Animal Behavior

I see deer out my window most mornings. They seldom travel alone, but groups can be any size from two to maybe eight. (It's hard to count the larger groups because they're moving around in the woods and aren't all visible at once.) I don't know how these groups form, or whether the same animals are usually or perhaps always associated with the same groups. Perhaps it has to do with kinship. Maybe naturalists have more information on this. In early summer you will often see a doe with her fawn, but in winter and early spring you will see these variable groups. 

 

A couple of days  ago there was a group of six, browsing in verge between my front lawn and the woods. I saw a couple of things I had never seen before. One was what might be called grooming behavior. Two of the animals started licking, and perhaps nibbling, on each other's neck. This might be a form of social bonding, but it could also achieve removal of ticks. 

 

Shoots haven't started to come yet here in Windham County, so I really have no idea what they could have been eating, but it was something in the dirt. One of them started digging with its forefeet, and eating something it found in the disturbed soil. I walked down there and took a look. It had dug up quite a large area, irregular but roughly three feet in diameter. However, I couldn't see anything interesting that gave me any hint of what it might have been after. That the deer disturb the forest soil in this way was news to me.

As interesting as all this is, and as  attractive as they are, the deer population has grown wildly out of control. Since there aren't any Indians, cougars or wolves to kill them, and hunting is no longer very popular among us European settlers, they just breed and eat. There are many more deer in New England today than there were before the Europeans came, and they damage the forest. Their only effective natural enemy is the automobile, unfortunately, and that also makes them directly dangerous to humans. If you want to hunt on my property, you're welcome to.

The Tower Clock

I keep promising to start posting here regularly and then I flake off. Anyway this time I really mean it. 

Yesterday my neighbor, who is also the town first selectperson, asked me to wind the town clock while he was away for a week. I didn't even know there was a town clock, let alone that it was part of the job description of the first selectperson to wind it. It turns out that somebody donated the clock to the town a long time ago, and specified that it be installed in the belfry of the Congregational church. So obviously almost nobody realizes that it even is the "town" clock. It occurs to me that this is probably a First Amendment violation but nobody cares. 

 

The reason the First Citizen is winding is because the church member who used to do it can no more. The congregation has dwindled and right now, the church seems to be inoperative and doesn't even have  pastor. So Gary didn't know what else to do and started winding the clock himself. This is obviously not a long-term solution. Anyway we went over there and he taught me how to do it. This involves going up to the balcony, then climbing a steep ladder and going through a hatchway into the belfry. The clock is a beautiful Seth Thomas mechanism has to be at least nearly 100 years old because the company stopped making them in 1929. I saw one before in a clock shop where I had my grandparent's old pendulum clocks repaired, and I wanted to buy it then as a decorative object. Of course hardly anyone ever sees this one.

It's weight driven. The weights fall down a shaft to the side, so it's a bit different from the model you see at the link. Lifting the bell weight is a lot of work, even with the mechanical advantage of the crank and gear works. It probably weighs two or three hundred pounds. The weight that drives the clock is much easier to lift. Towns installed these clocks in the 19th Century when most people couldn't afford timepieces, but life was becoming much more regimented by time due to factory work. Our town was exclusively agricultural back then, however, so presumably this was just intended as a prestige item. Willimantic, which was a factory town, is a bit too far away for the locals to have worked there before the automobile.

Nowadays, I suspect that the burghers don't really care about the clock. I think if they do want it to stay in operation they'll have to come up with some money to put someone on retainer to wind it and keep it oiled. It seems that nobody cares about old stuff anymore. The price of antique furniture has crashed and antique houses don't sell. I regret that actually. Anyway I'll wind the clock tomorrow and again on Saturday, before Gary gets back. Then I hope we'll have a conversation about what to do next.

Well, I'm disappointed

 UCONN went to undefeated Villanova and beat the crap out of them. 'Nova hung in there for the first quarter, then UCONN went to a zone defense and 'Nova couldn't get the ball inside for the rest of the game. After  that blowout, it looks like the Big East won't be much of a challenge after all. 

They had a game against a ranked team, DePaul, on Tuesday and even though they were ice cold shooting - I think they made 2 out of 18 three pointers or something -- their defense was again impenetrable and they dominated in the paint -- largely thanks to Olivia Nelson-Ododa -- and won by more than 20 points. They have Baylor coming up next week so we'll see what they've really got.

With that out of the way, I'll say that Windham County is in a very different place now than we were just a couple of months ago. For most of the year we had a very low prevalence of Covid-19, in fact not a single positive test in my town and very few cases anywhere. Since we're largely rural or semi-rural, that meant life wasn't very much affected, particularly during the warm weather when people could gather outside. But now we have to take it much more seriously. We've had a few people in town get very sick, and the death rate in the county overall has become considerable. 

 

Looking at the general incompetence and indifference of the current administration, vaccine distribution is obviously going to be very slow. Joe Biden has pledged to get it up to 1 million shots a day, but that's aspirational. I expect it will take at least 6 weeks and probably more to get up to that rate even after the grownups take over on January 20. So we're not out of the woods for another six months or so. I'll let you know what life is like out here.

The Big East

Sorry, I keep meaning to keep up this blog and then I get distracted. This time I'll really do it. What inspires my post today is something personal and, I suppose, trivial. The only major league team in Connecticut is a WNBA franchise, which has a small following and doesn't get much attention. But the biggest thing going in sports in the state is actually the UCONN women's basketball team. The UCONN men have had off and on success -- one year both the mens' and women's teams won the NCAA championship, which I believe is a unique accomplishment. But the women have been consistently at the top of their sport, under head coach Geno Auriemma.

In my adult peregrinations, I have lived in the Philadelphia area, D.C., and Boston as well as Connecticut. One unifying institution in all of those places was the Big East conference. This was mostly a basketball conference -- a lot of the schools didn't even have football teams, although Miami and Boston College, which back in the day had powerhouse programs, did belong. When I lived in D.C., Big East conference member Georgetown was a leading program under John Thompson. In Philadelphia, it was Villanova. In Boston, B.C., which actually won a men's national championship once. And of course UCONN. Other teams were also nearby. St. John's and Seton Hall in the New York area, and Providence College. Note that these are mostly Catholic schools but that's pretty much irrelevant.

Regardless of whether your local team was a contender in the NCAA tournament, or their top players were destined for the NBA, the Big East as a league still mattered. Fans got to know all the teams and the players and cared who won in the Big East. In a strange way it created some continuity in my life.

Then the UCONN trustees decided that the school needed a Division 1 football program. That seemed like a very bad idea at the time. Because the Big East wasn't much of a football conference, I believe Miami and B.C. already left. In any case, so did UCONN, which joined the Atlantic Coast Conference in anticipation of being a big deal in foobaw. Well, you can guess what happened. The football team has never risen above abject and embarrassing awfulness. Meanwhile, the ACC has exactly one women's basketball team that even has a chance of making the NCAA tournament, and that's UCONN. That means that every single ACC game they have ever played has been a cupcake. They typically won by doubling or tripling their opponent's point total. They never lost a conference game.

Not only is that no fun, it also means that by the time they got to the NCAA tournament they had little experience against quality competition and bad habits developed by clobbering teams that couldn't match them athletically. As a result, they developed a pattern of losing in the semi-finals where they would encounter well-matched opponents for the first time.

So now UCONN has rejoined Big East basketball, and the women have had their first two conference games. I was hoping this would mean more serious competition, but so far I'm sad to say it hasn't, both games have been blowouts. But they have Villanova tomorrow so we'll see what happens. They're an exciting team with, get this, 6 freshmen. (Yes, it's a sexist and obsolete term, but it's the one they use. Take it up with the administration.) At the end of the blowout against Xavier, Auriemma had 5 freshmen on the floor, but one of them is top recruit Paige Bueckers, who looks like she'll live up  to all the hype, and they have three or more others who look like they'll be solid if not great players. Meanwhile, they have very strong sophomore and junior players, and a real chance for a national championship, despite not having a single senior on the team. 

We'll see what happens. Hopefully Big East women's basketball has some legitimate competition.

Garden update

Now is the time when serious gardeners prepare the beds for spring, which I have started doing. I also planted garlic yesterday, which is traditionally done on Columbus day so I was two days early. But this fall has been very weird. We did have a frost a couple of weeks ago, but I had a tomato plant up by my house that survived, and it's still thriving. The weather has really been summery, I haven't even made a fire for two days (I heat the house with wood), and I haven't brought in my houseplants.  And there's no frost in the ten-day forecast. 

Is this going to be the new normal, or just an anomaly? Probably the latter because we've also had unusual cold outbreaks. What is happening, as I would hope most people know but probably do not, is that the disappearance of the arctic sea ice has resulted in the jet stream developing huge loops, that pull arctic air down in one region and warm air up in others. Right now I'm on the warm side, but last spring we had a cold outbreak that nipped some fruit trees in the bud. (Mine were okay and in fact I had a decent crop, although the fruits were small because of the drought. Yeah, that's also going on.) 

Unpredictability is the worst outcome for farmers. They can live with a short growing season if they know when it's likely to begin and end. Having a couple of years of early last frost and late first frost can sucker them into disaster. So I will have to prepare for that, with cloches and cold frames and cautious crop selection. Can't do anything about the fruit trees though, if they get fooled I'm out of luck. Still, I'm not complaining about the lack of autumn so far. I'll take what I can get.

Indian Summer

We had a frost last week that trashed my tomatoes, basil and zucchini. Then it turned warm again, downright summery actually. I'm still harvesting broccoli and basil and, somewhat remarkably, a tomato plant up by my house -- a volunteer that appeared after I rinsed out the compost bucket -- was unscathed. Apparently the frost was patchy and only affected the field, which is a bit downhill. I'm in a valley so lower means colder.

I had a grilled veggie sub for lunch consisting entirely of vegetables I grew myself. I still have zucchini in the fridge, plenty of onions left, and I harvested the broccoli this morning. It's the side shoots that appear after the main heads have been cut, which happened a while ago. You won't find those in the grocery store, but they're worth it for home gardeners. 

Anyway one lesson is that I'm going to build a cold frame, which can protect tender plants from an early frost and take hearty ones right into the winter. I have a lot of plexiglass panels harvested from converting a sun porch to a four season room, so I might as well use a couple. I'm also going to do proper preparation of the garden beds for next year. I'm basing my plans on The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, by Edward C. Smith, which I definitely recommend. 

If civilization collapses I'll be ready, at least by next July.

Don't take life for granted

A deputy fire chief in our small town, who is also the former first selectman and is obviously very widely known here -- a town with more cows than people -- was at the firehouse last week with his backhoe. I need to be fairly circumspect here and not say more than the family has made public or is generally known. He was planning to dig a trench for a new waters supply line.

For some reason, he started the machine while he was standing on the ground. This should be impossible -- that kind of equipment has a switch that won't allow it to start if there's nobody in the operator's seat. Evidently for some reason it had been disabled. I don't know why -- I own a backhoe and I can't think of any reason why I would want to start it from the ground, and I'm happy for any and all safety features. Anyway the machine moved forward (which also shouldn't happen even if it starts) and ran him over. He's been in the hospital for the past week in critical condition. I'm guessing if he hadn't been at the firehouse with the ambulance crew right there the outcome would have been even worse.

So this got me thinking, as I often do, about human nature. Workers who are instructed to wear safety equipment -- gloves, eye protection, face shields -- often stop wearing it after a while. When I was a youth I once worked in a factory where a procedure included dipping radiator elements into a bath of molten tin. One guy stopped wearing his face shield and you know what happened -- somehow there was water on the coil and tin exploded. I worked in another factory where they used hydraulic shears to cut blocks of paper. The machines require the operator to put both hands on widely separated buttons before bringing the shear down with a pedal, but the guys would put weights on the buttons. 

I could go on but you get the idea. Familiarity with dangerous tasks makes the danger recede from our consciousness. I've done this 100 times and nothing bad has happened, and I'm sick of this minor inconvenience so to heck with it. In the case of the backhoe it wasn't even an inconvenience -- he still would have had to get up on the machine. What's the point of starting it first except because you can, because you were clever enough to bypass the safety switch? 

So, slow down, think, don't do anything foolish. Somehow evolution made us careless.