Without my snowshoes, I would have to charge into the woods, leaping over or plowing through the drifts along the edges to reach the deep even blanket of snow within. If that interior snow was especially deep I would have to lift my legs high and somewhat sideways to make forward progress. In soft, waist-deep snow I could wind up wallowing in my own tracks, pulling myself deeper with my struggles and packing snow around my feet to the point I would need to lie down and attempt to extricate myself by rolling out of the hole I’d made. I could flop around like that for a couple of hours, straining, toiling and burning so many calories that I would ironically overheat and freeze to death if I didn’t suffer a heart attack first. Continue reading
Posts Tagged With: nature
Without My Snowshoes
A One-Way Ticket to Exile Island
When it comes to squirrels and chipmunks there is an exceptionally fine line between preposterously cute and inherently evil. The line was drawn by humans and therefore has no meaning to squirrels and chipmunks and, even if it did, they can only be cute for so long.
Last spring, a certain number of squirrels and chipmunks began exploiting the seemingly endless supply of bird seed that collected beneath the feeders. They were an efficient clean-up crew, stuffing their cheek pouches with sunflower seeds and millet, distorting their faces into gluttonous caricatures before running off to their secret larders, struggling to hold their heads up and even running sideways due to the weight. They had a good thing going but, being squirrels and chipmunks, they got greedy and messed it up.
Launching themselves from any and all nearby objects, the squirrels became furry projectiles. They would deliver glancing blows that scattered seed on the ground below, emptying the feeders at an alarming rate, but only if they could not actually catch themselves and hang on to a feeder in order to chew through plastic, aluminum and zinc-plated steel. That was like hitting the mother lode and the question of where they were stashing all that seed arose.
Clues started sprouting up in the form of sprouts. Specifically, sunflower sprouts in the ficus and millet sprouts in the African violets and, not long after the discovery of their little agricultural enterprise, it began to snow pink insulation as the squirrels adjusted the R-value of the attic to their liking by pushing it out through their newly chewed-through entrance.
With all the cottages at Fish in a Barrel Pond full of Club members and their families, the use of guns was out of the question. Not that crawling into the attic with a shotgun was an option to begin with, but something had to be done and what was done was this: Continue reading
Quill Gordon Channels Natty Bumppo
Animal tracks show up well in fresh snow and some people enjoy getting out and “reading” the “stories” those tracks have to tell, but generally the plot lines aren’t much. The woods are full of the apparently random ramblings of rodents and lagomorphs.
“A squirrel went from this beech to that maple” or “a hare passed by this log yesterday” are recurring themes in the woods.
There are times, though, when the story might be interesting, and you don’t even need to be Natty Bumppo in order to cipher it out.
If a large man on large snowshoes trudges across the frozen January crust it looks like this:
If a Northern Hawk Owl comes down on a vole it looks like this:
And if a coyote walks by and a rodent panics, “swims” to the surface and makes a break for it, that rodent is not long for this world. When the trait that causes poor decision making is eliminated from the mouse gene pool it looks like this, with coyote #1 on the left flushing the mouse, which skedaddled to the right where it was promptly pounced upon by coyote #2 :
Not really a thriller, and not much of a mystery, but at least somebody got a snack out of it.
The View from Fish in a Barrel Pond 