Tag: Nature

Urban deer, oh dear

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Eastport – centered on Moose Island – is one of many small cities being overrun by deer. You may have met some of the culprits here at the Red Barn.

Here are some random bits as a result.

  1. In the Wampanoag language, they’re known as “the ones with wet noses,” for the way they investigate the world around them.
  2. Why do fawns have white spots? I suspect it could be a good opportunity for a storyteller to develop. Along with the question of why fawns eventually lose them.
  3. They like apples. Man, do they. Some will dance on their hind legs in reaching for the branch overhead.
  4. They can destroy a garden overnight.
  5. That said, they’ll eat just about anything. One even swallowed a spigot on our bird feeder.
  6. Speaking of which, a bit of cayenne pepper in the feeder seems to repel them. As the adage goes, better late than never, regarding some lessons.
  7. They’ll eat out of your hand if you’re patient. Not that I advise that.
  8. Bucks get bumped out of the circle as they come of age.
  9. The most we’ve counted in our small yard at one time was ten.
  10. We’ve had an albino in the north end of town. I first thought it was a goat in the night.
Here’s a shot from our dining table. Or hers, as well.

One commute I can’t complain about

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Some Sunday mornings, my drive to and from the Quaker meetinghouse a half-hour from my home is a meditation in its own right.

Even in fog or snow, it can be refreshing.

Much of the road is through forest, plus stretches along Passamaquoddy and Cobscook bays and their tributaries. The route also passes through a tribal reservation and a national wildlife preserve, which does sound a bit exotic though I take it as routine.

Eagle sightings are common, and I have had to stop for deer or turkeys in the middle of U.S. 1. Once I even spotted a moose far ahead on the pavement.

A radio program of classical choral music on a CBC station that comes in quite clearly is often also an element, depending on my mood.

Do you remember the freedom you felt when you first learned to drive? Some mornings, especially when there’s no other traffic, that elation returns.

While I’m tempted to proclaim “What could be more glorious than this!” I will also note many of the scattered homes I pass resemble junkyards – poverty in Washington County is a constant – so there’s a reminder of that reality, too. I suspect there are more dead cars and trucks here than people.

As an added touch, there are no traffic lights, either.

Red squirrel jitters

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Squirrels were a pestilence back in Dover, raiding our garden and devouring the crown molding in our barn, in addition to some damage to the house itself.

While deer are a problem here, we haven’t had squirrels.

But the other day, I looked up from my keyboard and saw a small red squirrel scampering across our brush pile.

A few minutes later, my wife, working in another room, called out to say she’d seen a squirrel.

“A red one?”

Yep.

They’re worse than the grays we had, in the opinion of many.

So far, at least, it hasn’t been back.

Cross our fingers. We really no longer see them as cute.

You’d think those birds would be far more ravenous in the depths of winter

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We continue to keep our bird feeders out through the summer (something we wouldn’t do if we had bears in town), but I am surprised by how much more they eat in summertime, when there’s plenty of other food available, than they do in deep cold and snowy conditions when they need more to keep their metabolism up.

Yeah, we know there are more of them now and that they’re also feeding their babies. But on some days they eat as much as they would otherwise consume in two weeks – or more.

On the other hand, we do enjoy watching the variety and drama as they dine right outside the window at our kitchen table throughout the year.

That record flooding gets personal  

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Looking at the news of Vermont’s flood damage, I’m seeing places I know and have traveled. Towns I pass through on my way to and from Quaker Yearly Meeting sessions at Castleton University, for instance, all now heavily hit. I wonder about some of the covered bridges I anticipate visiting or places I stop for a stretch, too.

I’ve been waiting to hear from a dear friend, especially, though I know his home is high above the stream running through town. Still …

My wife and I retain strong impressions from seeing the devastation from Hurricane Irene nine or ten months after it delivered its wallop. You wouldn’t believe the extent unless you saw the evidence.

The mountains become a funnel for the falling water, and many of the roads have nowhere to go but beside the streams. People, of course, live along the roads … many of them at the foot of natural chutes from the hillsides.

It’s not just water, either, but the boulders and gravel it unleashes.

There are real stories that will unfold long after the TV cameras and breaking news headlines have moved elsewhere.

But it does make a difference when events do somehow seem to reflect home for you. Or when you look for what I think of as “slow news.”

We’re stuck in fog, fog, fog

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While I had heard that these stretches of a surrounding blur of dense gray could linger weeks here, I assumed folks were talking about March or maybe late November, not the height of glorious summer.

And then a friend told me of one summer in Lubec, a few miles over the water to our south, where it hit every day, often without any splash of sunshine.

It does dampen the emotional wellbeing of many.

As much of the nation – and world – suffers under recording-breaking heat, we’re having many days when the day’s high has barely reached much above 60, as in Fahrenheit. Only a few readings have even broken as far as the lower 80s. I’ve worn my beloved Hawaiian shirts only three times, and my shorts are still in the bottom drawer of the dresser. If you’re wondering, unlikely as that is, I’m not one of those guys who goes bare-knees in January, believe me.

Much of this has been accompanied by weeks of fog – morning and late afternoon through the night, especially – but sometimes without break during the day as well.

I’ve stopped reminding people that Seattle experiences something like this six-months straight every year or that San Francisco is accustomed to watching the ground-hugging clouds return every afternoon.

We do live on an island, so the temperatures just seven miles away on the mainland traditionally run ten degrees warmer, but those are still much more reasonable than the hellfire raging elsewhere.

None of the wider extremes should come as a surprise. True prophets had forecast them a half century ago, and we are running on those projections, contrary to the decades of denials and resistance of capitalist naysayers and their puppet politicians. Remember, too, it was “climactic instability” rather than mere “global warming.”

So, on a more mundane level, on those partly-cloudy to partly-sunny days in the forecast, we jump onto running the laundry early and then getting it promptly out on the line to breathe, and I attack the lawn with the mower as soon as the grass dries sufficiently. Not that I’m the only one, not by a longshot.

When I did live in the Pacific Northwest, I was in the interior desert with dreams of escaping somehow to a writing life somewhere along the coast, maybe in a cabin in British Columbia or Alaska.

Something like this, perchance.