I'm back

I realize I haven't posted here for about two months. I'm not sure why -- there's been plenty to write about, but the muse seems to have abandoned me for a while. I believe she will return now.

Among the subjects I have neglected to cover:

The suicidality of squirrels. They wait until a vehicle is coming, then run into the road and try to get squashed. At least so it seems. Driving around here requires continual alertness.

Hurricane Irene. The principal reaction of the wise guys was to mock the news media for making a big deal out of it, but it was, in fact, a big deal. It just didn't happen to destroy Manhattan, but out in the countryside we had quite the time of it. I sat here listening to huge trees crashing down all around me. I'm now in the process of harvesting the wood, which will last me through 2014, I think. So it's not all bad. But a week with no electricity and all the stores and gas stations closed was highly educational.

Glenn Beckistan. I don't know what it is about low population density that makes total wackoism appeal to people. Living in Boston, you could safely assume that people you met were not wingnuts. Not so out here in the woods. I'll have to do some pondering on why this is.

The continuing effort of the State of Connecticut to kill Joshua Komisarjevsky. I have written about this horrific situation before, but the trial has now started. This is one of those death penalty cases that comes down to the bare, simple question. He's guilty, he's a career criminal, his deeds are atrocious, obviously he can never be permitted to walk among us. But why do we have to kill him?

And there's plenty more. I'll be back.

It's an inva-a-a-a-sion

Yesterday my neighbor showed up with a pickup load of firewood, which he was dumping off as an informal exchange for some work. Henry doesn't do chainsaw, ostensibly because his first wife told him not to, although as far as I know his current wife doesn't care. He also borrowed my splitter to process his holdings, including the portion I had sectioned. So I didn't refuse the donation.

Anyhow, I was scouting out where to build my woodshed, which might involve clearing some vegetation and even cutting into the hillside behind the house. I had a small stand of some sort of attractive shrub which I was thinking I'd regret removing, but Henry told me they were Russian olives, which are, as it turns out, an invasive alien species that all good people should destroy. I checked it out on your Intertubes and sure enough, he's right. So I broke out my trusty Stihl Farm Boss™ and terminated them with extreme prejudice.

By the way, Henry has also been volunteering on a crew to extirpate another invasive species called mile-a-minute weed from the banks of the Shetucket,* just a half mile from here. The plant is named, of course, for the rate at which it spreads.

The bad news is, this is hopeless. If you Google Russian olive, you will not only find stern orders to destroy it, you will also find nurseries selling it with lavish praise for its beauty and hardiness. Evidently this is legal, though evil. Most landowners will probably never even learn that it's a harmful invader. If they do, they are unlikely to possess the equipment and capability to remove it, and many won't even have the inclination. As for the mile-a-minute weed, those volunteers will just have to keep going back several times every year and yanking it out, but it is highly unlikely they will ever eradicate it.

BTW, I learned from William Cronon's book Changes in the Land that many of our most familiar weeds -- dandelions, plantains, burdocks -- are in fact European invaders, whose seeds arrived as contaminants in animal feed, apparently. Perhaps they are not so harmful, but humans just keep mixing up the flora and fauna of the continents and oceans, to nobody ever knows what result, but it's usually bad.

Oh well, too late.

*Wickipedia:"The river flows through an especially unspoiled rural section of southern New England, despite the historical prevalence of industry in the surrounding region. Parts of the rivers have been designated by the federal government as the Quinebaug and Shetucket Rivers Valley National Heritage Corridor. The National Park Service describes the river valley as the "last green valley" in the Boston-to-Washington megalopolis. In nighttime satellite photos, the valley appears distinctively dark amidst the lights of the surrounding urban and suburban regions." Just so you know, that's where we are.

All God's critters got a place in the choir

That's a song by wandering troubador Bill Staines, lyrics posted here, rather strangely, by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Actually they don't all, but a lot of them do indeed make a racket.

As I reported some months back, in the winter here the dead of night is as quiet as the dark side of the moon except for the occasional coyote howl or hoo hoo, hoo hoooo of a barred owl. But by early spring bird song started by dawn. It gradually evolved from intermittent sparse utterances to a continuous sound track. Pretty soon the tree frogs started up at dusk and no I'm surrounded by a trilling, swirling symphony 24 hours a day.

Unfortunately I'm no expert on bird song so I don't know exactly what I'm hearing. There are many species of chorus frogs, and again I don't know exactly what I've got there either, although I can deduce that the spring peepers, Pseudacris crucifer, must have started the whole thing off, since "Spring Peepers primarily live in forests and regenerating woodlands near ephemeral or semi-permanent wetlands," and that is exactly where I am at; and they also can survive freezing temperatures so they're the first frogs to get going in spring.

What I also don't know is why these creatures make all this noise. I understand that one reason is to attract mates, but that must get over and done with after a reasonably short time, so why do they just keep on singing? It ought to help predators find them, which can't be good, so it must really be worth it for some other reason. Anybody know?

You gonna believe your lyin' eyes . . .

or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? I was going to post something a few weeks ago when they declared the eastern Cougar extinct, but then I said naahh, there's too much idiocy in the world to bother. The declaration acknowledged that many people had seem mountain lions in New England recently -- and I happen to be among them but what do I know? However, they didn't count because they must be strays from Colorado or animals escaped from captivity or something. Anyway, even if they're here, they aren't really here.

So a 140 pound mountain lion is struck and killed by a car in Milford, and the spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection says "We don't see a lot of those around here." Well actually you don't see a lot of them in Colorado either, or anywhere else, because they don't normally show up for the day-after-Thanksgiving sale at Target, but if you see any of them, that means they exist, right? No, this one must have escaped or been released from captivity. Now come on, how many people keep mountain lions as pets and have them wander off? Is this really going on all the time? Pish tosh, I say.

In other news, our downtown consists of a post office, a general store, and two churches. Or it did. A few weeks ago the proprietor of the General Store drove his pickup into a tree at 2:00 am, leaving no skid marks. Maybe I shouldn't speculate but he'd put some money into fixing the place up and installing a pizza oven, and with half the people in town being out of work and for sale signs everywhere I expect fewer folks were willing to pay an extra 50 cents for a loaf of bread. It's six miles to the nearest grocery store now but people are just working harder at planning ahead and not running out of stuff, I expect.

Now we have no restaurant or store in town, except for a chainsaw shop. So is this really a town? We do have a volunteer fire company, a library, and an elementary school -- we're part of a regional school district above that -- and we share the dump with another town but it's still a place to meet up. There are annual events at the historical society -- Farm Days and the Highland Games -- a farmers' market once a week and occasional flea markets and whatnot on the town green, and Little League baseball at a town park. But we only really exist because of the public sector. There's no Main Street. Shopping means going to one or another big box in Windham. I expect this is happening in a lot of places.

Paint my house

One of the major benefits I hope to get out of hobby farming is that I have to work my tushy off, which is definitely necessary because years of city living and desk work have made me feel like I'm no longer 20 years old.  No longer being 20 years old probably has something to do with it as well but still, I'd like to get a little bit of it back.

You know what? It just might work. Today it's just 12:45 but I've already mowed a couple of acres, split a chord of wood, and turned, well, a shitload of chicken shit into my tomato patch, removing an equal quantity of rocks in the process. The plants go out tomorrow. (It's been a cool wet spring.) I am now filthy and sweaty and my back aches. Perfect.

Now, since you evidently aren't going to do it for me, I have to get cracking on painting my house. All that other stuff was pretty much an excuse not to start doing it.

You know what? People need this. We need to do physical work and see the result. It's essential to body and soul. And missing from most American's lives these days.

People and plants

I had an open house or housewarming party yesterday, whatever you want to call it -- an official introduction to my homestead for family, friends and colleagues, most of whom had never seen it and were coming from an hour or more away. It was great, I'm glad I did it.

I told people not to give me anything but you know how much good that does. I wound up with two azaleas, two hydrangeas, and a lilac, along with about a year's supply of booze. So I planted the shrubs today and it got me to thinking. How can evolution explain our fondness for colorful flowers?

This is no minor feature of human psychology.  There is an enormous industry devoted to breeding, propagating, growing and selling cut flowers and flowering plants.  It's even profitable to fly cut flowers from Chile to New York.  Consider the importance of something so ephemeral to the weightiest of human affairs, from romance to mourning.

There is no shortage of plant life at my estate -- looking out the window I see a riot of green.  Our ancestors on the African savanna would have seen flowers occasionally, but seldom if ever anything as showy as the ornamentals we have developed through centuries of selective breeding.  So this isn't taking us back to some primal memory; nor are flowers particularly indicative of any related reward, at least not until fruit is ripe weeks or months later.  We just like them.

A house, even one sitting in the middle of the woods with lush vegetation all around, doesn't seem complete until we put in some of these useless plants, that we just happen to like.  We are mysterious.

Going Wild

Okay, after some research and looking at pictures, what I saw was indeed a pig. It was rather smaller than the animal that puts the B in your BLT, but it was female (no tusks), may have been a juvenile, and anyway feral pigs come in various sizes but are often small. They come in various colors but the gray coat is accepted style. The problem is that Connecticut is one of the few states in which they have not been reported. Either this one didn't get the memo, or it was somebody's pet that wandered off. Its indifference to my presence would argue for the latter. I hope so, because they can do a lot of damage.

I can think of three other Old World mammals that Europeans have unintentionally introduced to the wild in North America. Horses don't cause a lot of problems because they pretty much occupy the niche vacated by the slaughtered bison, and the federal government limits their numbers -- to the bizarre objections of some people.

Then there are rats. They seem to limit themselves to human cities, and so only bother humans. Their ancestors must have had some other niche, but whatever it was, they don't seem interested in it nowadays.

Finally, and this sad to say is the biggest problem of all, there are the feral cats. Cat lovers, and there are many, don't like to hear a word against them, but as Maryann Mott tells us in the linked article, it is estimated that feral cats kill hundreds of millions of birds, and more than a billion small mammals such as chipmunks, every year. They never existed in the Americas until Europeans started losing their pets. Domestic cats have not changed much since they started using cute fuzziness to freeload on humans, so they revert to the wild very easily.

Cat loving activists try to deal with the problem by sterilization, but that seems to me like sweeping the beach. There probably isn't much that can be done beyond targeting specific colonies that are readily accessible. This is one more reminder of the collateral damage we do with purely innocent intent.

The new photo in the banner recognizes the change of season.