Treasures Revealed

It's been a while since my last post I know.  I've been in the woods every day, usually twice a day.  As spring progresses I am finding more and more treasures revealed by the snow-melt.  Of course the birds arriving daily are such a surprise.   I practically stumbled over a Woodcock, pictured above. They wait until the last second to fly up from the ground where they hide without even trying.  Their camouflage is amazing, but when they fly up they stand out like a sore thumb.  A very strange shaped bird.  The woodcock looks to be more of a shorebird than a meadow bird.  As he flies, his wings whistle.   His mating flights  are a musical crescendo of ascending notes followed by colorful notes as he spirals down to the ground once more.

This morning I decided to look for a cabin I had found years back, along the Surry/Walpole line.  As the mornings are colder, I can still walk on the hardpack snow with ease.   I brought Evvy with me as usual.  She found three different bones, in three different locations within a half to 3/4 of a mile.  Two of the bones appeared to have been cut with a saw.   Naturally I am curious about this.  Was this a deer?  Poached?  Or was this even a deer?  A bear?  The bones were long bones, as in legs.  One bone was about 10" long and appeared to be somewhat curved.  There was a complete ball and socket joint at one end.  This would be the proximal end, nearest to the body mass.  There was meat still attached, and Evvy dragged each bone a long distance before being distracted by other things.

I never saw where Evvy picked up each bone, and I wondered if there were more where she had been.  Nevertheless, I was on a mission.  A large Barred Owl swooped just ten feet over my head to well in front of me.  That was neat.  Evvy dropped the bone and gave chase, as if she could ever hope to catch this magical bird.   I followed a trail marked with granite cairns, and melted snowshoe tracks.  I found a nice place to sit, where someone had constructed a bench, and campfire circle of granite.  The stones in this area are often perfect square shapes, like bricks.  Making cairns, or walls is easy with these rocks.  This particular trail looped into the woods from a main logging road, and back with no sight of the cabin.  I decided I must walk further up the logging road, and enter the woods to the east.  And so, I did find a recent logging road entering to the east.  I remembered the cabin had its own cairn markings.   I still hadn't seen any cairns, so I turned south and decided to make bigger and bigger circles until I found the trail.  At last, I did find this trail.  No one had passed here for a very long time.  Trees destroyed by the past ice storm of December littered the ground.  I recalled that the cabin had been perched along a ridgeline and had a decent view to the East.  Then I spotted a red utility trailer, a small one.  I raised my arms as if I had just won the lottery.   There amidst fallen White Pines was the small cabin.  The roof had some minor damage, but the cabin remained sound.   The loo had lost it's walls and roof, but the "single hole" with toilet cover was still there.  I was wishing for toilet paper, then decided to just wait til I got home.    I spent some time exploring around the cabin.   Frozen in some ice I found a the journal of Joey Rittle, dated July of 1993.  The pages were frozen together, as was the back cover and spine.  I could not read the journal without ruining it, so I let it be.  Besides those things are private, even if left out there in the "no where".   Mr. Rittle had piled up all his cabin stuff under a roof attached to the cabin; dishes, backpacks, camp chairs.  None of this was inside the cabin.  The cabin was secured by a healthy padlock, but I could see in the windows.  A perfect spot.  I fantasized about my own cabin yet to be built.

After I was sufficiently familiar with the surroundings and how I got there, I decided to find the cairn trail again.  Weather was moving in quickly, and I didn't want to be out there should it start raining.   Evvy continued to locate new bones, these had not been cut, but chewed.   

I located Rittle's cairn trail back toward the logging road I walked in from.   This trail connected to the Monadnock Conservancy easement, and the snowshoe trail I had found earlier.  I added a few extra cairns so I would more easily locate the trail from the east.   Finally Evvy and I emerged from the woods where we had first entered two hours earlier.  The sky had become completely overcast, and cooler.  When we began, the sky was sunny, and warm with few clouds.   We had flushed out some Roughed Grouse, and Evvy enjoyed chasing Robins, and Chipmunks alike.  If it moved, Evvy chased it. 

As I made my way back to the truck, I thought there must be a hundred years of cleanup necessary to remove all the trees ruined by the ice storm.  Maple trees lay bleeding their sap into the snow, and ice.   Oaks and pines lay strewn all over the trails, and into the woods.  

A successful exploration today, just one of many to come.

Catch A Tiger by the Tail

The other day we went to Stearns Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation in Tampa. We saw many, many animals that arrived here for one reason or another. This little tiger was born in Oklahoma, and moved here. Here name is "Nikita" and she is 14 months old. They told us she was at just about the age where humans are not able to just pat her as we were doing. She was quite a handful as it was. In fact, she bit a hole in one of the handler's jeans with barely any effort. I was surprised to find that her fur was quite course. I in my ignorance thought she would have soft fur. Her paws are already very strong, as is her bite. She loved biting her toys, and I suspect she WAS getting sick of so many people manhandling her.

There was a puzzling Emu walking the grounds. He had been there for some time. One of his legs was deformed, having survived an attack. But he got around just fine. There was a three legged whitetail deer, that also got around fine. Amazing, because out in the wild both of these creatures would have been eaten long ago.

My main concern with this facility was that most of the animal enclosures were, in my opinion much too small. There were Siberian Tigers in kennel sized cages. They paced back and forth, clearly reduced to psychological ruin. It was sad I thought. Black bears, African Lions, Florida Panther, Jaguar, and other cats are housed here. There are also many, many birds to include very beautiful pheasants from the orient, Parrots, Macaws, and even a flock of Turkeys. There were some small monkeys as well.

Two more days of warm sunshine here in Florida, then back to the harsh reality of late winter in New Hampshire....ugh. I will be glad to see MY creatures after so many days.

The Sunny South

Thank God for Florida in winter. No snow, no cold, no mailboxes being lopped off by a raging plowguy. I'm out in the sun every day walking, jogging, or just sitting sucking up the warmth. While there IS a drought going on, there are still things blooming here and there. Leaves are beginning to spring forth on the Cypress trees. I had occasion to take a nice 17 mile bike ride on my mom's beach comber single speed the other day. I rode through Jay B. Starkey Park, which is a wildlife conservation area of great expanse. I saw a Fox Squirrel like the one pictured. HUGE!! Like a small cat. He was oblivious to me, I suspect probably quite tame. He sports a lovely black coat on his back and head, with white underneath. I had never seen one before, so it was a treat. I noticed that along the path the ground appeared to have been rooted around in. Then I saw signs announcing a 3-day special hunt of Wild Hogs. The Fish and Wildlife agency for this area is holding the hunt for these wild pigs through tonight. The hunt is by special permit, maybe like our Moose Lottery. The hunt goes from 4 p.m. -4 a.m., and the trails are closed during this time. Of course the park closes at dusk anyway, which is about 6:45 p.m. down here.
I was wishing I could have gone on this hunt, or at least hang out at the checking station to see the results. Apparently there are too many wild pigs, and they are wandering into the residential areas looking for food. If only there weren't so many residential areas cropping up everywhere, perhaps the hogs might not be such a nuisance.

The soft shell turtles in the pond out back have been eaten by an alligator, but the large Painted Turtles are in abundance here. I enjoy watching them, some very large, like 20# basking on the sunny banks.

I'm hoping that back north the weather is warming, and melting that 2-3 feet of snow in my yard. For now though, I'm basking in the sun which is predicted to continue for several days to come.