We continue to yearn for Indian Summer to lure us through autumn and buttress us against encroaching cold. The year feels drab without those jewel-like days, sparkling nuggets of azure and gold that shunned us in September and elude us yet.
The sanfoin hay Jim cut in mid-September languished in windrows for nearly two weeks, held hostage by fog, frequent showers, sopping nightly dew, and still air—all nearly unthinkable on our Front Range island. A single afternoon of sun and wind offered a brief window for wrapping it into rounds and hauling it to the stackyard before three more week of moisture and drear descended.
Meanwhile grizzly bear troubles rattled our routines and our psyches. Whether it was a sow with cub(s) or a solitary migrant, after killing two of our neighbor's ewes, it/they hunkered into some brush 150 yards from our driveway and haystack. The neighbor had been checking ewes on his bicycle because both his pickup and 4-wheeler were out of commission. Upon finding the first kill, he pedaled home to get a tarp to cover the site in order to protect it from birds and preserve evidence for the predator control folks. While he was gone, the bear(s) returned to the site and tried to haul the skeleton over the top of a fence, but the bones hung up on the top wire. I can only imagine his adrenaline-driven, frantic retreat from the freshly-moved kill after realizing that the bear(s) was close and observing his every move; the thought triggers my own adrenaline moment. I'm not sure if my 4-wheeler could outrun a charging bear, but I think I'd blow out any carbon accumulation in cranking it to lift-off speed. As for trying to escape on a pedal bike, I'd be best served by silent prayers from a fetal position.
We responded by locking the ewes and replacement ewe lambs into barns for a couple of nights, flood lighting the corrals during the night, and keeping an all-night radio station blaring into the corrals. We pushed ewes into the shelterbelt for daytime grazing until they pruned all the low vegetation and brush that obscured clear lines of sight. We shook apples out of our many apple trees and gave ewes time to eat them before corral lock-up. We picked up windfalls from under all of the trees not accessible to the sheep. Jim rode shotgun, literally, while I took pups out for their late night piddle run. The snare set by predator control agents came up empty, so we assume that the bruin(s) moved on. Knowing well the adage about assumptions, we continue to keep corrals flood-lit at night and our vigilance dialed up, and I illuminate after-dark pup piddlings with an industrial-strength flashlight.
Speaking of pups, the two of them continue to make us laugh and bring great joy. Dot is fierce, quick, independent, and aloof—a master of physics, levering her lithe body at just the right angle and speed to knock Dozer awry in most of their nearly-constant competitions. Dozer is content to be a jovial good fellow who brings up the rear in any race. He has acquired numerous nicknames: Do Si Dozer, based on his imagined preference for straight-forward square dancing rather than nuanced ballet; SpongeBob, for his boxy square-pants build; Double-Dump Dozer, a consequence of his robust appetite; Diesel Dozer, for his Mack Truck sublety; Big Bud, for his congeniality and those mighty MT Highline tractors used for huge, dryland farming; Bull Dozer, for his stereotypical bull-in-the-china-shop blundering. Case in point: yesterday, Dozer ventured boldly into a culvert, followed more cautiously by Dot. They could be heard splashing about in the water left standing within before Dot turned around and emerged from the end she'd entered. Not so Dozer. Eventually, his head popped out the far end and he tried to scramble out, but his exit was restricted by thick lumps of rhizomatous grass. After he began whimpering, I tried unsuccessfully to pull him out by the nape of his neck. Finally I reached into the water and stretched out first one front leg and then the other, altering the bulk of his shoulders so that I could pull the rest of his body free, rather like pulling a calf that's hung up by the shoulders in a cow's birth canal. Black sulfurous goo coated his legs and most of his body but not to worry, it was all good and a jolly adventure.
We assume that their mother, Toot, is very young, for she plays hard with them, delights in out-gunning them on high-speed high-jinks, and leads them on our merry jaunts out and about. I'm proud to report that she is finally making herself useful off-leash with sheep chores.
Both pups and Toot were neutered in mid-September and recuperated quickly. Though pups are fun, we won't be contributing to the nation's over-supply of them. We will take the pups to at least one series of obedience classes before the year is out, and I plan rattlesnake aversion training for both of them next spring, plus, perhaps, an update for Toot.
Along with neighbor friends, I attended a hands-on training session in FAMACHA eye scoring, a technique for evaluating internal parasitism in sheep based on the color of membranes inside the lower eyelid. If the cover-push-pull-pop FAMACHA routine reveals lively crimson membranes, the ewe need not be dewormed; if the routine exposes insipid pink, she is anemic and should be dosed; paler membranes suggest that a burial hole should be dug in anticipation of imminent death. Having dewormed our entire crew earlier in September, I'll review the technique in February and try it on ewes during lambing season.
Katrina and her friend, Omowumni, overnighted with us at the end of September, long enough to help harvest the last of the garden, help separate the ewes into three breeding groups, and help do routine maintenance on our oldest buck—driving him into the corral, pushing him down the crowding alley for deworming, and constraining him against the fence long enough for me to trim his feet. Deep mud and wind-driven sleet throughout made for numb hands and feet, towering heaps of wet, richly ripe laundry, and gumbo-gobbed boots. Heat from the woodstove surely felt good!
A day later, Jim and I hastened to add hot wire to the eight strands of barbed wire separating two of the breeding groups. We maintain empty corral spaces between those two groups and the third, and we follow a regimented sequence of AM turning out and PM corralling in order to minimize overlap and destruction. Despite our efforts, the bucks have their beady eyes ever-peeled for opportunities to engage with forbidden ewes and kill each other. Lovely creatures, eh?
A few days later, I escaped to a fabulous watercolor workshop in Kalispell, four days free of all responsibilities and immersed in painting, critiques, and demos by instructor, Bev Jozwiak. Late Friday afternoon I met family in Big Fork—both sisters and their spouses from Missoula, brother and his gal from Dayton, and Katrina with her dog, Merlin, from Bozeman—to attend the opening reception and banquet celebrating MT Watermedia, a national juried show. I finished these three paintings before heading home late in the afternoon on the last day of the workshop. The drive was glorious, though twice I had to brake hard, once to avoid a fat black bear charging full-tilt across the highway, and again, after dark, at the top of Rogers Pass, for a deer standing in the middle of the highway licking salt from the asphalt
The sanfoin hay Jim cut in mid-September languished in windrows for nearly two weeks, held hostage by fog, frequent showers, sopping nightly dew, and still air—all nearly unthinkable on our Front Range island. A single afternoon of sun and wind offered a brief window for wrapping it into rounds and hauling it to the stackyard before three more week of moisture and drear descended.
Meanwhile grizzly bear troubles rattled our routines and our psyches. Whether it was a sow with cub(s) or a solitary migrant, after killing two of our neighbor's ewes, it/they hunkered into some brush 150 yards from our driveway and haystack. The neighbor had been checking ewes on his bicycle because both his pickup and 4-wheeler were out of commission. Upon finding the first kill, he pedaled home to get a tarp to cover the site in order to protect it from birds and preserve evidence for the predator control folks. While he was gone, the bear(s) returned to the site and tried to haul the skeleton over the top of a fence, but the bones hung up on the top wire. I can only imagine his adrenaline-driven, frantic retreat from the freshly-moved kill after realizing that the bear(s) was close and observing his every move; the thought triggers my own adrenaline moment. I'm not sure if my 4-wheeler could outrun a charging bear, but I think I'd blow out any carbon accumulation in cranking it to lift-off speed. As for trying to escape on a pedal bike, I'd be best served by silent prayers from a fetal position.
We responded by locking the ewes and replacement ewe lambs into barns for a couple of nights, flood lighting the corrals during the night, and keeping an all-night radio station blaring into the corrals. We pushed ewes into the shelterbelt for daytime grazing until they pruned all the low vegetation and brush that obscured clear lines of sight. We shook apples out of our many apple trees and gave ewes time to eat them before corral lock-up. We picked up windfalls from under all of the trees not accessible to the sheep. Jim rode shotgun, literally, while I took pups out for their late night piddle run. The snare set by predator control agents came up empty, so we assume that the bruin(s) moved on. Knowing well the adage about assumptions, we continue to keep corrals flood-lit at night and our vigilance dialed up, and I illuminate after-dark pup piddlings with an industrial-strength flashlight.
Speaking of pups, the two of them continue to make us laugh and bring great joy. Dot is fierce, quick, independent, and aloof—a master of physics, levering her lithe body at just the right angle and speed to knock Dozer awry in most of their nearly-constant competitions. Dozer is content to be a jovial good fellow who brings up the rear in any race. He has acquired numerous nicknames: Do Si Dozer, based on his imagined preference for straight-forward square dancing rather than nuanced ballet; SpongeBob, for his boxy square-pants build; Double-Dump Dozer, a consequence of his robust appetite; Diesel Dozer, for his Mack Truck sublety; Big Bud, for his congeniality and those mighty MT Highline tractors used for huge, dryland farming; Bull Dozer, for his stereotypical bull-in-the-china-shop blundering. Case in point: yesterday, Dozer ventured boldly into a culvert, followed more cautiously by Dot. They could be heard splashing about in the water left standing within before Dot turned around and emerged from the end she'd entered. Not so Dozer. Eventually, his head popped out the far end and he tried to scramble out, but his exit was restricted by thick lumps of rhizomatous grass. After he began whimpering, I tried unsuccessfully to pull him out by the nape of his neck. Finally I reached into the water and stretched out first one front leg and then the other, altering the bulk of his shoulders so that I could pull the rest of his body free, rather like pulling a calf that's hung up by the shoulders in a cow's birth canal. Black sulfurous goo coated his legs and most of his body but not to worry, it was all good and a jolly adventure.
We assume that their mother, Toot, is very young, for she plays hard with them, delights in out-gunning them on high-speed high-jinks, and leads them on our merry jaunts out and about. I'm proud to report that she is finally making herself useful off-leash with sheep chores.
Both pups and Toot were neutered in mid-September and recuperated quickly. Though pups are fun, we won't be contributing to the nation's over-supply of them. We will take the pups to at least one series of obedience classes before the year is out, and I plan rattlesnake aversion training for both of them next spring, plus, perhaps, an update for Toot.
Along with neighbor friends, I attended a hands-on training session in FAMACHA eye scoring, a technique for evaluating internal parasitism in sheep based on the color of membranes inside the lower eyelid. If the cover-push-pull-pop FAMACHA routine reveals lively crimson membranes, the ewe need not be dewormed; if the routine exposes insipid pink, she is anemic and should be dosed; paler membranes suggest that a burial hole should be dug in anticipation of imminent death. Having dewormed our entire crew earlier in September, I'll review the technique in February and try it on ewes during lambing season.
Katrina and her friend, Omowumni, overnighted with us at the end of September, long enough to help harvest the last of the garden, help separate the ewes into three breeding groups, and help do routine maintenance on our oldest buck—driving him into the corral, pushing him down the crowding alley for deworming, and constraining him against the fence long enough for me to trim his feet. Deep mud and wind-driven sleet throughout made for numb hands and feet, towering heaps of wet, richly ripe laundry, and gumbo-gobbed boots. Heat from the woodstove surely felt good!
A day later, Jim and I hastened to add hot wire to the eight strands of barbed wire separating two of the breeding groups. We maintain empty corral spaces between those two groups and the third, and we follow a regimented sequence of AM turning out and PM corralling in order to minimize overlap and destruction. Despite our efforts, the bucks have their beady eyes ever-peeled for opportunities to engage with forbidden ewes and kill each other. Lovely creatures, eh?
A few days later, I escaped to a fabulous watercolor workshop in Kalispell, four days free of all responsibilities and immersed in painting, critiques, and demos by instructor, Bev Jozwiak. Late Friday afternoon I met family in Big Fork—both sisters and their spouses from Missoula, brother and his gal from Dayton, and Katrina with her dog, Merlin, from Bozeman—to attend the opening reception and banquet celebrating MT Watermedia, a national juried show. I finished these three paintings before heading home late in the afternoon on the last day of the workshop. The drive was glorious, though twice I had to brake hard, once to avoid a fat black bear charging full-tilt across the highway, and again, after dark, at the top of Rogers Pass, for a deer standing in the middle of the highway licking salt from the asphalt
 |  |
In the time I've spent working on this blog, our forecast has brightened, promising blue skies and daytime temperatures in the 60's for the upcoming week. Maybe I'll set up my easel outside and take a second run at the sunflower lamb painting. Or maybe not . . . that would require construction of a stout pup exclosure around my setup, and I don't want to paint in a pen. Alternatively, perhaps I'll read outside in the sun, welcome distractions from our trio of merry pranksters, and save the painting for days of grey.
RSS Feed
