I love setting the first set of footprints in a fresh falling snow. It is, quite likely, the closest I will ever get to boldly go where no person has gone before. This winter has provide me with ample opportunity.
First, I had to find my snowshoes. With my winter gear? No. In the shed? No. In the attic? No. They were hiding under some dust and cobwebs in my former office, which I evacuated abruptly in March of 2020 due to the pandemic, when snowshoeing season was still happening.
Then I had to sprint-nothing like sprinting in snowshoes to get your heart rate pumping-to beat some skiers to the trailhead. The extraordinary feeling of being the first one on the trail wears off relatively quickly, as that means one is also breaking the trail. It takes roughly three times as long to break a trail as it does to follow one.
A new path, still under construction, will allow guests at Indian Creek Nature Center to visit this oak tree. Unlike the shattered pines and black locust trees around it, the ancient oak withstood the forces of the derecho.
This winter I had fresh falling snow and a brand new, yet-to-be-opened trail to enjoy. It was awesome. If you can’t find your snowshoes or don’t own any, the Nature Center will rent some to you to do your own exploring in the winter magic.
Upon seeing the delightful little chicken house my flatmates had built for their chickens earlier this summer, a friend knew exactly what I needed: keets. When he said he was giving me some, I tried to conjure up in my mind what a keet was to no avail. We drove to pick up the seven cute, little, incredible wild birds. I fell in love immediately, until the drive home when they started shrieking, each at 96 decibels, the whole way. The magnificent seven spent their days frolicking in the garden.* Their volume crescendos when they are excited about things like learning to fly, or when strangers come up the driveway, or for various reasons beyond human comprehension.
A young keet.
The very kind couple who sold me the keets provided me with everything I need to know: they were a mixture of pied and pearled coloring (which meant nothing to me), they needed more protein than chickens, and they preferred to roost in trees and nest on the ground, which made me wonder how any survive ever.
The keets enjoy the blueberry patch during the day; at night, they go into a pet-carrier and spend the night inside where it is warmer and safer.
If your knowledge of fowl beyond chicken, pheasant and turkey is a bit rusty like mine is, keets are baby Guinea Fowl. Originating from Africa, they were introduced here primarily as a meat bird. They are hunters, which means no tick, grub, or grasshopper escapes their attention. They also run on the wild side, preferring not to be picked up. Unless their options are being carried or having to walk in the snow. In which case being carried suddenly becomes a very attractive option.
Charles (a pearled guinea) eats moss off of the side of the front step. At dusk, he was quite adamant about not going down into the snow. I ended up carrying him, along with the rest of his flock, to the aviary for the evening.
*Why did the keet cross the road? To prove you can’t build a fence good enough to hold it. I drove over one of the keets within days of their arrival because they were too small to see. I hadn’t been worried about that because I knew they safe were in the garden.
January 21 is National Squirrel Day. If you already have a bird feeder, you know that every day is squirrel day. To celebrate squirrels, here are a few more things we can do for our furry friends:
Set out some grapes, cashews, and pecans.
Add a year-round water source.
If it is snowy or wet, put your treats out a board to let the animals have dry feet for a bit.
Add selectively tasty compost scraps, such as sweet potato peels and apple peels.
A year and a half ago, I raised an orphaned grey squirrel, born around July 21, 2019. Later that fall, he vanished. It’s not unusual for young squirrels to move out and establish their own territories. Squirrel kits born late season often overwinter with their mom. As his mom, I had hoped he would stick around. I made him a nice nest box, filled the feeder tray regularly, and visited him at least twice a day.
One morning, he was gone. I said he was on walkabout, experiencing the world. What squirrel doesn’t dream of driving his motorcycle down the Pacific Coast Highway 1? But odds were equally good he had been taken out by a red-tailed hawk, a great-horned owl, a raccoon, or even a mink.
I went outside to feed the flock on December 23, 2020 and a squirrel came running up and jumped right into the middle of the flock, scattering the birds. It made me laugh, he was so bold. I knew immediately it was Terrence Nutworthy the Third.
This is the point where people say, “uh-huh.”
My case that this really is Terrence:
-Fox squirrels have lived in my woods longer than I have, but I have never seen a grey squirrel in the yard. The grey squirrels are around in the forest, of course, but the fox squirrels keep them out of the yard itself.
-Both Terrence and this squirrel have a little dark scar under their left eye.
-A wild squirrel, when confronted by a human, should run up the nearest branch, and will likely chatter fiercely. This is what my yard squirrels still do, despite generations having grown up with me as a fixture in their lives. A wild squirrel will not literally ask for a human handout. Which this squirrel did. He came right up and ate out of my hand.
As if my day couldn’t get any better, Terrence brought a rare black squirrel with him. Black squirrels are really grey squirrels with different fur color (melanistic subgroup). The black squirrel, being a wild squirrel, wants nothing to do with me.
I immediately purchased an addition for my yard for Terrence:
Winter is hard on wildlife. Obviously, animals have adapted and populations can survive without us. But the heated waterer will make survival a little bit easier, and possibly more enjoyable for everyone, including the squirrels, opossums, deer, mice, song birds, and fox. It may even enable me to get a decent picture of the black squirrel.
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When you hatch your own chicks, approximately 50 percent of them will be male. As the overseer of Sugar Grove Farm, dealing with the baby roosters is my problem. The hens get to live an organic, free-ranging lifestyle at the farm. A neighbor was initially interested in raising the cockerels as meat birds, but decided there were already enough projects in her life.
“I will feed them to Mr. Friendly,” I said.*
Mr. Friendly is famous for his ability to swallow a bird whole when he is hungry. To avoid depleting the bird population, he spends most of his time inside and well-fed. Here, he is curled up in his favorite catnip box.
“We would raise them,” my flatmates said.
“You’ll do everything? Feeding? Care? Building a house? They could live in the garden. It’s already fenced.”**
“Yes.”
“Kill them at the end of the season?” One of my flatmates is a vegan and the other is a vegetarian, which makes this question a bit deeper than asking your average person if they are up for killing what they will put on their plate.
“We think the experience would be valuable.” I couldn’t argue with that. But looking at their honest, hopeful faces, I recognized the expression. It was the same expression on my face when I was young, and sprung the mouse traps in my parent’s house because I did not want the mice to get hurt. It is not the face of someone who is going to find killing something easy or even possible.
My flock of five ISA Brown roosters-which are actually white, because they are sex linked-was started. The hens, which are brown, are some of the most productive egg layers on the market. At the time, the roosters were a week old and living in a kiddie pool.
The kiddie pool quickly got cardboard sides to prevent “hop-overs.” When the hop-overs became fly-overs, my flatmates took the birds outside and built them a chicken house.
My flatmates were amazing in how seriously they took chicken care. As the birds got bigger, they were carried back and forth to the garden each day. A small chicken house was added to the garden. Eventually, a larger walk-in chicken house was constructed.
Nanotig is very curious, but he isn’t really interested in eating birds; he prefers mice.
When my flatmates were getting ready to go back to college, I asked the question: were they still planning on slaughtering the roosters?
“It is hard to kill something you have spent so much effort keeping alive,” they said.
“I’ll take care of them until they get mean,” I offered. “As soon as they get mean, I will do it.”
Because everyone knows roosters get mean, right? That was August. It is now December, and the Cluck-Clucks still expect to be petted regularly, like to be carried into the chicken house at night, and try to sneak into my house.
Nitro was chewing on a bone (hence the towel to protect the floor). When he went outside, I propped the door open so he could come back in whenever he wanted. It was a beautiful summer day. the chickens took it as an invitation.
*One of my flatmates insist after I said that, I followed it up with, “unless you guys want them.” I don’t remember saying that. But it is the sort of thing I would have thought, and I frequently say what I think without fully thinking through the consequences, and my flatmates have an extraordinary strong sense of honesty.
**My garden fence was built to keep the deer out. It does that well, and holds up squash vines well. We quickly learned that it fails to keep anything besides deer out, and fails to keep anything in.
Trigger is-as you can see-not a bird. The flock is a mixture of guineas, ISA Brown Roosters, and Black Star Roosters. They all agree on one thing: an opossum is not a bird, and does not belong in the aviary. Or so I thought earlier this fall, as they threw very vocal temper tantrums whenever Trigger wandered inside and they refused to go in for the night. Refusing to go in at dusk has resulted in the death of many a bird.
Trigger has emptied the chicken feeder of feed.
Trigger would let me carry him back out. He didn’t even fear me enough to bother playing dead. His tail was rubbery, his fur silky. As much as I love opossums, I thought, I can’t feed everyone. I feed the flock, I put tasty scraps out for everyone, and have a bird feeding station and a ground feeding station. I already am feeding everyone, in limited, affordable quantities. But Trigger eats a lot of food and upsets the flock.
Last night, I went out to button up the chickens. It was cold (it is 12 F now) and there is a foot of snow on the ground. The flock hasn’t ventured outside. Trigger was inside the aviary with the birds. I don’t know that anyone was happy about it, but those roosters are roosters. If they wanted to kick a young opossum out, they could. I sighed. Trigger moseyed out into the snow and headed for the woods, instead of waiting for me to take him into the shed for shelter. Nitro makes him nervous. I know this because he plays dead for Nitro. The tip of his tail was already suffering from frostbite.
This morning, I fed and watered the birds. Then…I took a bowl of cat food out to the shed for Trigger and the two other opossums who live there. One of the opossums is Kip, Trigger’s mother; the other is a skittish black opossum who hasn’t shared his name with me yet. Because it is higher in protein than bird seed, the cat food will support the opossums better through these cold nights.
Pocket Mouse Publishing 