and a whole lot more are over at the PBS website, where you can see the nifty Nature program Is That Skunk?. We saw it the other night, more or less by accident. All my anecdotal observations confirmed; they’re extremely reluctant to spray ( An Eek of The Week that isn’t). And wait’ll you see the spotted ones – some cute!
greeted us when we woke this morning –
no mistaking ‘em; skunks’ short legs and long bushy tail create a unique undulating line, stuttering in light snow, smooth as a Japanese brushstroke in deep powder, either way a perfect shadow of their endearing waddle.
skunk tracks in thin snow
I know, I know, a lot of people don’t like them – especially people with dogs. But the problem there is simply that too many dogs don’t know how to back down. Unless you’re threatening the babies or cutting off the line of retreat or otherwise driving the poor thing into a defensive corner a skunk is the most peaceable of creatures. Read More…
No heating season complete without a startup drama, in this case a very loud eek! coming from the woodstove. Bill rescued the source and sent a picture, along with an explanation of why the thing doesn’t look quite right.
immature starling, bound for freedom
“The starling that came down the stovepipe. By spring the white tips on the feathers wear off and the stronger dark fibers (with melanin) give the metallic coloration.”
10/23
Kristi and I are discussing the last bits of putting the garden to bed. We’re wondering about the winter rye, our standard cover crop for the Maine vegetable plots. She planted it 10 days ago but nothing seems to be coming up. Big Mystery. Seed was fresh, there has been rain…
10/24
Mystery solved first thing in the morning. I look out the bedroom window into the rosy dawn and there in the garden is a flock of wild turkeys, busily scratching and eating.
wild turkey breakfasting on rye and clover
They’re vegetarian rats, basically. Eat bulbs, empty birdfeeders, gnaw through attic walls to make smelly nests, from which they sally forth to eat the insulation from electric wires. Absolute proof – if we needed any – that good looks can get you a pass on a lot of bad behavior. If they had rat tails instead of those bottle brushes and did not have the habit of sitting up and eating with paw-hands, and
if the babies weren’t so damn cute, we’d be a lot farther ahead in squirrel eradication.
And don’t talk to me about dispersing seeds. If I find one more “volunteer ” black walnut with a taproot halfway to China…
Right. So what did we do with this little pair, scarcely larger than the violet leaves, happily playing for half an hour oblivious of dangerous humans only 10 feet away? We ooed and ah’d and elbowed each other and I ran out in my nightie to get photographs.
Bah, Humbug.
We all know the metal baffle does nothing. Taking down the feeder just sets them into the borders to nibble new buds. Any suggestions?
Bill happened into it when he was out fishing near Esopus creek, famous among fishermen for trout and among foodies for one of America’s most delicious apples, the Esopus Spitzenburg (frequently lauded by Thomas Jefferson), about which more some other time.
He was walking through the woods back to his car and there it was, barely dry and still wobbling. It went to ground immediately. The doe was in the underbrush, snorting. He could have picked it up and carried it away, thereby saving somebody else’s garden a lot of trouble, but of course he didn’t.
Bill Bakaitis
Newborn fawn in the woods on public land. The blue paint on the tree is a forest service mark: “this one is to be cut down.”
It has been several years since bears first came through our yard, knocking down the birdfeeders and leaving unmistakably bearlike deposits to corroborate the neighbors’ sightings: a mother and 2 cubs. The beehives remained untouched so we remained unconcerned, even though we should have known better.
As summers passed and nothing else happened, we stayed (relatively) unconcerned, even though Dan right down the road reported several ursine visits that played hell with his hives.
This year, the Dan reports were scary: a mom and cubs and a singleton, presumably male. In the yard. In the hives. On his porch.
Dan Connors
View through Dan’s sunroom window
When he chased the solo in his car, lights flashing and horn honking, it retreated to the edge of the woods. When he backed up it emerged, more or less thumbing its snout.
Dan Connors
And Then it came for us
As Bill wrote to a friend on the 6th of May:
“This morning we awoke to find our beehives and bird feeders all torn asunder. I had just spent $170 for 2 packages of new bees and they had just released the queens and were just getting settled in their new homes when this happened.
I spent the day rebuilding the hives and installing an electric fence around the hives. If you hang some bacon on the wires, so we hear, the bears wrap their tongue and lips around it and get a good jolt.. We are eagerly awaiting their shocking bellows.
A mother and two cubs and another solo have been raising havoc in the neighborhood. DEC said that, since the bees are livestock, I can shoot the bears. They will give me a permit for and provide me with, rubber buckshot if I wish. They would also like to come and grab these animals so for to give them a collar… Once they have good data to justify a hunting season they will allow hunting for them in this county.
In 1990 there were @ 400 bears in the Catskills (across the river). By 2005 the population had grown to 4,000 to 5,000. @ 500 were taken there last fall….”
So far Bill’s fence has not been challenged – or at least we have heard no bellows and the bacon appears undisturbed. (More points for crow smarts? They are expert compost-pickers, ever alert for a bit of protein, but they haven’t come near those wires, even though they should be immune.)
Here are the fence details Bill sent to Dan, should you wish to build a solar powered electric bear deterrent around anything:
“ I went ahead with the more expensive unit (Zareba SP10). It also happened to be just about whatCornell and Bee Culture (via Cornell apiarist) recommend. It puts out just about 5,000 volts and 0.17 joules.
It is good to see it snapping sparks for @ 3/16 inch over the raindrops!!!
I strung my wires alternating hot (+) and ground (-) with the lowest wire 6″ above the ground and the top wire ground (-) for lightning protection. Since I used steel posts the ground wires are wrapped directly onto the posts. I used 12 gauge copper jump wire to connect the hot wires as well as for the lead from the controller. I suspect I could make a slight improvement if I grounded the unit to the steel posts as well as the usual ground rods.
The well furnished home food garden has always and still should include at least one hive of honeybees. But this is easier said than done, so learning that bees were part of Bill’s dowry may have been the thing that clinched the deal, back when we were courting. Fast forward 16 honeyed years: I’m writing a N.Y. Times bee story and in the course of research discover – who knew? – that this little insect may well be the canary in the agricultural coal mine.
Honeybees don’t get much press compared to, say, petroleum, but their pollination services are just as crucial as fuel and fertilizer to about 15 billion dollars a year in crops, from almonds and alfalfa to sunflower seeds. More bees are needed in each place than any one place could provide, so tens of thousands of hives get loaded on trucks, taken to fields or orchards in bloom, then packed up again and hauled elsewhere.
These migratory honeybees are essential to agribusiness monocropping, which could not exist if it had to depend on local pollinators. That’s why the bees have been getting their 15 minutes of fame* – a mysterious affliction called CCD ( colony collapse disorder) has destroyed so many colonies it’s threatening a major industry. Farmers are paying much higher prices for hive rental while also worrying there may be shortages that can’t be overcome, even with expensive imports.
More than you really want to know is posted, with running updates at beeculture.com, but the very short version is:
*CCD probably isn’t new; reports of similar, albeit far smaller, epidemics go back at least as far as 1898.
* CCD is almost surely not one disease or pest or insecticide but rather some unknown combo thereof that exploits the weakness of bees stressed by profoundly unnatural ways of being kept and used. No study has yet revealed a single insult that is/was the tipping point. Each time a likely culprit is fingered, further investigation confirms that it is at best only part of the puzzle.
* Domestic honeybees are livestock: living creatures raised and used by humans. What do we know about them compared to what we know about chickens and cows? Zilch. What are we likely to learn soon? Also zilch, in part because there is no massive bee industry to lobby for public funds or undertake its own research.
The internet allows posts like this to go on at enormous length, but that doesn’t mean they should, so here are a few visuals from our own
Home Grown Honey Harvest, October 7, 2007
Bill checks to see if there’s any honey in the frame ( a pre-built foundation for the bees to start from).
I always thought smoke made the bees think the hive was on fire, so they were too busy worrying about the house to sting anybody. Beekeepers just say it calms them, with the same result.
They don’t stay calm long; you have to extract the honey someplace they can’t get to, in this case the barn.
This is Bill’s honey extractor, a galvanized antique called the Root Novice. Modern extractors are steel or plastic and this is probably the place to say that honey is more or less self-sterilizing. It’s so sweet bacteria can’t grow in it and so low in water content yeasts won’t grow either. The reason you can’t give it to babies is that it can contain spores of anaerobic bacteria like botulism. The acid in all human digestive systems that process solid food prevents those spores from growing, but new people who still drink all their nourishment don’t have that protection.
After each cell is filled with honey, the bees cap it with a wax lid. You have to slice off the lids (with a wicked sharp, thin-bladed knife) before you can extract the honey.
Bees gather honey from one source at a time. If you want to name the honey for its source – check out the list at honeylocator.com – you have to harvest it before the bees move on. The dark patch looks sort of like buckwheat but I’m sure it’s not. Doesn’t matter, whatever it is will just add complexity to this year’s vintage.
Frames are held upright by arms in the extractor. Turn the crank and the arms whirl around, flinging the honey out by centrifugal force, same as in a salad spinner.
Honey isn’t the only thing that gets flung; the colander catches things like stray bits of wax and the occasional unfortunate bee that didn’t respond to the smoke.
After collection, the honey is poured into sterilized jars. Over the next couple of weeks, any tiny impurities rise and form a thin layer at the top. For gift-giving, we take the layer off. For us, we just leave it as an extra seal until we want to use the honey.
Before the equipment is washed and stored, it’s put outdoors for the bees to clean. They will retrieve almost all of the honey to add to their winter stores.
* Fifteen minutes seems to be about right. Bees are as gone from the headlines as they are from all those dead hives. Tune in next February for a brief flare-up, when almond orchards will need a surge from an army so grievously depleted it may not have enough troops.
Christmas day: Breakfast consumed, presents opened, the tree not twinkling ( we’ve given it a bye this year) and Baby, it’s warm outside – time for a cookie-redemptive walk.
Never mind the cliches about perpetual November, our bit of the mid-Hudson Valley is eerily like March. At the suet feeder, the usual crew of woodpeckers ( downy, hairy and 
red-bellied, one of the worlds more misleadingly named birds, photographed here by Edward Russell)
has a visitor, a Carolina wren.
The wren is not mind-bendingly out of place – our 1980 Peterson field guide says “fluctuating in north; cut back by severe winters” – but personally myself I get a chill when I see Carolina in New York on Christmas day.
The forsythia at the top of the hill has been blooming for the last month, so the flowers are no longer a surprise, and neither is the clump of blewits that came up 2 weeks ago in the oak leaves by the roadway. They’re multiply frost-walloped but still hanging on, only slightly the worse for wear.
The weeds never were surprising; cold-resistance is one way biennials like wild phlox, garlic mustard and verbascum get such a jump on everything else. But we’ve seldom seen so much greater celandine , Chelidonium majus, even though, being a poppy , it’s perfectly happy to wax fat for next year in low light and cold-but-not-frozen soil.
The deeply scalloped greens were lovely, and a reminder of how close some weeds are to relatives on the approved list. This one looks a lot like our native woodland poppy, Stylophorum diphyllum, a rarer plant with larger flowers and less aggressive habits.
It’s easy to tell them apart when they’re blooming – C. majus has small, pale yellow flowers; S. diphyllum has good sized, deep gold ones – or when you see seed pods (C. majus = long skinny sticking up; S. diphyllum = sort of football-shaped, drooping ) but at this time of year the best way to know what you’re seeing is to simply assume the worst, especially if the plant is by the roadside or in some other highly disturbed ground.
Greater Celadine is a present from the New England colonists, who brought it as a medicinal herb, primarily for digestive complaints and to cure skin diseases. A brief google suggests the medical theory is hair-of-doggish; the bright orange sap of C. majus is very irritating to the skin and extracts of the plant have been implicated in liver disorders. It’s also supposed to help with sneezing, which I can testify it causes bouts of if you break the stem while pulling it up.
Greater celandine. The sap is as orange as the roots
Today I come to you directly from a jolly therapy session; half an hour of poking around at our big orange jasmine, scraping off the scale. The therapy is for the plant, not me – those houseplant gurus are thinking wishfully when they say this kind of screwing around has a calming effect. But it does remind me to remind you to go peer closely at your indoor greenery for signs of unwanted life. Midwinter is explosion time for aphids, whiteflies and scale. Like all of us, the plants have had it with short dark days and dry stale air.
The jasmine, a murraya, actually, is also getting a course of drenchings with insecticidal soap. You know the drill: Put the plant in the tub. Spray the hell out of it, being sure to get the undersides of the leaves. Leave it in place overnight. Next day, put a sheet of plastic over the pot surface to protect the soil, weight it with a few shampoo bottles or whatever, so it doesn’t slip, then draw the curtains and give the plant a long, gentle, tepid shower.
Is that it? No it’s not. Once there are enough bugs to see, there are enough bugs to breed, and it usually takes 2 or 3 treatments to get rid of them. Why bother? In the case of the murraya, fragrant flowers all year round, in batches every couple of months. The full name is Murraya paniculata, and they are not all that uncommon – I got mine at a local nursery that offers them every winter.
BTW, the shower part is a good idea even for plants that don’t have bugs… not only will they look better without dust, they’ll be able to absorb more sunlight. Needless to say, this advice does not apply to cactus or to damp-hating succulents like aloes and jades.
* Nothing like fooling around with the houseplants to make you want to head outdoors, to refill the birdfeeder if nothing more. And while we’re out here, allow me to recommend the hanging wire mesh conical collapsing basket model, currently playing at a hardware store near you. They’re terrif: unobtrusive, welcoming to multiple birds and difficult for squirrels to get at – — also hard for larger perching birds, as we discovered by watching one poor female cardinal ( the winter’s loveliest bird, in my opinion) swooping hopefully by the sides without being able to land. To solve this problem , stick a few lengths of thin bamboo stake through the mesh, letting them protrude just a few inches on each side. As long as you choose a very thin stakes, the perches are too flimsy to support anything bigger than a bird.
* And finally, a nice tidbit for lovers of Jamaican food: there is suddenly quite a bit of goat meat around, probably a happy outgrowth of the goat cheese boom. This is not tender young kid, it’s grown goat. Wonderful for curries and stews, but tough and I do mean tough. You’d think a 2 inch piece of anything would get tender after 2 and a half hours of stewing, but if you were thinking about goat you’d be wrong. Don’t forget to start dinner early.
