Country life at 7,000 feet
The sphinx moths just hatched and are feeding on the catmint.
I’m dedicating this post to the sphinx moth’s proboscis.
This tube is nearly as long as its body
and it bends in interesting ways.
With a nice long proboscis and a set of wings, you might not even want opposable thumbs.
I’m having a moment of proboscis envy.
Two weeks ago, I found a plan for a chicken house and found I needed Bob to build it… and Bob asked Rick to help.
The two of them used plumbing strapping to attach the cattle guard to the 2×4s,
and then pulled the two 2×4s together and screwed on some crossbars.
I think it took Rick and Bob about an hour, but I’m not sure that it was a ton of fun.
Then Bob built a little doorway and some supports on the ends, and I started attaching chicken wire with little zip ties. (Here he’s putting some finish on the wood).
I ran out of chicken wire today, so I’ll get another roll tomorrow to finish it off. Almost done, but I thought it’d be a simple hoop house with a tarp, and it’s turned out to be a Chicken Palace.
And the worst part is:
the chicks have been outside in a temporary pen since Thursday, and I bring them in every night. I catch each bird by hand–they’re surprisingly tame–and they have little toddler bodies, all firm and compact and squirmy. They are cute as can be. They do little boy things like climbing on top of a box and flapping their wings. They’re sprouting feathers in unlikely places.
They’re very endearing. Oh dear.
We know that the beavers moved in because of their nighttime handiwork.
and it’s pretty easy to see where they’re staying. It’s a streamside burrow with two entrances that they live in until they build their dam, fill their pond and build a lodge. It’s their starter home.
The main entrance is right in front of you, made of peeled branches woven together.
The other side of the same pile shows a second entrance, while the beaver’s backdoor route is all the way over by the pile of peeled sticks at the far end of the bench of soil. There’s likely an underwater entrance on this end, and a series of underground rooms dug from here to that far pile.
This is the back door entrance on the far end of the bench, with an underwater entrance on the far end as well. The beaver’s first rule of home construction is: always have an alternate exit. Some animals fight off intruders, but beavers build a back door instead.
This pair is in a streamside burrow for now, but they have big plans. At night they’re consumed with construction problems, but during the day when they sleep they might dream of their dam and a litter of kits. Of the day when they have a proper lodge in their own pond.
This might be the beaver’s dream.
(This lovely illustration is from a book written by the Islamic scholar Harun Yahya titled Devotion Among Animals: revealing the work of God Ch.2 Awareness in Animals: One of the dead ends of the theory of evolution, Fig 5.) (I’ve gotten in trouble for using this illustration in lectures because people assume that I must renounce evolution to read antievolution tracts, but honestly, I’ll read anything.)
A pair of beavers started engineering this area this spring. This is the view from one end of their clearing
and this is their clearing from the other end.
Without exception, all of the cottonwoods have been cut to fall at right angles to the river. I think at least 30 big trees–between one and two feet in diameter–have been cut here. There are hundreds of little trees gone, but you don’t notice them because they are taken away.
When they cut big trees, it’s a multi-step process.
First, they sit up on their hind legs and chisel their way around the base of the tree until it topples.
Then they go up to the top of the trees and trim off the branches from the top down.
Sometimes the tree doesn’t fall just the way they intended,
but mostly it goes exactly as planned.
This clear-cut is as deliberate as if someone cut this wood for a lumber mill (although since it’s cottonwood, no one would’ve bought it, and the beaver do a cleaner clear-cut than humans: they don’t leave slash piles that need to be burned).
When you consider that this is a project that likely a new pair started this spring, you can see that ”busy as a beaver” might be nothing but the truth.
I have a particular fondness for beavers. I am probably the only person you know who keeps a stuffed beaver in her bedroom
which is why you’ll hear more about beavers tomorrow.
In the last two days, the chicks have been visibly larger every day.
They’re starting to have a ripe musty odor, even though I change their wood chips every day. They run around so much in their pool that there’s a layer of dust over my office. It’s time to get them outside… so I found plans.
It gets moved every day, so the chickens always have a new area to graze on and the grass doesn’t get raggedy.
This chick hatched 17 days ago, and it’s almost done with its warm red light and chick mix. I’m sick of simmering on the back burner, he says. I want to get out and boil.
I took a road through the national forest that goes up to about 9,000 feet.
There’s a lot of wildflowers up here that are already in full bloom. The high altitude plants that rely on snowmelt for moisture grow fast and flower as early as they can. They’ll be fine if they don’t see a drop of rain for months, because they’ve already put forth their seeds.
and a little closer
The lupine are particularly prolific
and there are so many patches in so many shades of blue that the pollinators are having a field day.
and here’s two at a time
The garden lupines at 7,000 feet haven’t even set their buds, while these wild lupines at 9,000 feet are in full flower on May 12.
Fleabane is sprinkled up the slopes, soon to disappear.
The Oregon Grape keeps its leaves year round, but the flowers don’t last long.
Everything I’ve shown so far grows in big patches. But when you start looking at the little flowers, it looks like everything’s blooming.
This wild candytuft must be the source of the ones we plant in our gardens
and this one’s a mystery to me.
The landscape still has streaks of snow, and you wouldn’t think the wildflowers would be blooming. But they are.
One summer we raised mallard ducks on the pond, hoping they’d fly off in the fall with the wild mallards who stop by the pond on their migration south. But the mallards we raised didn’t leave. They weren’t tame at all–they were raised to fly away–and we didn’t want to winter them over. So we shot the ducks from across the pond, and scalded them in the lobster pot. The plucking was horrible, the gutting was worse, and neither of us even like duck. The only way Bob agreed to raise chickens was if someone else processed them… and the local slaughterhouse doesn’t do fowl.
Last summer I asked our local chicken farmer if he’d process chickens for a fee, and he said yes. His wife Holly was at the Farmer’s Market, and I explained that I got chickens thinking of her husband saying he’d process them. She said that she normally didn’t do any extra chickens, but since…
It’d take about an hour and a half to do 23 chickens, she said. It’s the clean-up that’s the problem. So somehow it transpired that she’ll do my chickens as a separate run, and I’ll clean up. That’s one thing I learned about chickens.
The second thing I learned is that they should be slaughtered at 8 weeks. I have six weeks to go.
Meanwhile, the chicks were much more interested in the world this time out.
They stick close together, but they pecked at the flowers and scratched the ground and generally looked around.
You can see they have a little set of wing feathers,
and this chick has the first hint of tailfeathers.
It’s hard to believe they’ll be grown in a month and a half.
People say, I bet you fall in love with them and keep them for eggs.
I wish.
Bob and I were driving in to the first Farmer’s Market (where Peg sell worms and asparagus, Suzie has daffodils, seeds and greenhouse starts and Holly has eggs and chicken) when we saw this herd of elk right close to the road. As long as we stay in the car, the elk aren’t very interested in us.
But there are all these shrubs in the way.
Bob backs up so I can get a clearer shot, and suddenly they were paying close attention. I haven’t been so close to the elk before, since they always run away. I had been wondering if they actually bump up against each other in their tight herds, or if they always keep a few inches space.
I think there are thirteen elk in this photo, squished like sardines. They’re definitely bumping together. I get out of the car,
and the gang of elk is gone, lickety split. The adjacent farm has an elk fence, so the elk have to run down to the end of the fence
and jump the irrigation ditch to get away from me. There’s a horse fence parallel to the ditch, and the elk jump it like steeplechase champs.
Adios! Sorry for making you run away.
Peg raises worms, and she has for fifteen years. Red wiggler worms. You could call her a vermiculturist, because she grows them and sells them in little Chinese food take-out cartons. She makes about $250 a year from worms, which makes her one of the few alchemists you’re likely to meet. She turns garbage into gold.
There’s nothing particularly complicated about her system.
The square enclosed by wire is this year’s active pile, and the open square is last year’s pile, composted and full of worms. The worm pile is enclosed to keep her dogs out, and inside the wire enclosure she layers coffee grounds from the local latte shop and old lettuce leaves from the grocery dumpster (but any kitchen compost will do). She adds a scoop of worms and covers the new pile with leaves or old manure. As the season progresses she adds more pockets of organic matter when she’s in the mood, covering each additional contribution with a layer of leaves or manure. And she lets nature do the rest of the work.
There is still snow in Peg’s yard, but she already has broken open last year’s pile and the worms are looking good.
I mean, they’re looking good if you like a lot of worms. These red wigglers are not native to North America, but they are not invasive. If you put them into your garden, they’ll die.
Lots of sources say that there aren’t any native worms in North America, but it’s not true: in the south and the west there were plenty of worms to start with, but there weren’t any native earthworms in the northeast after the last glacier receded. And the non-native worms have changed the northeastern forests.
According to 2003 research, when earthworms move into a new area, they feed on the organic material on the forest floor and bring it down into their burrows. They feed primarily on the top layer of leaf litter, as well as on the duff – the spongy layer of decomposing vegetation beneath the leaf litter. …Earthworms do an excellent job of recycling nutrients, but “when they eat away the duff layer, all the plant seeds that germinate there, like trillium and mayflowers and wood anemone, may disappear or may not have any place to germinate. Other creatures that live in the duff and forest litter like salamanders and ground-nesting birds may be affected as well. Within a decade or two, the worms can essentially change the soil profile into something like the black mineral-rich soils that are found in many European forests.”
Non-native nightcrawlers are making the duff disappear.
These little red wigglers don’t survive in the forests, but I don’t think they’re very attractive.
For beauty in an earthworm, we have our native giant palouse earthworm, Driloleirus americanus, a pinkish-white earthworm that can reach 3 feet long and is said to smell like lilies when handled. Even though this one is a little battered, you can see it’s a beautiful creature.
Red wigglers, Eisenia foetida, are sold in Chinese take-out boxes while the giant palouse earthworm is an endangered species.
As the alchemists of an earlier age would say,
Sic transit gloria mundi - (Thus passes the glory of the world).
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