calories to the landscape to change the tone.

This is the same buck with the uneven antlers as the one eating pumpkin at Christmas, but this is after nearly two months of winter starvation. The snow is deep and has been deep all along, and it’s crusted so he’s still confined to paths. The herd has been living on twigs up the hill and a little birdseed and cracked corn put out by the neighbor, and just a little of the cracked corn I put out for the turkeys. Two months of a starvation diet, and they’re not starving. We’re living with Breatharians in our midst.

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