THE DOG DAYS OF FALL

Breadloaf campus, on Middlebury Gap, Route 125

To get right down to it, ever since “It’s Over” (previous entry), things have been pretty crazy around here.  At the same time it has been probably the most beautiful time of year.   (Did I say that about June?).   Colors especially intense, days of sun blindingly bright and sparkling light––too much to take in at one time.

Let me explain. 

Skyler, at about 12 weeks

Our new puppy came from a shelter.  Unusual, as he’s a pure bred Brittany.  There was an elderly couple in the Stowe area that bred Brittanys and had decided to quit the breeding business.  Somehow or other there was an accidental mating.  Skyler, and four siblings, three females, two males, were the result.  The couple gave the entire litter to the North Country Animal League. The Huston family first saw the puppies at a dog-centered event at the Shelburne Museum and were smitten.  They decided they wanted a puppy.  A few days later I drove up to the Stowe animal shelter with Lesley to pick up Daisy.  I was fatefully smitten, too.  Adoption forms were handy and so I filled one out, just in case.  When I told Ken about the puppies he was ready to get one at that very moment.  The decision was made.  A week later we picked up the pup that we named Skyler.

Skyler has kept us busy.  A puppy, if you've ever had one, is like a human toddler in ability and knowledge.  And charm.

A committed lap sleeper.  

But first, the week from hell.   

All this happened at once:  Ken had a test that revealed a tumor, we adopted a puppy, surgery took place (in Burlington, some 40 minutes away), Ken developed an infection, there was a trip to our local ER (Middlebury), the puppy got sick, an emergency trip to the vet (Vergennes), Ken's infection got worse, another trip to our major ER (Burlington) where surgery had taken place, the puppy got sicker, threw up all night long (I was laundering towels at 3 in the morning), a trip to an emergency ($$$) veterinary service (Burlington, again), Ken in the hospital (the people hospital, Burlington again), me with no sleep.  Things began to improve when both Ken and puppy were home from their various hospitals.  (Puppy improved more rapidly, both physically and mentally.)  The good news: Ken's surgery successful, infection a thing of the past, and our puppy is wild and happy and sweet, just like a puppy should be.   

Skyler is keeping us on our toes.  (Or did I say that already?)

Skyler (right) and sister Daisy, in a rare moment of quiet

Tussling with his slightly larger sister at the Hustons next door is one easy way to use up some of his energy (Daisy's too), as long as one can stand the play growling and general tearing around.  But then Brittanys like activity, and having Skyler will keep encouraging us in the same direction.  The scoop on Brittanys is as follows:

“The breed was originally bred as a hunting dog and noted for being easy to train and sweet-natured. The breed is generally more sensitive to correction than other hunting breeds, and harsh corrections are often unnecessary.  Brittanys are all around sound dogs, as they are excellent family pets as well as working dogs in the field. Brittanys are eager to please, friendly, and sometimes sensitive dogs. They generally learn quickly and are loyal and attached to their owners. They are great with kids. Brittanys are energetic dogs, and need at least an hour of vigorous exercise every day. The dogs are active and require frequent exercise and room to run, and a fenced yard is essential. At least one long walk is required daily to satisfy the needs of most Brittanys, and many Brittanys will need more than this. The Brittany makes an ideal companion for an active owner.”

We have been doing a fair amount of walking, all things considered.  One nearby pleasant walking site is the Dead Creek area.  It reminds me a lot of Concord, Massachusetts' Great Meadows, next to the Concord River.  Only much bigger.

One of several ponds in the Dead Creek WIldlife Management Area

At nearby Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area, primarily a waterfowl refuge, the annual Dead Creek Day had retrieval demonstrations, among other activities relating to wildlife.   Dead Creek is a lazy collection of waters, including partially manmade impoundments, all draining into Otter Creek and ultimately Lake Champlain. With Skyler accompanying us, we could barely walk ten yards without our puppy being swarmed by admirers.  (How can anyone not stop to pet a puppy!)  Skyler watched the demonstrations of water and field retrievals and search and rescue dog performances intently, without, I suspect, learning a thing.  He also met, less happily, a pair of bear hounds.  (Yes, trained to run down and, I imagine, tree, bears.  Not something I would especially care to see.)  

All eyes are on the retriever currently in the field

Plying the Robert Frost interpretive trail on Middlebury Gap and a trek down the old Vergennes Waterworks (known to those from Bristol as the Bristol Waterworks) trail with Andy and Davey McGavern (Davey handling Daisy for this vigorous puppy workout) were more leisurely, for the adults, anyway.  The days were clear and the trees bright with reds and oranges.  

A forest trail

At the near horizon the trees on the hill have gone completely orange
(Robert Frost Interpretative Trail)

Scattered along the Robert Frost trail are some of his poems, sometimes fitting the site, other times not.  

IN HARDWOOD GROVES

The same leaves over and over again!

They fall from giving shade above,

To make one texture of faded brown

And fit the earth like a leather glove.

Before the leaves can mount again

To fill the trees with another shade

They must go down past things coming up

They must go down into the dark decayed.

They must be pierced by flowers and put

Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.

However it is in some other world

I know this is the way in ours.

And maybe here a birch could prompt amusing thoughts like this:

A YOUNG BIRCH

The birch begins to crack its outer sheath

Of baby green and show the white beneath,

As whosoever likes the young and slight

May well have noticed.  Soon entirely white

To double day and cut in half the dark

It will stand forth, entirely white in bark,

And nothing but the top a leafy green –

The only native tree that dares to lean,

Relying on its beauty to the air.

(Less brave perhaps than trusting are the fair.)

And someone reminiscent will recall

How once in cutting brush along the wall

He spared it from the number of the slain,

At first to be no bigger than a cane,

And then no bigger than a fishing pole,

But now at last so obvious a bole

The most efficient help you ever hired

Would know that it was there to be admired,

And zeal would not be thanked that cut it down

When you were reading books or out of town.

It was a thing of beauty and was sent

To live its life out as an ornament.

There are numerous other poems scattered here and there, but this one seems to fit the season best:

NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down today.

Nothing gold can stay.

One so young, the other so old.  Harry has well over 15 years, and Skyler only two months plus.  Harry is visibly slowing down fmonth to month, breathing heavily after a bit of exercise, and, lately, snoring at night.  He is not particularly impressed by Skyler.  Rufus came and went.  As for Harry's time, we shall see.  Nothing gold can stay. 

IT'S OVER

Summer, that is.  In all but the actual date.

Signal of change?  A  heron (this very heron?) seems to visit only when the season shifts

It doesn’t matter if the weather should get hot again and we go swimming one more time––that won’t change anything.  It’s all in the signs, the atmosphere.  School buses are back on the roads.  The clouds have become the clouds of fall, long, dark–even on bright days–and extravagant.  Not all the time, mind you, but often enough.  And the morning dews are heavier; steps leave footprints in the grass.

Our meadow was mowed, at long last, but this will be the final cut; it will stay short until next spring.

THE COWS OF YESTERDAY

Addison County Field Days Midway in full swing.

Cow love.  (Ben)

Addison County Field Days already belongs to another season. How, then, did our 4-H’ers make out?  There were essentially two judging categories that mattered:  the cow or calf rating, and rating the person who showed the calf.   (This was called “Fitting and Showmanship.”). The quality of the calf, being essentially genetic, hence not controllable, left style of presentation the judgment to aim for.  Ben’s well-behaved calf Kinzie seemed to lack some je ne sais pas, so, alas, Kinzie put Ben near the end of the cow-quality award line.  Neither Audrey’s “Belle” nor Carly’s “Autumn” ended up with beauty prizes either, for that matte, although their calves looked lovely enough to me.  

Happily, Audrey made second  (named a “Champion”) for showmanship in the large novice class in which Ben also got a ribbon.  This, despite the fact that Audrey’s calf kept trying to lie down and take a nap while in the ring.  Her cool and friendly handling of this may not have been a handicap.  (By this time, day four of the fair, all the cows were mighty tired, having been subjected to more activity and attention than they may ever get again.)  Carly was awarded a blue ribbon in her senior novice class; this was especially satisfying as her calf had spent the previous 24 hours in heat and was pretty agitated.   Only Ben’s Kinzie remained serene throughout.  But no prizes for serenity.  After the fair closed on Saturday the exhausted 4-H’ers (who as part of their project had to rise at 5 AM each day, clean the stable area, and otherwise care for and feed the cows every day) went home.  So, too, the calves and cows, back to the quiet rhythm of their own barns and pastures.

The judge bends over to help Audrey raise an uncooperative Belle.

YESTERDAY’S HORSES

The most interesting animals at the fair, other than the cows of course, were the huge draft horses.  You seldom get a chance to see these behemoths close up.  Fortunately, along with great size comes great decorum.  Intimidating as they are, they are also uniformly placid and well-mannered. 

Two gigantic beauties

We watched a farmer (an actual plowman) from Whitehall, New York, turn over a field with his massive Suffolk Punch pair.  Suffolk Punches aren’t the biggest of working horses (that would be the Shire), but were probably the most frequently used agricultural working horse in their time, the Fords of horsepower.  (Any early description has these selling points:  “The breed tends to mature early, be long-lived, and is economical to keep, needing less feed than other horses of similar type and size. They are hard workers, said to be willing to ‘pull a heavily laden wagon till they dropped.”  Change a noun or two and this could be a car ad.) He has owned this pair since they were born.  When they reached the right age, each horse was hitched to an already trained horse and, as it were, trained itself.

A team of Suffolk Punch

LAST HUMMINGBIRDS OF SUMMER

They will be gone soon.  By mid or late September all our hummingbirds will migrate south, flying over the Gulf of Mexico, a trip of some 2,000 miles plus, to reach their wintering grounds in Central America.  Given their size, it is astounding that they can survive such a journey.

Hummingbirds will nest on a tree branch some 5 to 20 feet off the ground in a nest built of soft down from
ferns, milkweed, fireweed, or thistles, and held together by spider or tent caterpillar webs and covered
with lichen.  A clutch of 2 tiny white eggs, about the size of large peas, is laid and incubated for 11-16 days.

Archilochus colubris, the ruby-throated hummingbird, is the only variety found east of the Mississippi.  It’s three and a half inches from the tip of its needle-like beak to its tail, and weighs a mere tenth of an ounce. Peering through binoculars I have managed to see the shimmery ruby throat (a spot only males have), and its metallic greenish body.  Their movements are so rapid I haven’t been able to observe any more details than that.

Ever since Bob Norland installed two hummingbird feeders on our front porch in mid-summer we have been filling them nearly each day, sometimes twice a day, with nectar. The fake nectar consists of four parts water to one part sugar.   We have watched countless ruby-throats zipping wildly back and forth ever since, their size at odds with their aggressive nature.  There have been daily aerial battles, and once I even heard the clicking sound of a swordfight of bills.  The constant fighting for dominance over one feeder or the other (a hummingbird would claim a feeder, sit on top of it and fend off all comers) doesn’t tend to create much empathy.  

But then I read about their lives, and their migration route, and how close they are each day to starvation.  Consider:  Hummingbirds fly on average about 50 miles per hour, males beat their wings about 70 times per second, females about 53 times, their tiny hearts beat 600 times per minute and up to 1200 times during periods of exertion (compared with 72 for humans).  To survive they need great amounts of energy and must feed all day, at least every 10 minutes.  Each feeding lasts a half to full minute, as they lick (not suck) nectar from flowers.  (They loved our trumpet-shaped reddish weigela shrubs in July.)  Their grooved forked tongues lick about three times per second.  But nectar isn’t enough.  For protein and fat they eat insects. 
 During severe weather or food shortage they are able to enter a state of torpor in which their heart rate, breathing and body temperature drop drastically.  They can only remain in this state for some 8 to 12 hours.   And they are loners.  Males and females are together only during courtship and mating. 

 

Already our feeders have been less attended.  The constant fights over possession seem to have abated.  Some have probably already left for their great trip south.  As for the young swallows that built their nest on our front porch, four young swallows fledged and have blended in with the other swallows.  It was interesting to see that they returned to the nest at dusk for at least three or four nights before giving up its security forever.

Four large baby swallows cram themselves back in the nest after fledging.

THE BATS THAT WEREN’T THERE

By this time most people have heard of white-nose syndrome that has been held responsible for the tremendous loss of bats throughout Vermont.  The fungus has killed off nearly six million bats nationwide since it was first discovered in New York State in 2006 and is spreading westward.  Vermont is home to nine bat species.  The little brown bat and northern long-eared bat, once common to Vermont, have declined 90% in recent years.  Other bat species currently on the Vermont endangered species list include the state-threatened small-footed and the state and federally endangered Indiana bat.

I came across a wildlife study conducted in Milton, Vermont, by the Vermont Fish and Wildlife early this spring, in which 67 bats were tallied in bat houses that had been erected the previous year, a twenty percent increase from last year––a low number, but a glimmer of hope that there might be survivors.  I saw one bat (I think!) flying in front of our house at dusk about a week ago.

European bats seem to have an immunity to white nose syndrome, we learned from our neighbor Don Mitchell, author of a new book called “Flying Blind”* and subtitled,  “One Man’s Adventures Battling Buckthorn, Making Peace with Authority and Creating a Home for Endangered Bats,”  as much memoir as bat story.  Mitchell is our neighbor up the road at Treleven Farm.  He has been offering “Bat Walks” (more accurately, bat habitat walks) every Saturday morning from the end of August to early November.  We were the only hikers on a Saturday morning before Labor Day.

The view from the Mitchells' cliff is similar to the view from Buck Mountain.  We overlook their pond and pasture.

It all began with the visit of a Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department biologist visited approached him about tracking endangered Indiana bats on his land, some 150 acres of mixed pasture and woodland.  Mitchell took up the challenge of participating in and essentially creating a project of bat habitat improvement, opening up areas around shagbark hickory trees (a favorite haunt of these small bats) and removing encroaching invasive plants.  Time will tell whether the number of bats found in these enhanced and welcoming environments will grow.  A worthy line, though, to add to a life resume´:  novelist, writing professor, shepherd (the farm raises sheep)––batman.

A towering Shagbark hickory has plenty of niches for bats.

AND SUMMER TOURISTS, ALSO GONE 

Micah and Stephanie at the calf barn

With the unofficial end of the summer upon us our warm weather guest list has come to an end.  Temporarily, anyway. Our guests came from Noosa, Australia (first duo), and Melbourne, Australia (second duo; third expected this winter?), Brookline, MA, Campton, New Hampshire, Newburyport, Massachusetts, Novato, California (via Maine), and Paris (not the one in Maine).  Several of our visitors made it to Kingsland Bay and up Buck Mountain.

Paul posing for Sue; nothing like this in Paris!

*Flying Blind by Don Mitchell, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT, 2013.

THE COW SCENE and other (wild) beasts

"She's so Jersey."

                                                                                                                                                                        New Yorker magazine, 7/29/13

 

This is dairy country.  Which is not to say that there aren’t farms here with llamas, alpacas, horses––miniature, Icelandic, Morgan, and other––donkeys, sheep, and, notably, one Bactrian camel.  Farmers nearby often have a couple of beef cows (steers, in other words) most of which look really huge.  But this is mostly about cows, and calves at that.  Even a two-year-old calf is nearly the size of a fully-grown cow.  You don’t realize just how big is big until you stand really close to an adult cow.  Or see one lying down, those big stomachs and udders kind of flattening out and occupying what seems like yards of space.

Two dairy cows, in repose

Ben, Audrey and Carly, ages 10, 12 and 14, respectively, are committed to 4-H this summer, which for them means working with calves in preparation for showing them at the annual Addison County Field Days that starts this year on Tuesday, August 6.  The cows and kids are matched up roughly by size:  an older and taller person like Carly will have an older and bigger calf.  Carly’s calf, named Autumn, is about one year old.  Audrey’s, named Belle, and Ben’s, called Kinsey, are each about nine months old.  All the calves are either Holsteins (the black and white ones) or Jerseys (light brown).  From the time the 4-H’ers are assigned their calves until the end of Field Days they are responsible for cleaning their cow’s stable, keeping the calf clean, fastening its halters, taking the calf on a lead, and exhibiting in the judging ring.  (More on that later.)  This is not as easy as you might think.

Carly with Autumn

Audrey bonding with Belle

In the days before Field Days Carly, Ben and Audrey and the other 4-H’ers made regular trips to the barn where the 4-H cows were boarding, a farm nearby that has good stable facilities but has no cattle of its own.  There they had to wash their calf, take it out of the barn on a lead, and practice what they will be doing in the show ring:  parading their calves, and lining them up correctly for the judges.  The first judging at the fair is about conformation:  it is the cow that will be judged (although there is doubtless some contribution made by the manner in which the calf is being led and presented).  The ideal calf, future cow, needs to have certain ideal characteristics.  To even begin to understand the lingo in judging, it’s necessary to picture the parts of a cow:

Dairy judges have five categories of ideal traits:*  “frame,” “dairy character” (yes, character), “body capacity,” “feet and legs,” and “udder.”  What’s important in a cow’s frame is that it have a long and wide rump with pin bones (you can see why I put in the chart) that are lower than hip bones, thurls (see above) wide apart, proper proportion of height at withers and hips, front legs placed straight and square, full crops and straight and strong back.  And (I love this) the “head should be feminine…”   (Maybe it’s those long eyelashes.)  As for dairy character, this is about finding evidence of a good future milk supply by looking at the ribs (wide apart), withers (sharp), neck (long, lean), skin (loose, pliable). Then there’s body capacity volumetrically speaking (deep and wide is good).  Feet and legs should show good mobility (well-rounded closed toes, straight rear legs wide apart, short and strong pasterns).  Lastly, but likely most important, there’s the udder.  That, after all, is what it’s all about. Udder traits are depth, teat placement, strong support of the udder cleft, fore and aft udders wide, high and firmly attached (one would hope!), cylindrical teats of uniform size––in short, a balanced and nice looking udder that looks like it would happily hold a lot of milk. 

In a calf many of these same characteristics will be in a premature state.  Not much of an udder, for example, but lots of potential.   

4-H'ers getting show ring advice

The second judging is all about the 4-H’er him/herself.  (Calf-showing 4-H’ers are both boys and girls, more or less equally.)  “Showmanship” is the byword.  This means that the manner, attitude, and care with which they present their animal will be looked at closely.  To prep for this all the 4-H’ers have been bonding with their calves for many weeks.  At each visit to the barn the young trainers will have led their calves out of the barn, gripping the halters tightly as the calves clump along.  Watching eight or nine calves being led in a slow wobbly circle on a pleasant summer afternoon for an hour or so is as soothing an activity as meditation.  Things get a bit exciting when one of the larger calves slips her harness and scoots off into the pasture.  She kicks up her heels, stops to browse for a moment, then remembers she is free and cantors off again, eluding capture until the lure of grain overwhelms freedom.

The calves are slowly led around in a circle by their 4-H'ers

Real dairy life isn’t something I want to know a lot about.  It has some unpleasant, even ugly, aspects.  Think about eggs, for instance. Where are all the male chickens?  Who needs roosters when all you want is eggs?  You can think about it, but honestly, I don’t really want to.   I also don’t like thinking about what happens to all the male calves.  It’s not very different from the chicken issue.       

Male calves are obviously pretty useless to a dairy operation.  Bulls are harder to handle than cows and how many do you need, really, for reproduction.  Some farms don’t need bulls at all.  Given that the odds of a cow giving birth to a male is around 50 per cent (barring fooling around with the semen), there are going to be extra male calves.  Some of them may be castrated and kept for beef (consider them lucky) and some others sold for veal, a side product of dairy farming I’d never thought about before.  The topic of male calves often occasions a rueful expression. It’s not a happy thought. 

At the calf barn there is a very young male calf who is adored by everyone, and who is having what will probably be the very best time of his life, the presence of 4-H’ers a bonus for this little guy who looks beguilingly like a fawn.  Everyone vies to feed him his bottle, to pet him, and take him out of his stall on a lead and watch him scamper about.  (You could imagine having him as a pet.)  His mother, Luna, is in an adjacent stall.  Another lucky one, she is hand-milked daily. Her milk–unhomogenized, unpasteurized raw milk–fills a refrigerator and is for sale.  It tastes delicious.  I have watched Ben and Audrey pour the cream from the top of the milk into a smaller jar and shake the jar for maybe ten minutes to make butter.  The remaining liquid in which the new butter floats is buttermilk.

The little male calf romping

Everyone vies to feed the little calf

Usually calves are separated from their mothers a couple of days after birth.  The cow’s milk, of course, is intended for human, not calves.  (Calves will then drink a milk replacement.)  Of course the whole business of milk production means cows need to be lactating, and naturally they lactate as a result of giving birth to a calf.  Calf production is a constant component of milk production.   Pregnancy is nine months, like humans.  Milk levels peak at around 40 to 60 days after calving.**  As a result the life of a cow is a cycle of pregnancy, birthing, lactation, repeated several times over. 

 

Only yards away from the cow, a refrigerator full of raw milk

And what of those other (wild) beasts?  

Picture two birds, then four, battling in mid-air.  Picture one knocking another away from its source of food.  Imagine four of them aggressively tearing up and down and sideways.  Picture one sitting atop its food source to claim the territory as its own and no one else’s.  Know that these are beautiful, tiny hummingbirds.  Each day they––however many there are––consume more than two full feeders of nectar.

The feeder was emptied twice in a single day.

Below our kitchen windows we have been hearing a loud angry buzzing nearly every day, so loud I imagine the insect making it much be about three feet wide.  Last week when Ken squeezed behind the shrub below the kitchen window to clean it he was suddenly set upon by hornets, fortunately escaping with only two bites.  A few days later I peered behind the shrub and found a huge hornet nest.  He was lucky.  The hornets were not.  The way to get rid of a nest like that is to wait until dark when all the hornets are back from foraging and spray into the nest opening.  Vale, hornet!

Hidden behind the shrub...

...was this surprise.

We have often been dive-bombed by swallows, the latest species to make a nest under the roof of our porch.  This one was a minor feat of mud and twig engineering, as the next rests on nothing in particular, a mere half-inch of board. The rest is cantilevered.  Directly below the nest on the porch deck I found broken eggs on two separate occasions.  I was surprised to find two baby swallows looking down at me from the nest above.  Did these two toss out their two siblings?  I wonder.  Yesterday, again directly below the nest, I found the body of a very tiny mouse lying amid bird droppings.  Swallows eat flying insects.  Could the mouse, being utterly the wrong species, possibly have been an item of rejected food?  Or was it a victim of a bird poop bomb?

The mother swallows looks down at us.  Who tossed out the eggs?

Mysteries.

*Jessica Stamschror, Dr. Tony Seykora, and Dr. Les Hansen, Department of Animal Science, University of Minnesota College of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Science, “Judging Dairy Cattle, July 2000.

**Mike Hutjens, "Managing the Transition Cow," University of Illinois Extension, via Wikipedia