Farm News 10-29-06

Sunday morning, after chores

Growing Up

The little ducks and bunnies are growing up. This week the ducks left their stall and joined the big flock of ducks and the bunnies left their mother to be on their own. That means it is time for more babies.

A young duck has a big pile of eggs in the barn which she is keeping warm. They should hatch soon and give us another batch of baby ducks. Ducks take about 32 days to hatch. The difficulty is not in counting days but in figuring out when incubation started. Ducks tend to go back and forth for a while before they become serious about staying on the nest. So, for a week or two, the mother might have been jumping off the nest whenever she heard me come into the barn. Mother ducks are deceitful creatures.

There is no practical reason to be hatching ducks at this time of the year, it's that baby ducks are so cute. And, the later in the year they hatch, the longer they stay little and cute. The batch that hatched most recently are beginning to get long and leggy, Like a 12 year old kid that just grew a bunch. They are sleeping in a huddle away from their mother, now, but they still follow her around, or she follows them around, it's never too clear which it is.

They are now old enough to begin staging Keystone Kops routines. Out on the lawn they will spread out until they are all three or four feet apart. If they see me coming they go into panic mode. Each duck starts running toward the others and then they all meet in the middle in a crash in which at least one duck will fall on its back. Then they mill around a bit until one duck starts heading in a single direction. The rest of them fall into line and away they go. If any duck stops for any reason, all the ducks behind crash into it. I haven't been able to deduce from what survival traits for living in the wild these behaviors descend. The behavior does fit in with barnyard survival. The poor things appear to be so dumb you know you have to take extra good care of them.

Fog

We had an excellent foggy day this week. Wandering around in the fog can be great fun if there are no dangerous cliffs or crevices in which to stumble, nor are there large trucks travelling at high speeds anywhere in reach. When the visible world shrinks to blurry objects no more than 50' away other senses have to come into greater play. Driving back roads through the Flint Hills in the fog is a nice way to spend a morning.

Some years ago, on a foggy morning, I drove a road known as The Old Wolf Trail through southern Kansas. The Chataqua Hills have lots of trees, especially Black Jack Oak, the Flint Hills are treeless tall grass prairie. The Old Wolf Trail connects the eastern part of the treless Flint Hills and the western part of the wooded Chataqua Hills, more or less. As one drives west the trees thin out and vistas of grassland open up.

Very few people live on The Old Wolf Trail and traffic is quite sparse, school buses and mail delivery making up the largest part of it. Houses are two to five miles apart and there are only a few crossroads. In some places grass is growing up in the middle of the road, between the two tire tracks. Traffic is not a problem on The Old Wolf Trail.

On this particular foggy morning I could just see the trees and fence posts on either side of the road. Occasionally they would fade out, and occasionally I could see them clearly. I drove with the windows open, racing along at 5-15 mph, listening to the sounds and smelling the plants. It was lovely. At one point, as I slowly rolled past, I saw a nice old cow blinking at me through the fence.

Sometimes the fences and trees would disappear, and then a field entrance or driveway would appear, then pass from sight to the rear as the fence posts reappeared. I heard a dog bark once but didn't see it. I saw another dog but it didn't bark, nor did I.

As I came into the Flint Hills the fog began to lift. Sometimes I was back in the center of a hemisphere moving through the fog, and then the edges would lift and grassland would stretch away to the new limits of visibility. A rabbit appeared, motionless, in the circle and then disappeared out the back, then a coyote, sniffing the rabbit scent in the air.

I had started shortly before sunrise on the east edge of the Chataqua Hills, fumbling around in the dark and fog trying to find my way to the east end of The Old Wolf Trail. When I finally arrived the sun must have been up, but it wasn't easy to see the difference. It wasn't dark, but you still couldn't see more than fifty feet. For a bit I was disappointed. I had wanted to make this drive but I hadn't expected the fog. But, I was there, and the fog might lift soon, so I set out. I had estimated the drive would take about an hour, on this morning it took two and a half hours. And it sure was pretty.

Pandora Radio

The geeks have a new buzzword, internet 2.0. Roughly, it refers to the new kinds of web sites that can be nicely trained to do as you wish. Pandora.com is internet 2.0 radio. It uses your inputs to adjust music streams to your taste. Try it out, you might like it.

Old Addresses & Phone Numbers

It seems that as one ages the number of funerals for family and friends increase each year. I don't go to funerals very often, I figure if they died without my help then they can bury themselves without my help. Another reason I don't go to funerals is my black suit won't go around me anymore, I'm too fat. That is extremely discouraging, so I don't try to put it on any more.

Anyway, I noticed that my address book contains the last known addresses and phone numbers for a lot of dead people. Even if their cell phones still worked, I don't think I'd want to talk to any of them again. Sometimes it's better not to know some things.

Farm News 10-29-06

Sunday morning, after chores

Growing Up

The little ducks and bunnies are growing up. This week the ducks left their stall and joined the big flock of ducks and the bunnies left their mother to be on their own. That means it is time for more babies.

A young duck has a big pile of eggs in the barn which she is keeping warm. They should hatch soon and give us another batch of baby ducks. Ducks take about 32 days to hatch. The difficulty is not in counting days but in figuring out when incubation started. Ducks tend to go back and forth for a while before they become serious about staying on the nest. So, for a week or two, the mother might have been jumping off the nest whenever she heard me come into the barn. Mother ducks are deceitful creatures.

There is no practical reason to be hatching ducks at this time of the year, it's that baby ducks are so cute. And, the later in the year they hatch, the longer they stay little and cute. The batch that hatched most recently are beginning to get long and leggy, Like a 12 year old kid that just grew a bunch. They are sleeping in a huddle away from their mother, now, but they still follow her around, or she follows them around, it's never too clear which it is.

They are now old enough to begin staging Keystone Kops routines. Out on the lawn they will spread out until they are all three or four feet apart. If they see me coming they go into panic mode. Each duck starts running toward the others and then they all meet in the middle in a crash in which at least one duck will fall on its back. Then they mill around a bit until one duck starts heading in a single direction. The rest of them fall into line and away they go. If any duck stops for any reason, all the ducks behind crash into it. I haven't been able to deduce from what survival traits for living in the wild these behaviors descend. The behavior does fit in with barnyard survival. The poor things appear to be so dumb you know you have to take extra good care of them.

Fog

We had an excellent foggy day this week. Wandering around in the fog can be great fun if there are no dangerous cliffs or crevices in which to stumble, nor are there large trucks travelling at high speeds anywhere in reach. When the visible world shrinks to blurry objects no more than 50' away other senses have to come into greater play. Driving back roads through the Flint Hills in the fog is a nice way to spend a morning.

Some years ago, on a foggy morning, I drove a road known as The Old Wolf Trail through southern Kansas. The Chataqua Hills have lots of trees, especially Black Jack Oak, the Flint Hills are treeless tall grass prairie. The Old Wolf Trail connects the eastern part of the treless Flint Hills and the western part of the wooded Chataqua Hills, more or less. As one drives west the trees thin out and vistas of grassland open up.

Very few people live on The Old Wolf Trail and traffic is quite sparse, school buses and mail delivery making up the largest part of it. Houses are two to five miles apart and there are only a few crossroads. In some places grass is growing up in the middle of the road, between the two tire tracks. Traffic is not a problem on The Old Wolf Trail.

On this particular foggy morning I could just see the trees and fence posts on either side of the road. Occasionally they would fade out, and occasionally I could see them clearly. I drove with the windows open, racing along at 5-15 mph, listening to the sounds and smelling the plants. It was lovely. At one point, as I slowly rolled past, I saw a nice old cow blinking at me through the fence.

Sometimes the fences and trees would disappear, and then a field entrance or driveway would appear, then pass from sight to the rear as the fence posts reappeared. I heard a dog bark once but didn't see it. I saw another dog but it didn't bark, nor did I.

As I came into the Flint Hills the fog began to lift. Sometimes I was back in the center of a hemisphere moving through the fog, and then the edges would lift and grassland would stretch away to the new limits of visibility. A rabbit appeared, motionless, in the circle and then disappeared out the back, then a coyote, sniffing the rabbit scent in the air.

I had started shortly before sunrise on the east edge of the Chataqua Hills, fumbling around in the dark and fog trying to find my way to the east end of The Old Wolf Trail. When I finally arrived the sun must have been up, but it wasn't easy to see the difference. It wasn't dark, but you still couldn't see more than fifty feet. For a bit I was disappointed. I had wanted to make this drive but I hadn't expected the fog. But, I was there, and the fog might lift soon, so I set out. I had estimated the drive would take about an hour, on this morning it took two and a half hours. And it sure was pretty.

Pandora Radio

The geeks have a new buzzword, internet 2.0. Roughly, it refers to the new kinds of web sites that can be nicely trained to do as you wish. Pandora.com is internet 2.0 radio. It uses your inputs to adjust music streams to your taste. Try it out, you might like it.

Old Addresses & Phone Numbers

It seems that as one ages the number of funerals for family and friends increase each year. I don't go to funerals very often, I figure if they died without my help then they can bury themselves without my help. Another reason I don't go to funerals is my black suit won't go around me anymore, I'm too fat. That is extremely discouraging, so I don't try to put it on any more.

Anyway, I noticed that my address book contains the last known addresses and phone numbers for a lot of dead people. Even if their cell phones still worked, I don't think I'd want to talk to any of them again. Sometimes it's better not to know some things.

Farm News 10-22-06

Sunday morning, after chores


A Rainy Saturday

Saturday began with a light rain and low skies of tarnished silver. The Sumacs spill scarlet through the mist and fog. What a beautiful morning. Now, if a person planned to walk to town, or wanted to play golf, it might not be the best of days, but if you appreciate an excuse to stay inside and look out the windows, it was an excellent day.

Gray autumn days make the colors of the season leap out of the mist. The native grasses give us a grand palette of yellows, reds, and browns. The Sweet Gum in the front yard is a whirlwind of orange, tied to one spot with roots. And then there are mounds and mounds of mums and marigolds.

It is time to go to Quivira and Cheyenne Bottoms, both near Great Bend, a round-trip of about 500 miles from here, two months or so on horseback. There is some sort of inconsistency between leaving a 500 mile trail of hydrocarbon smoke and wanting to see a bunch of birds. I'm patriotic enough to have dispensation to ignore that inconsistency.

Every two weeks during the fall and winter the rangers at Quivira publish an estimate of bird population at http://www.fws.gov/quivira/Current%20Birds.htm. As of October 12, the day of the most recent survey, there were only a few hundred Sandhill Cranes. That number can jump very quickly to a few hundred thousand.


Readers Write:

White Swans and Horny Toads

You know how good conversations sometimes go after dinner. They flow around the table without script or thesis and you can't really remember all the meanderings. You just know that it was revealing of something. And it was good. Last Saturday night it all devolved to disparaging remarks about Oklahoma. Deserved or not, I can't say that I rushed to their aid. Now with a little distance from that group of uppity Kansans and those bottles of wine, I would like to paint Oklahoma in a different light.

I spent a long year in Oklahoma when I was about 8 years old. I used to get up early and go out before anyone else. I had a good perspective at that time of the flora and fauna of my backyard from a belly slithering point of view. The two things that stand out for me now about that back yard was horny toads and train tracks. Being a fairly sophisticated eight year old Kansas boy I had never seen anything like a horny toad. There were several in our yard. I looked them over real close. Wanting to inquire further I put one within a few inches of my mother's nose one morning.
Her normally perfect nurturing demeanor sputtered into that maternal militaristic command with something about, "Get that ... out of my house this instant!" Despite her stuccato reaction, I immersed myself in the prehistoric time warp of the horny toad. Hard and spiky on the back with soft and snaky bellies, horny toads move plenty slow enough for a kid to grab. I could spend entire Oklahoma afternoons eye to eye with Horny Toads. Therefore, I became an environmentalist.

Our back yard was a pretty barren place. The only aesthetic human gesture was that it got mowed but there was little actual grass. One fair morning my sister and I went adventuring across the tracks to foreign lands. As if on a quest for anything holy, we followed our blessed noses for miles and miles to a beautiful pond with cat tails and white swans and shade trees. Being completely unaccustomed to all three, we sat for a long time just looking and listening and smelling the place. We sat on its edge, not wanting to disrupt the constructed splendor. Therefore, I became a designer of places.

When you're eight you just never know what the day will bring. You just never know what lasting effect a day will have - how your personal history will unfold. I suspect if I were to chart the pivotal moments of the intervening forty years of my life they would be similarly unhurried, aimless and unambitious; profound in the context of the moment, but without importance at that moment. Writing of history requires the perspective of time. Today I cannot know what was important in my day today.

A Horse Lover

I'm a horse lover. I have no desire to ever eat horse meat. I fervently hope that the horses I have owned never make it to anyone's plate. That said, I don't oppose horse slaughter, even for human consumption. I just don't want the ones I love to be eaten.

There is a problem however, that has never been sufficiently addressed. Now, if you can tell me I'm wrong on this, I'd love to hear it. But slaughter houses and transport for slaughter are not set up to handle horses. First of all, horses cannot and should not be transported as cattle are. This is not because of some romantic vision of horses, it's because of the way they are made. If you cram a bunch of cattle together, they don't kick and bite and try to kill the other ones to make more room for themselves. Horses DO. This ends up with broken bones and trampled animals. So they shouldn't be transported in crammed double deck carriers as cattle are. Second, horses are very social. Horses that see other horses killed have been known to go into shock. So the kill floor needs to be handled differently in order to be humane.

I have no problem with humane slaughter. But it seems to be cost prohibitive to develop it that way.

And a Weirdo Who Always Centers His Text

Meat:

think about
India. Lots of
cows wandering around,
being treated like - what ? -
congressional representatives ?
While I was staying in India, I found a
western-style restaurant where I could
get a nice, well prepared - with ‘trimmings’ -
filet minion for about $1.50. I frequently had
two or three during the evening. A nearby community
has a rattlesnake round-up [held right next to the cemetery,
coincidently] every Fall, with a bar-b-que, and the snakes are one
of the featured menu items. I hear the opossum is a popular dish
hereabouts, also. I have seen alligator tail on restaurant menus
not far from here.

 

Farm News 10-15-06

Sunday morning, after chores

The Flint Hills

In the evenings I would sit with my grandfather on the front porch of his house looking out across the Fall River valley. He would sit in the rocker and I would sit in the swing. One evening, during a hail storm, we were sitting on the porch when two young raccoons dashed up out of the hail and joined us. My grandfather continued rocking slightly in his chair, and one young raccoon hid under his chair, while the other hid under the swing in which I was sitting. The entire universe stopped for a few moments, I don't know how long, until I finally moved, or did something, and frightened the raccoons away.

First Freeze

We had our first freeze Thursday night. The water in the garden hose was frozen but there was no damage.

A Reader Writes

My folks, my brother and I lived in Paris when I was a kid. My brother is much older and had been living abroad for some years before we got there. We had an apartment in, what we later learned, was the "communist" part of paris. Horrors. Anyway, my brother brought home some meat from the local market and had mom fix it for dinner. She asked what kind of meat it was so she would know how to prepare it. He said he would tell her later. So she fixed it, we had it for dinner and pronouced it excellent. My brother then told us it was horse meat. We had it frequently after that.

For quite a few years you could buy frozen horse meat in the US. It was marketed as dog food. I guess they don't do that anymore.

The U.S. House of Representatives, having some spare time on their hands, passed a bill outlawing the interstate shipment of horses for human consumption. Does that mean I can't buy a mule in Missouri if I intend to bring it home and butcher it? Calvin said that cheap horses are selling for $35 at some livestock auctions. That's ridiculous. At that price we could use horses to help allay a lot of protein deficient diets. A healthy three day old Holstein bull calf sells for $150 here. It will take a year of growing and a lot of feed to bring that calf up to the size of the $35 horse, so you would think any horse should be worth at least $150. Horses are worth less than cattle because we hold the horse in such high esteem that we won't eat it.

Peter Mayle, who writes about such things, has high praise for donkey sausage. During the Battle of Beecher's Island, when fifty Army scouts were besieged on an island in the upper Arikaree River, the scouts spoke highly of the quality of the raw backstrips of the pack mules. Most of us would try broiled Zebra ribs without question, though the Zebra, horse, and donkey are all Equines.

'Liberal Bleeding Hearts', who think we shouldn't eat horses because horses are somehow special, fail to arouse any sympathy in me. Many horses are beautiful: the sight of a herd of two year olds running across the pasture is glorious, and new foals are wonderful. I like to talk to horses, smell horses, put their manure on my garden, and laugh at their foal's jokes.I also like to talk to cows, smell cows, put their manure on my garden, laugh at the calves' jokes, and eat their flesh. I assert that there is absolutely no evil involved in eating puppies and dogs, or foals and horses.

To those of you who live in the same congressional district as do I, I suggest to you that, in respect to dogs and horses, Jim Ryun, Republican member from Kansas of the House of Representatives, is a Liberal Bleeding Heart. If you live in this district, please vote for someone else, or write to me and tell me why you won't, please.


Lesbians

Jefferson County, Kansas, is full of lesbians. I did a Google search on 'lesbian female statistics', figuring that would get me some statistics. It didn't, really, except the information that in Massachusetts lesbian couples outnumber gay couples by about 3-2 in marriages. The fact is: there is no shortage of lesbians; the implications are vast.

Of the lesbians I know, most have been married to a male at some time in their lives. When someone says, "Homosexual . . .," people tend to think of the flaming faggots, the guys who wave lavendar hankies in the air. Of the gay men I know, very few fit into that stereotype. Isn't that interesting? I feel fairly certain, or at least hopeful, that I do not differ much from the average American Man. To you, does the word 'homosexual', bring up any female connotations?

I tried a search on 'lesbian population' and didn't get much more. In terms of households, same-sex couples make up about 1% of the US population. Well, within a one mile radius of my home, the percentage of same-sex couple households seems higher. After counting on my fingers for a while, I decided that I can think of fourteen male-female households and two same-sex households within a few miles of where I live, which is a rate of 14%. And, both same-sex households are made up of lesbians. All of which proves that counting on your fingers can lead to an increase in homosexual behavior.

Farm News 10-08-06

Baby Ducks!

Thursday evening I discovered six baby ducks in a nest I didn't even know the mother was sitting on (or is it setting on?). Anyway, she was there enough to hatch out babies. Like all baby ducks, they are delightful.

This marks the beginning of the late baby season. There will probably be several more duck nests producing babies, and we might have kittens, too. The bantam chickens used to produce fall chicks but they seem to have lost their procreative urge over the last two years.

Travels

This issue of Farm News is coming out a day late and is brief because I have been on another expedition, again to the Flint Hills. Mile after mile across high pastures, the only sound the crunch of gravel under the tires, when, after crossing a slight rise, the land rapidly drops into a valley with a tree-lined waterway undulating across the bottom.

In the valleys there are birds calling and squirrels scolding, clearly audible over the tires on the gravel. Butterflies skip along the roadside weeds. And, there are trees, some of them well over a century in age.

The Flint Hills are tall grass prairie, an environment that has almost disappeared. The grasses are no longer tall because thousands of head of cattle eat them down short. Without the cattle, the Flint Hills would be a very dangerous place. Three hundred years ago, when Bison herds ate paths through the grass, a spark of fire could set off huge roaring fire storms rolling across the hills and leaping the valleys.

The fires killed off any small trees that might have sprouted since the last fire and turned the grass into a cloud of smoke, dust, and ash that was spread by the winds. For most humans and small animals caught in the path of one of those fires, death came with the flames. The danger was high enough that people didn't start settling in the hills until after the Civil War. Work began on the Hawthorne Ranch in 1861 and the house was finished in 1864. In the same decade Elwin Braten Ware left Massachusetts for the Flint Hills and settled there, starting a tree nursery. Elwin B.'s great-granddaughter, Annabelle, married Bill Hawthorne.

The house is nestled into a crook of a stream that curves around the east and south sides of the yard and then goes on south to feed Fall River. The stream is bordered by Walnut, Sycamore, Burr Oak, Hackberry, and Green Ash. Unlike northeast Kansas, there is little Osage Orange, Honey Locust, or Black Locust. I didn't find any trees that I thought were as old as the house.

Three hundred years ago there must have been Beaver along the stream. That might explain the lack of any really ancient trees. Besides being good for lumber, the destination of many trees, few trees would be able to survive for very long in the presence of Beaver. In the Cimmaron National Grasslands, an area in far south west Kansas, trees over 14” in diameter still have to be protected by wire netting from the Beaver. If there are Beaver out on the High Plains then there would have been Beaver in the Flint Hills.

If, due to various lucky breaks, a tree makes it past about 14” in diameter, out in an area that is mostly grassland, then what is going to stop it from continuing to grow? It now shades out the grass around its trunk, protecting itself from grass fires. People with stone axes are going to move on to find a 6” tree to cut. So what kills it? Lightning probably kills many. It kills the tree and ignites a grass fire at the same time.

One year, during a winter thunderstorm, lightning hit a 75 or so year old Osage orange tree south of the house. The next spring a few branches on the tree had a few leaves, but the bulk of the tree was dead. If lightning can do that to an Osage Orange, then I think it is safe to assume it can do it to other species. Over a three hundred year period, I think it would be hard to find a tree growing on the hilltops that hadn't been hit by lightning. In fact, lightning might be as important a factor in keeping the Flint Hills treeless as is fire. Its hard to keep the effects of the two separate.

The Flint Hills, by the way, is a big table land, composed of quite a few different layers of tables, all chopped up by wind, stream and river erosion. Unlike north east Kansas, where I live, the Flint Hills were not shaped by glaciers. You won't find any Dakota Quartzite in the Flint Hills. Much of the surface limestone, though, has an orange to dark brick color from being exposed to heat in fires. A grass fire in a Tall Grass Prairie is a big deal, even though they can occur in a given area every two or three years on a millennial calendar. The Flint Hills is an area where big deals, whether climatic, geologic, or spiritual, can occur fairly surprisingly often.

Disaster Planning by Dr. M.

As a nation, we have come to realize the importance of disaster planning on a personal, local, and regional level. We can all think of the events that have brought this topic to the forefront of our minds. The United States Army has been more or less engaged in disaster planning forever simply by the nature of an army. Managing large swaths of people moving about exposed to nature and violence is basically what we do. To that end, my commander sent me to the garrison disaster planning tabletop exercise this week.

Fort Monmouth sits on the coast of New Jersey, 45 minutes from NYC, in an area with the same coastline configuration as Mississippi. However, this section of New Jersey has roughly eight times the population density of Mississippi and a lot more people with money, influence and lawyers. With this in mind, the garrison planned a pandemic influenza outbreak plus Cat 3 hurricane scenario. The idea was to make it as bad as possible so that we could contemplate the worst.

We talked about education, containment, at-home quarantine, and first responder responsibilities. We discussed communications, hospital capacity and ventilator numbers. We had a serious discussion around the Red Cross manual on the handing of dead bodies in disaster areas. And then I brought up carcass disposal.

In the event of an outbreak of human to human transmissible avian influenza (the current definition of pandemic flu) all birdhouses would be depopulated. What do you do with the birds once they are dead? According to the tabletop exercise, you lay them out in a field, cover them with a tarp, and let them decompose until a temperature of 120 degrees F has been reached. Really. The plan is a field and a tarp.

Now, being a new Captain, I am generally loath to point holes in the statements of those around me, because one never looks good by making others look bad. However, it hardly takes a genius to point out that we live in New Jersey, not New Orleans and that there are about 2 weeks in a year here that a pile of dead chickens will reach 120 degrees. But, birds aren’t the only animals that would be affected.

You see, many animals are susceptible to the flu. Avian influenza has been documented in a number of species, including dogs and horses. So, when I asked what the plan was for carcass disposal of those species no one had an answer. Well, that’s not really true, one lawyer pointed out that this is New Jersey and we can always get rid of the bodies.

I brought up carcass disposal because we have a huge horse population in Monmouth County. If those horses become carriers of a strain of pandemic flu, they will have to be put down. And disposing of a horse carcass requires at the least a backhoe; at the most a bone saw, some sharp knives and an incinerator. If 40% of the workforce is out of commission as most pandemic flu forecasts project, just how are we going to get rid of these 1200 pound animals?

I don’t have an answer right now, but, I am fairly certain that I can find an incinerator or two in the county if I looked. And that’s what disaster planning is. Looking around and asking what’s going to happen and what are we going to do about it? And it doesn’t take an experienced planner to point out that a field and a tarp do not a disaster plan make.

Dr. M., I always knew you were smart. While thinking about disposing of horses, I hope you include the idea of making jerky out of them. Calvin and I still hope to make fortunes out of horse and mule jerky. Would you have time to be our sales manager, do you think? We'll give you 15% of the gross, how about that?


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Farm News 10-01-06

Farm News

Sunday morning, after chores, 64°



Sunday in the Country

Last Sunday morning, after chores and sending out Farm News, Paula looked out the kitchen window and said, “There is a horse with two kids on it in the yard.”

Sure enough, it was Cassie and Rian riding Caitlyn's horse, Brandy. Cassie and Ryan were visiting Caitlyn, who lives next door, and they had all come over to see the bunnies. Finally, we obtained an accurate count of the bunnies; there are six: two white with black spots, one black with dark brown spots, one black, and two gunmetal gray, a fine looking bunch of bunnies. And, being bunnies, they were doing their job and attracting young girls.

Before the first three took their horse and left, my niece showed up with Harry and George, her three year old twin daughters. Their real names are not Harry and George, but I can't tell them apart, so, if I couldn't always get their names right, then I figured they would probably prefer that I call them Harry or George over being called by their sister's name. While the twins were still here one of their friends, Willa, also three years old, showed up to see the bunnies.

The sky was blue, dappled with small white clouds, the breeze gentle, and the air cool. The children were running around in the yard, gleefully exploring the world. Ahh!


Quick, Ride for Headquarters

J., an unemployed friend, and I took a ride down to the Hawthorne Ranch in the Flint Hills. There are several trails one may use for that trip, and the one we used going down was pleasant. We took the turnpike to Cassoday and stopped for lunch in the Cassoday Cafe. They are open from 7:30 am until 3:00 pm and offer a buffet of all you can eat for $7.50. It's all good enough to eat and appreciate.

From Cassoday we went east for six or seven miles of gravel road, running up on the top of the long ridge until the road drops into the Fall River Valley. We turned south and went along the west bank of Fall River for a while, and then turned east, crossing Fall River on a low water bridge. (A low water bridge is concrete ford across the river. When the water is low one can splash across without floating down stream.) We then turned south again on the east side of the river, traveling south a short distance to the ranch house.

Two old men live there: scruffy, rough around the edges, untidy, and not too clean. One of them has an occasional job and the other has been unemployed for years. The old men have three dogs: scruffy, rough around the edges, untidy, but probably cleaner than the old men. Whenever a strange vehicle drives by the dogs start barking and howling, exploding a profound silence that normally blankets the place. Other than the mail carrier, who the dogs have learned to tolerate, no other vehicles pass the place for days at a time. In the spring, after a heavy rain, the house is generally not accessible by wheeled vehicles for several days. There are only two TV channels available unless they install a satellite receiver, something they refuse to do because they think it might open a path for invasion by space aliens. Like their bodies, their environs, and their dogs, their minds, not surprisingly, are scruffy, rough around the edges, untidy, and not too clean.

A half dozen Barn Swallow nests are plastered up on the front porch, occupied by swallows that have learned to ignore the human residents of the house. A quarter of a mile north a pair of Bald Eagles have a huge nest threatening to break down the tree in which it is situated. Trumpet vine and honeysuckle abound, helping support a large population of hummingbirds. Wild turkeys feed in the front yard and deer browse in the back. Butterflies chase each other around the native flowers. It might be a bit scruffy, but it will do.

Honeysuckle and trumpet vine both have a way of getting out of control. Both are woody perennials here, losing their leaves in the winter and growing new ones in the spring. Hummingbirds have no problem with honeysuckle and trumpet vine getting out of control, instead considering as a richening of the habitat.

Several years ago I purchased a yellow flowering variety of trumpet vine and planted it on the south wall of the rabbitry. The wall consists of two layers of used railroad ties topped with 6' high 2"x4" welded wire fencing. I put rocks around the spot where I planted the vine and moved the duck water next to it. Seemed like a good setting for that vine to me.

Since then I have dug out a shoot that was coming out too far from where I wanted it go grow and gave that shoot to a dental hygienist. Her vine from that shoot bloomed this year, but my vine, growing in what appears to be an ideal spot, has yet to show any sign of blooming.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the common orange trumpet vine has finished blooming and is setting seedpods. There are two hummingbird feeders on the porch to help the hummingbirds survive. Hummers are so pugnacious that if there is only one feeder the dominant male will keep all the others away; two or more feeders will give them all a chance. It's getting close to migration time and they'll need the food to prepare for the trip south.

This has been a good year for Maximilian's Sunflower, Helianthus maximiliani, which is blooming along the roadsides now. It often grows as a single stalk with a lot of 2-3" yellow flowers attached to the stalk and long, thin leaves. Maximilian's Sunflower is a perennial, unlike most Helianthus species, which are annuals.

Time, like the sky, seems immense in the Flint Hills. How long can a plant live? Are some of the plants we see over 500 years old? The grass-covered hills seem eternal, but Heraclites had it right, everything is undergoing change. It is hard to perceive that change when standing on a hill beyond sight or hearing of any road, immersed in wind, grass, and sky.



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