Lately, the squirrels have been noisier when they get fed. I don’t know what they’re saying to each other, but it seems as if they can’t stop talking. Didn’t their mother teach them not to talk with their mouth full? Be sure to have the sound on so you can hear their conversation.
The Captain and I were having an afternoon coffee on our deck when Randolph came to visit. He’d been lurking around the yard late at night and usually disappeared in the wee hours of the morning. But lately he is getting braver about being seen in the glaring daylight hours.
He wasn’t too concerned about anything – even took time to scratch an itch.
He came right out in the open, looking for dandelions in the grass, and this explains his more frequent visits. Our grass is loaded in weeds. Definitely not a Scott’s Turfbuilder lawn. I don’t really mind him digging out the weeds to get at the roots or bugs, but I wish he would refill the holes.
Until now I had been blaming Bonnie and Benny Bunny for all the holes dug in our “lawn,” and they do their fair share of digging, but I saw Randolph in action this day, and knew I had to allow the bunnies some leniency. They are probably only guilty of digging a third of the holes in the yard.
We had a nice surprise today. A friend had been out in the woods picking oyster mushrooms and had a bunch to give us.
I’ve picked chanterelles but I didn’t know much about oyster mushrooms so I’ve never picked them. With mushrooms, you can’t take chances because many kinds of mushrooms have lookalikes and many of those can make you very sick (or worse).
So here is a picture the friend took to show us how they grow. See them there on the trunk of that dead alder tree?
The pictures were all taken by my friend with his phone, except for the two photos in my kitchen.
If you thought mushrooms always grow on the ground, think again. Here they are again, going way up the tree.
They almost look round like a tennis ball, but if you look carefully, you’ll see that they are flat and often seem to grow overlapping each other.
Because they are off the ground, they are much easier to clean than chanterelles.
I just took a pastry brush and cleaned off a few specks of dirt. No need to wash them and make them soggy. My dryer has five layers so I filled those up with the flat mushrooms and gave my attention to the rest of them which, temporarily, are spread out on a couple of baking sheets. (They are not going to be baked.)
I put a tiny bit of butter in a pan and put the mushroom pieces in it. This is just the start of what I put in the pan. I filled the pan enough so the whole bottom of the pan is filled. One thing I learned is that it is much easier to tear oyster mushrooms than to cut them.
Once they were sauteed just until they were cooked through, I put them in a big bowl to cool off while I cooked the next batch. After the sauteed mushrooms were all cool, I put them into plastic tubs and froze them. The sauteeing ensures that the mushrooms are not rubbery when you thaw them out to add to stir fries or gravy or whatever dish you want them to be in.
A couple of the bigger pieces were perfect for adding to a sandwich. So good!
If you find the energy to go out into the woods to look for mushrooms, you might be rewarded with the sighting of a large animal – at least the sight of its hind end. I’ll spare you the guesswork – it’s an elk.
Paved road, wildlife viewing, and a load of mushrooms for dinner. What could be better?
When Emma, our English field cocker spaniel, first went pheasant hunting, she just did what she was bred to do. She sniffed and snarfed until she found a pheasant scent, and she did it very well.
Later in the trailer, she found a stray pheasant feather, and another instinct of hers kicked in – that of eating whatever looked good.
She’s not too proud to get her picture taken with a feather stuck to her mouth and one ear flopped back. She’s confident we will love her anyway. Quite a humble innocent.
With most babies, every new item must be sniffed and if possible, eaten. Emma was no exception. She tried to eat the cord of the trailer’s electric heater when it was plugged in (luckily we caught her before she fried herself), she ate one of my brand new Birkenstocks,
and took her time working on a pair of slippers. (She doesn’t chew them now that she is all grown up, but she nibbles and nibbles over a long time, until there’s a substantial accumulation of damage.)
“Who? Me?”” she asks?
She’s not a puppy anymore and she doesn’t chew everything in sight, but she is still very focused on putting things in her mouth.
A friend of ours came over to help us out when our lawnmower broke down. He always brings dog biscuits as a treat for Emma, and this time was no exception. Emma got her dog cookie and followed the friend around the rest of the time he was here (as she always does).
Fast forward to the next morning when I took Emma out. Something reddish-orange caught my eye after she did her business. Was it the piece of carrot I had given her? Surely she would have chewed it more. Was it blood? OMG! I hope she’s okay.
I got a stick and poked around in the little chocolate wedding cake she had dropped, and brought the reddish-orange thing into the house. I washed it off, and couldn’t believe my eyes.
It wasn’t a dog biscuit, but it was something our friend had brought with him (and apparently lost in the grass as he was trimming the edges). It’s about an inch long and is made of a rubbery foamy material. Yep! You guessed it. It was an earplug.
But what a funny one it was. See the one hair on its head? Then go about a third of the way down on the right-hand side. Do you see the happy face? (I didn’t put that on it.) I think this earplug was happy to see the light of day again after his journey through the bowels of a spaniel innocently looking for another dog biscuit.
I think in this case, the innocent pursuit of dog biscuits backfired on Emma.
“Lookit! Lookit! The baby fig tree has a tiny fig on it. Do you think it tastes good?”
“What fig? Where? You mean that tiny green thing partway down the stem? Our ears are bigger than that fig!”
“Yeah, but it will grow!”
“I don’t want big ears!”
“No! I mean the fig will grow.”
“Oh good. Then can we eat it?”
It was actually under the wharf head where the river otters, Otto and Olive, had fun “under the boardwalk.”
“She was just here a minute ago,” says Otto. “I can smell her sweet perfume. I believe it’s ‘Tang of Sea Lettuce'” by Otter de la Rent Her. Very expensive stuff. Maybe she ducked in this pool for a dip.”
“Oh there you are, Olive. (Sniff, sniff!) I’ve been searching for you everywhere.”
“Yeah?” says Olive. “Whaddaya want from me, Otto?”
“That’s easy,” sniffs Otto. “Huh! Whaddo I want from you…? Olive you! Hahahaha! Gettit? Huh? Gettit?… OLIVE you!
By Poseidon, you do smell delicious. Come on. Let’s play under the boardwalk!”
(Under the boardwalk) Out of the sun
(Under the boardwalk) We’ll be havin’ some fun
(Under the boardwalk) People walking above
(Under the boardwalk) We’ll be fallin’ in love
(Under the boardwalk — boardwalk!)
A new load of firewood waits for someone to move it into the shed. Doesn’t seem like a big job unless you consider that each piece of firewood must be picked up and set down again. If there are 300 pieces of firewood that means I have to bend down to pick up or put down wood 600 times. My back hurts already!
If I thought this prospect was daunting, how do you think young Benny Bunny felt when his hiding place was discovered after only a short time and he came bouncing out from under the firewood? Now he will have to find another place to hide.
“Don’t fret, Benny,” said Bonnie Bunny. “As long as we have each other, we can snuggle up together tonight. But for now, let’s get out of here. Quick like a bunny!”
You can see how tiny Bonnie is compared to the piece of firewood she’s sitting beside.
Last time we had firewood delivered, I found a badge at the bottom of the pile of wood.
Forty-one years ago, someone was a volunteer at the Summer Games held in Comox on Vancouver Island.
Somehow the badge they wore became a part of my collection of curiosities. I don’t know who wore this badge, but perhaps I brushed by that person as I climbed up into the stadium to watch the dressage competition.
I had just moved back to the island after being away for several years working in other parts of the province, and when I heard that the Summer Games were on, I went there to have a look.
The riding competitions caught my attention and I was impressed by how royal the riders looked. I even wondered if by some remote chance a young Prince Charles had entered our humble competition. He looked fine in his riding jacket and helmet.
The horse was brushed until he gleamed and his mane was braided. I was enthralled by the spectacle of this rider guiding his horse over barricades and around the ring to jump the various hurdles. The whole show made the Comox Valley feel like Buckingham Palace.
Riders work with their horses for years to train them and form a bond that leads to easy co-operation in the show. Discipline takes on new meaning in dressage. I don’t know much about the rules of dressage competitions, but I know that the event was a real pleasure to watch.
Here are some photos from the Internet that relate to what I saw locally on a smaller scale.
I would go to another event like this in a heartbeat if it were held here again. Meanwhile, I will always wonder who lost this badge and where it has been for the last 41 years.
“Hey, Charlie! Come over here. I think I’ve found some bugs.”
“Yeah? Where?”
“Well … they were here a second ago.”
“Oh! Wait! I think I see him.”
“This is taking way too long. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go looking for my own again.”
Are the badlands really bad?
The lack of a steady supply of water makes it hard to grow much. And look at the terrain. Can you imagine an expensive piece of farm machinery trying to negotiate those hillsides? I think farming this area is out of the question.
Still, some vegetation just plants itself. It has to be tough to survive. Grasses are real survivors if they only have a chance to sprout.
But seeds are easily washed away if not in the sparse rain, then at least in the run-off from snowmelt. The wind lends a hand too. Between them, wind and water carve out a landscape full of curves, rifts, pillars, and odd-shaped hills.
So what is the good of these badlands? That is, if there is anything good about them.
At first glance, it looks like a wasteland. You’d be surprised though, how much life it supports. Insects, obviously, and those attract birds and snakes. Lots of snakes. I guess that’s a good thing, if you like snakes. They have to go somewhere.
The carved out crumbling rock formations provide many crevices and holes for a snake to hide in – a place to get out of the hot sun. In the late fall, rattlers will travel miles through prairie grasslands to the badlands where they seek out underground chambers (caves and tunnels) and scooped-out areas where they can snuggle up together for the winter in their very own hibernaculum. These dens are often underground and close to the water table, but preferably in a place where it stays above freezing.
The erosion in the badlands creates all kinds of possible hiding places for small animals. The fields at the edge of a badlands area could provide food for insects, small rodents, rabbits, and game birds such as grouse and pheasants, which in turn attract predators such as hawks and owls.
Even deer may be found wandering through the badlands.
If you have a dog though, watch where it goes. You don’t want it to be bitten by a sneaky snake. If you take your dog there, maybe to hunt a partridge or other game bird for dinner, the best time to do that is probably early in the morning when it is cool and the snakes are still a bit poky.
A friend told me of a time when his dog (same breed as our Emma – an English field cocker) was running down a path ahead of him and a rattler was in the path directly in front of her. The dog leaped over the coiled up snake and kept going. It was lucky that, because of the cold morning, the snake was still quite lethargic. A few hours later, this scenario could have had an unhappy ending.
If you’re ever in a badlands area, keep your eyes open and your camera handy, and bring along your snakebite kit and the local vet’s phone number.
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