Country life at 7,000 feet
I have to do something for a costume party tonight. It’s easy for Bob, because he can wear his Dad’s Austrian clothes and look delectable. I’m reluctantly going as Sarah Palin: updo, designer dress, heels and a rifle.
Do you like dressing up? Did you have to get together a costume this year? (Are you going as Sarah too?)
Prairie dogs have a bad reputation, and this is why:
The foreground shows a nice stand of native grasses and flowers–see the last few purple asters of the season? A little prairie dog town starts where the grasses stop, and the land is stripped to nubbins of grass and bare earth. That big dark green plant growing on bare earth is an alien species of thistle that nothing eats, so it looks as though the prairie dogs remove good grasses and grow noxious weeds. No one wants these rodents around, and they’re easy to remove with poison.
Today prairie dog towns are as rare as old growth forests: they cover about 2% of their original range. They are (depending on the state) variously classified as threatened or “a species of special concern”. But since there are still thousands of prairie dogs and they make a mess of the landscape, they are typically not tolerated on private or public land. It’s the only rare species I know of that is routinely shot and poisoned.
Cute!
Meanwhile, every rancher knows that all grass is not created equal. Young, tender growth is higher in protein than tall grass. Buffalo and antelope graze preferentially on prairie dog towns because the clipped grass in prairie dog towns provides higher quality feed. From the 1976 on, studies show that cattle grazing on prairie dog towns gain weight at appropriate rates.
This is because the amount of vegetation grown on an acre of land is not fixed. There is not x amount of grass that can be divided up by the grazers (so more prairie dogs mean less grass for cattle). Prairie dogs increase the production of grasses and leafy plants by increasing soil moisture, increasing the amount of organic matter mixed into the soil, and by keeping the area fertilized and clipped.
When prairie dogs engineer the landscape, the land’s net primary productivity (roughly the mass of plants grown per acre per year) increases. Prairie dogs alter local hydrology in ways that keep more water on the land, increasing soil moisture. Even though it looks like the prairie dogs ate everything, the land itself is more productive so their net impact is close to zero. This has been known for 35 years–more than a generation–and these studies have been replicated time and again. But ranchers say, that’s old research,
and the poisoning continues.
I spent some time in a prairie dog towns both Monday and Wednesday, and the whole time I was there a sentinel dog kept his eye on me.
This prairie dog was looking out of the hole that was closest to me. It barely moved the whole time I was there–both times. The prairie dogs that came out of their holes were the ones that were farthest from me.
This shows the general situation: the prairie dogs are putting on fat for winter, and they are stuffing food into their mouths as fast as they can. These are photos of three different prairie dogs over two days.
Here we have a left hand stuffing food in
right hand at work
and again a left handed assist.
One more time: a right handed rodent,
a left handed rodent,
and a left handed rodent again.
They don’t have opposable thumbs, but they sure do use their hands.
I don’t think anyone will be surprised to learn that interiors are much easier to photograph than prairie dogs. I took and sorted nearly 200 photos of prairie dogs yesterday and I’m sorry to say that I have very little to show for it. I’m afraid those dogs are going to have to get accustomed to me before they’ll give me some decent photos, so I’m doing another post on Catherine Palace.
Catherine I originally built the palace and Elizabeth, her daughter, expanded and gilded it. Catherine the Great, or Catherine II, redecorated one wing in the Neo-Palladium style.
This dining room is the first Neo-Palladium room I’ve ever been in; it’s done in pistachio and pink. It’s like being inside a jewel box.
The original palace interior featured countless gilded bare-breasted babes and babies. When Catherine the Great redecorated, she included scantily draped youths.
This is bas-relief for an empress. You might say the whole thing is a tad overdone, but the room next door is
perfection. It’s rose, antique white, and mahogany.
It’s one of the loveliest rooms I’ve ever seen. It’s bold and restful in the same breath.
And finally, this grand staircase was redecorated in the 1800s; the original mahogany banisters were replaced with white marble. (Most people paint when they want to lighten an interior, but not the Tsars.)
(This is not my photograph.) And here in the heart of the Russian empire you have the solution to the problem of what to do with those big Imari vases, plates and jars.
You’d probably need two high stepladders and some planks to dust them, but if you’re a Tsar, well… that’d be the very least of your worries.
This prairie dog was sitting in front of his hole this morning. I liked the way he was eating that piece of greenery. I’ll have more on them this week… but all I have today is this photograph. Have a nice Monday!!
Last winter, there were two easily recognizable young bucks in the interchangable herd of mule deer that wintered on our land: one had 7 points, the other had 8, and they were always together.
I took this photo on 2/17, as these little bucks were crossing the field on the deer path. You can see why they’d be easy to identify, two guys hanging out together. And then they left for the summer.
On 10/17, eight months to the day after I took the previous photo, this big buck walks out of the forest. To me this looks like a formidable creature.
Let me rephrase: this guy is a stud-muffin, and he has a serious rack. He’s walking around like he owns the joint, casual as can be, and then another large male walks onto the field.
I thought maybe I’d get some deer fighting photos–two big males around mating season–but instead they were totally comfortable with each other.
They’ve had a good summer up in the high country,
and they have every reason to believe that they’ll have a safe winter beside the stream.
They said Hi to the dog from afar, and one plopped down in the shade near the ditch while the other enjoyed the grass, and they both felt right at home. And that’s when I flashed on those two little deer friends from last winter. It’s the same two bucks, a smaller eight pointer and larger seven pointer, 
still friends.
You’d think I could finish up with the Tsar’s summer palace, but I’m not even close. For example, how do you heat a palace? The ballroom was unheated–too many windows, too much floorspace. But most of the smaller rooms had tile stoves.
They’re tall, and they’re all over the place.
Some rooms have one stove,
and some rooms have two stoves.
Sometimes you can’t see if it’s a different room until you check the parquet pattern.
This dining room had one stove, but really could have used two. If I was eating with the Tsar, I would definitely opt for a seat near the stove.
Here you could sit near the stove and contemplate Buchholz’s 1768 portrait of Empress Elizabeth I
and here you can sit by the stove and contemplate a whole lot of paintings. The oils may be original, but the stoves are not. The floors are new as well: only one parquet floor survived, and it was in another section of the palace.
The Seige of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) was famously fatal. In 1941, the city was ringed by German and Finnish troops. Except for trucks driving on a single road across Lake Ladoga, no food or fuel entered the city for 900 days. Roughly a million citizens starved (Russians claim less, westerners say more). During this time Catherine Palace was used as a barracks for German troops, who burned the furniture for fuel and lit the palace on fire when they left.
By the end of the war, Catherine Palace was stripped and roofless.
This is a photo of a long series of palatial rooms after the war,
and I think I took this photo from the same spot. The interior of Catherine Palace has been reconstructed with the help of photos, drawings and paintings.
This is the ballroom of Catherine Palace (not my photo) and you can see that the walls are completely covered by carved, gilded figures.
It is unabashedly baroque.
1. ((often initial capital letter
) of or pertaining to a style of architecture and art originating in Italy in the early 17th century and variously prevalent in Europe and the New World for a century and a half, characterized by free and sculptural use of the classical orders and ornament, … and by dramatic effect in which architecture, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts often worked to combined effect.)
Instead of atlantes, the arches and ceilings are held up by women and toddlers caryatids and putti.
Here we have four putti holding things together between the window and ceiling,
and this unused door is supported by no less than eight bare-bosomed women and two putti.
Because it is Baroque, none of these figures are identical.
The gorgeous gals and plump babies aren’t confined to the ballroom. The small room next door had the only three original gilded figures in the palace.
The two darkened putti and the single bust on the wall are the only gilded figures that survived World War 2. All the other gilded forms were carved since then. WTF? It’s a repro.
This West Coast Lady butterfly, a Painted Lady relative, is surprisingly furry.
We’ve had many hard frosts by now, but the blanketflower is still blooming and the furry little West Coast Lady is still looking for nectar.
Here is the same butterfly
on three different blanketflower blossoms.
According to a Massachusetts state butterfly reference, all butterflies have six legs. If they look like they have four legs–like this one–it’s because the other two feet are little brush-y appendages near their heads. Brush-footed butterflies include Monarchs, Painted Ladies and Mourning Cloaks.
I am sorry to say that as hard as I look, I can’t see that third pair of brushy little legs.
Tsarskoye Selo, near Saint Petersburg, was the summer residence of the Tsars since 1717, when Catherine the Great hired a German architect to build a summer palace. It takes an empire to fund a building like Catherine Palace.
It is exceedingly large, built with an endlessly long facade and two side arms that make a U that is entered through this gilded gate.
This is the view looking left from the gate,
and this is the right side of the courtyard. The building is so big that the front entrance is missed in both these photos.
Catherine Palace is not only very large, it is also highly detailed.
During the reign of Catherine’s daughter Elizabeth (who owned more than 14,000 dresses when she died), the palace exterior was gilded with more than 100 kgs of gold.
I thought this photo was interesting for two reasons: you have to love the PVC drainage system, and aren’t those men holding up the building sort of creepy? According to Wikipedia, a support sculpted in the form of a man is an atlas (also known as a atlant, or atlantid; plural atlantes); The Roman term for such a sculptural support is telamon (plural telamones or telamons).
Peter the Great built Saint Petersburg by conscripting peasants from the length and breadth of the Russian Empire, and most of them died from cold, hunger, and disease. According to Andrew Osborn of the UK’s Independent, “historians believe the remains of some 100,000 18th-century serfs are buried beneath its wide Parisian-style avenues and grand Italianate palaces. … They gave their lives for the glory of then Imperial Russia and what they created, St Petersburg, stands as a monument to the single-mindedness of the Russian state.” Saint Petersburg and Catherine Palace were both built on the backs of serfs.
This lion’s face impressed me: look at his eyebrows, and his cowed expression. God Bless and keep the Tsar, he says, far away from me.
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