T-3 and counting

By all rights I shouldn't be blogging. We leave in days, and surely there are things I should be doing. But just to share the latest blips along the way. I have been warning the whole family to be oh so careful, "Don't injure anything at this stage of the game, we all need to be ambulatory for this!" Of course then, who should take a cartoon-like fall on the ice but moi.

Remember those "signs of spring" we were so joyfully writing about the other day? The bog had been spread with sand, and no more than two days later there came a wonderful southern breeze, a thaw, the sand filtered down onto the bog as planned and spring seemed a possibility. The glacial rivers that the trails have been of late began to melt and give way. Then, as quickly as it had melted, it refroze for the winds shifted back from the north and west. And, that snowstorm that pummeled the Midwest again, just sent us a lovely, "Ivory-Snow" flake inch or two. All the better to see tracks in right? And No Worries, for under the snow was sand. Or that was what I thought. Wrong, and nothing is slipperier than "Ivory Snow" snow on ice.


I remember thinking what an entertaining track I left. Confident striding footprints, then a clear outline of my not so graceful landing, followed by some staggering tracks which then headed off the trail and into the side brush lest I fall again. So, now a day of icing, and a wrapped bandage will hopefully be good enough. I will be the one-armed-wonder-sculler when snorkelling, hopefully not seen as a weakened species ripe for the picking by some nearby predator!

Not my luckiest day yesterday, for the computer monitor also decided its time had come. I must have worn it out reading all those reviews of hostels in Sydney, trying to chose from whether we would want one that promised broken showers and a smell that shall not be mentioned here, or one peopled primarily by avid drinkers and the aftermath that follows said drinkers. How to choose? Well, without a computer it will be up to my husband to do this at work, and thrift will win the day. Even for the delights of sharing a room with sick and boisterous people, one pays a high price in Sydney, so I can't even imagine how low he will go. Best not to think about it.

Think of Fairy penguins, think of the riotous names these Australian animals posses and the bragging rights if I were to see, say a Willy Wagtail,
or a Yellow Wattlebird,
who I hear sounds a lot like a vomiting Frat boy. Bandicoots, and Mulgara's,

if I see them, you shall hear about it. Not exactly household names these animals. At least not for we on the other side of the world. So, once again, may we come back able to tell our tales.

Till then, may the March of spring reach your door!

Preparing to Go "Down Under"

Forgive me that the offerings on this blog have been somewhat slim of late but it is because my mind has been elsewhere. Some 10,000 ,miles elsewhere, in Australia. For we are headed around the world a week from today to joyfully reunite with our daughter who will be on R& R from Afghanistan. She has been working with Aussies there and even with cyclones, floods, natural disasters coming on like clockwork, she would brook no refusal- Australia or nothing.

Now as a naturalist and a Mom, this will be a trip beyond my wildest dreams. However, I have a confession to make. Being a devotee of Bill Bryson, years ago I read, “In a Sunburned Country”. It’s a book chronicling his adventures there, and although he clearly loves the place, he also loves painting vivid pictures of the many ways you can “Come a cropper” in Australia, from the array of venomous creatures,
to rip tides, to man-eating crocodiles etc.

The type of images that give one pause. Of course I had to reread it, and to listen to it on tape, cementing each little portrait of a swallowed person down deep in my subconscious where I can pull them out at a moments notice. But ridiculous! If nothing else, what a natural end it would be for a naturalist. To cure myself of that, I got a Field Guide to Australian birds and now try and replace lunging crocodiles with Sulphur-crested cockatoo’s, Kookaburra’s and Fairy Wrens. Plus, all those marvelous marsupials, really! It will all be so amazing.



The second part of the confession is that I couldn’t seem to tear myself away from images of a flooded Australia, a hit-with-the-biggest-cyclone in their history, Australia. But all the more reason to go and add our few shekels to their coffers which will be so hurt by all of this. And my daughters are engineers. Our youngest daughter is also coming along and she is particularly interested in the water and flood control side of life so “bring it on” is her motto.

My daughter who is deployed, the one who set this all in motion, plans on getting her diving license there, and has booked us on a 3 day 2 night trip on the Great Barrier Reef-also incredibly amazing. I used to work at Sea World and here will be that amazing cast of characters from the Reef without the plate glass between us.
Praying mightily that the cyclones will hold off for the week we are there, even though this is the Wet season. How many major storms can hit in one season after all? And wouldn’t that make a memory if one did while we were there.

So, it’s all good, “No Worries”! Bless them that that is their National Motto. And I am trying valiantly to make it mine. T-6 and counting. So, if I don’t manage to blog much in these last hectic days, forgive me. But just wait for the flood of “IT WAS SO AMAZING” stories to follow. Told hopefully, from outside a crocodile’s stomach.

Another Sign of Spring for the Winter Weary

This may seem a more vague sign, one that is witnessed here on the Cape, here on the bog, but we who are grabbing at straws for a look to warmer days to come, will embrace it. The sanding of the cranberry bogs.


This past weekend when I walked the bog, the tracks I saw, were not of animals, but of bucket loaders, of sand spreaders, for the owner of the bog was doing something he does at the end of each winter. Spreading a thick layer of sand over the entire bog. They can do this in mid-winter, but my grower seems to favor late winter. It seems he picks a time when he knows the ice on the bog is strong enough to hold the little mini-sanding trucks that zip about spreading it, but close enough to a melt that the sand will then cover the vines as the ice disappears.
This sand helps the plants in several ways, giving them new soil to spread the vines, choking out weed seeds to some extent and even burying some of the eggs laid by insects in the fall.

They were scooping sand from an adjacent pile that exists just for this purpose and it brings to mind the many grown-over, steep mini-canyons that I see as I walk about areas where there are abandoned bogs. Maples and High bush blueberry are quick to grow where the vines were, so at a glance they look like forests, but they are edged in straight water courses, and always, somewhere nearby is that, now overgrown, but steep-edged canyon. The place where that grower dug out his sand, perhaps as far back as 100 years ago. Cool. To see the present use and the past use of land is easy to do in several areas of the Cape.

Today, a warm wind is blowing, well if you consider a 40-degree wind a warm one, and two crow families have come together to sport and dive in the tossing wind. They seem as happy as I to feel the change.
However, this is New England, it could snow tomorrow. But the light is growing longer each day, the chickadees are “fee beeing” and I have heard the drumming of woodpeckers- now the sanding of the bog. The scene for spring is being set little by little. And may we mark each advance with thankfulness. Thankfulness for seasons to begin with. There is a move to Texas in my future, where I will be lucky to eek out two seasons. So, may I embrace the cold and wind and wild changes while I have them! Enjoy everyone!

Life in the Subnivian Zone (reprinted from 2/5/11)

 Authors note:  I wrote this piece on life under the snow a few years ago when we were having a wild winter on the Cape.  Now in 2015 history seems to be repeating itself and then some.  I thought, then, maybe it would be appropriate to print this again and let you know about the party going on down there!  Pat 3/5/15 where, even in TX if feels like it is in the teens today! 



With all the groaning so many of us are doing about this endless winter, it seems a good idea to point out a few creatures that are doing the dance of joy. Bring on the snow! May it last until May! For some, life in the Subnivian zone is sublime!

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And what is the Subnivian zone? It’s simply the area between the ground and the top of the snow-an area of “free-for-all” for the likes of voles, mice, and shrews. Just think of the protection they gain within the tunnels they dig there. The temperature stays fairly constant, as it might in an igloo. The wind doesn’t bother them but most of all, the Hawk and the Owl and all others who place them on the “Friday Night Special” menu, can’t see them.

I am sure I have shared with you before how, as the snow begins to melt here, you can clearly see the tunnels that wind back and forth over the fields. Today I came across one shaped like a large valentine. Obviously no one has equipped these critters with a GPS or a Surveying kit to plot the straight line. Theirs is a meandering path that takes them to where grass may still be found, or whatever food source they are after. Under the cover of snow, mice and their like can feel free to chew away on the bark of young trees. If you come upon a tree in spring that is mysteriously missing its bark at the bottom, you can be pretty sure that is what happened.

The tunnels do provide some security, more than just having to “run for your life” all the time, but the prey weren’t left without a few tricks of their own. Owls and fox, coyote and weasels all have excellent hearing and they can hear the party going on down there. Perhaps you have seen pictures of a fox or a coyote leaping in the air to pounce on the ground, with the hope of trapping the vole in the collapsed tunnel.

Bernd Heinrich in his book “Winter World” says that, owls, upon hearing the sound, dive-bomb down with their feet curled and can punch a hole in even the crustiest snow. Then, grabbing with their talons, they usually find the, not-so-safe-after-all, vole. But before you take pity on the poor vole, let me remind you that it can have up to 18 litters a year, with 5 young in a litter and those, are able to reproduce in a months time!Eh Gad! Be thankful the occasional fox or coyote can still rout them out.

Another pro-snow animal is the Ruffed Grouse.
Of course, its preference is for soft snow that has recently fallen and has some depth. To stay warm through the night, and stay out of the storm by day, they blast head first into the snow and disappear in a puff of flakes. They then tunnel a little way under and set up a nice, well-insulated igloo for themselves where they are warm and out of harms way The only trick here is that snow may melt and then ice over in cooling temperatures making it a lot harder to ”poof” your way out again. Also, one must assume they only try this with soft snow or they would be in line with many of our NFL players with some serious concussions.


Now, does any of that make you feel better? Not every living thing is groaning about the forecast. And when the snow in your area finally does begin to melt, you too can go look for “Where the Wild Things Were”. Possibly even finding out your yard wasn’t quite as tame as you may have thought it was.

Unsolved Mysteries

When I think about it, “Unsolved Mysteries” is a good way to describe at least 50% of the things I encounter as I walk anywhere in nature. What seed pod is that? I wonder what the name of that particular moss is? And those tracks, they don’t quite look like anything I have seen before. And so it goes.

Last weekend, venturing back to the bog on a rare sunny day, I noticed my dog seemed to be absent for a good half of the walk. When I saw him at the far corner of the bog, on a crest behind the small mountain of sand they use to spread on the bog, I thought it best to investigate. Surely I owe Tucker some sort of commission here, for he IS the reason I get to see what I see.

Here on the backside of the knoll was the unmistakable evidence of a “crime scene”. An area of shorn fur, cut as if with scissors, which generally points to the shearing ability of coyotes. The fur was unmistakably from a White Tail deer for they lack the thick undercoat so many animals have. I noticed more white fur than I would have thought, and for one sick minute thought, oh no, that piebald fawn I saw in the fall.
I had wondered at the time, if that pinto marking would be a curse or a blessing. Would it break up its outline making it harder to see, or would the white stand out against the gray trees? But I can be one to jump to conclusions, and now I have told myself, they have white bellies, perhaps the fur came from there.

This was not the entire deer. I don’t think the kill happened where I was standing either. There were no deer tracks, nor sign of a chase, no drag marks either. What I THINK I was seeing is an animal that had been killed recently and then perhaps cached somewhere near and taken out piecemeal to eat. Think of the times you buy the whole chicken but make several meals out of it. This seemed corroborated when I went back the next day and found, this time, a portion of backbone that had just recently been dined on. So now, the mystery is, where are they caching it?

Again my dog was my clue. He had followed the tracks that went down to the pond, over the ice and up the steep railroad grade to the frozen marshy area on the other side.
Lets interject here that the tracks were a tricky thing, surely they were coyote, even a scat there to further seal the deal, but there were also large boot prints that went down to the pond too. Hmmm, most likely it was someone like myself, trying to figure out what happened. I followed Tuck and the tracks and we found ourselves again ducking briars, trying to crawl under bent and frozen shrubs. But on this side, I came across more shards of bone, so some of the deer had been dined on here. As is often the case, the briars win out and I decided I had seen enough.

But the mystery that remains is where did they hide the body? In the winter caching is a great boon to any animal that captured a meal to large to eat at once. They will dig a hole in the snow and keep it as we would in a freezer. Whether other animals find it and help themselves I can’t say. What the condition of the deer was when they caught it is unknown too. It has been a hard winter, and winter is the time that coyotes have an easier time catching deer.
Was it the piebald fawn of the fall? I sentimentally hope not, but as I have said here before, don’t begrudge the predator his prey. No one is standing over us at each meal accusing us of your dastardly habit of eating. Let’s show them the same grace.

I returned to the area today, but between when I was last there and now it has snowed again, iced over, rained torrentially and then snowed a bit more. Everything was covered up for the moment. So, let the mystery lie. Maybe it was cached, maybe it wasn’t. In winter coyotes are more likely to be together, not in huge packs but perhaps 3 or 4. After all, warmer to sleep with a pack (3 dog night) and we are coming up to Valentines day for coyotes so they would be travelling in pairs soon. Perhaps everyone just got their share, whatever they could and ate it at their own favorite spots.

It shall remain therefore, another “Unsolved Mystery”. But playing the sleuth brings a tad of entertainment to these wintry walks. No high tech equipment for us, but just a mind that can conjure up possibilities. See what mysteries you can unravel. Sleuth on.