Today was very nice -- 60 degrees F! We haven't seen temperatures like that since mid November. This of course led to the first signs of mud season. In Maine there's a period after the thaw begins but before it's over, when we have a kind of temporary permafrost, if you can have such a thing, below the ground level, which doesn't let water through, and so the top level melts and forms sticky mud.Aimee and I consider our mud conditions quite luxurious in comparison to the Bale House, which can get stranded in a sea of it's own mud.
My job for this first day of the half-term was to identify how much firewood we had left, and add to it if possible. There was such a tiny amount I went right out and found a guy in Brewer to sell me a pick-up truck of ash slabs, left over from milling blanks for baseball bats, but perfectly good fuel. This is heating up some beans right now. The pallet is what I found left under the snow in the firewood pile. The ash slabs are in the wheelbarrow, with ten-fifteen times that much in the pick-em-up truck.
Then we had a certain surprise. I was walking out behind the barn where I haven't been for month because of the snow in order to, well, do what guys do when they walk off behind buildings and trees in the middle of the day. I followed a dog-trail out there, only to find a dead bobcat. This predator was right up against the corner post for the sheep's current outdoor pen, curled up in a defensive position.I guess one of the dogs found him and worried him to death. He had a broken leg, and was very skinny, so he had been forced by hunger to take the huge risk of approaching a human barn, only to pay what must often be the price.
"Poor little guy," says Aimee, thinking of the cat. "Close shave," says I, thinking of the ducks who hang out in that pen every night.
We have a fair number of interesting neighbors here on the Great Farm, surrounded by so much wild land of reasonable habitat quality. We have deer and moose, who walk unconcernedly by the back field on the trail every spring without fail. We have bear. One bear ate neighbor Jean's bird-suet the year before last! A student of ours saw lynx tracks in the beaver meadow last winter. We have coyote. Lots of turkeys and grouse, many different woodpeckers, bald and golden eagles, hen harriers (marsh hawks), beaver, and, it seems, American bobcat.
Right next to our new lambs!
In Blake's Tyger tyger burning bright, there's this verse:
| When the stars threw down their spears, | |
| And water'd heaven with their tears, | |
| Did He smile His work to see? | |
| Did He who made the lamb make thee? |
I guess so. But I'm still glad nothing happened to the livestock.
The bobcat meanwhile is in the freezer with last year's pesto and tomatoes, under the bulk-buy tortelini.
Undignified, I know, but when Aimee gets back from her upcoming expedition to Nicaragua, she'll take it to school and dissect it to see what killed it.
As the Italians are well known to say, "ashes to ashes, dust to tortelini."
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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.
The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.
After getting tired of spam comments (up to a dozen or more per day), I required commentators to be Google "registered users". You can write me at mwomersley@unity.edu if you have a serious comment or question and are not a registered user.
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