A long night with restless critters

What an effing long night it was last night, I was sleeping in the tent when the coyotes all went off, singing arias a little too close to me for comfort, followed by a fox coughing in the valley, and as the rutting deer blundered past my tent, one of them knocking down the tent ropes, so it sounded like I was inside a large harp, booooiiiing! Zing! the roof was shaking like crazy. Then the wind came whipping down from the mountain (thanks to Karl the Fog—that heat spell was something—and extreme heat in October is cause for alarm—as in wildfire) and the gust of wind shook the tent like terrier with a rat. I could hear the tall fir trees cracking and groaning which set off the hoot owls. They sounded pretty feeble as they still don’t have their mature hoot down yet. The deer insult was followed by some largish animal attacking the side of the tent, three times with lots and lots of claws getting stuck in the tent wall. Of course, my first thought was Oh my God, a mountain lion or a bobcat is trying to get in—surely it’s not the coyotes. Not what I wanted to think about before drifting off to sleep—especially after coming onto my sleepytime gummy bear. Speaking of bears, by this time, I was really quite cross, and I begin yelling for all I was worth, which scared it—whatever it was—off, and it also brought out the neighbors bearing torches. Meanwhile, my cousin’s crazy cat was zooming around the inside of the tent like a well-oiled lunatic. Whatever was attacking the tent must’ve been trying to attack her. I no sooner got back to sleep when that episode was followed by two raccoons having it out and literally rolling like little fat fur barrels down the slope into the creekbed where they caterwauled and quarreled some more. This performance was repeated throughout the night with copious snarling and fearsome growling and snorting as they made direct contact several times. And at dawn, I had to rescue my cousin’s crazy cat (the one that was racing around the tent) singing her three-note Siamese cat opera, trying to get away from a large puffy stray tabby Tom who was trying to beat the crap out of her. They are all nuts. I chased him off, she was stuck on automatic hiss mode so I couldn’t pick her up and put her in the house. She usually doesn’t sleep outside, so she was pretty freaked out. I am so tired, I am cross-eyed. And now it’s raining. No need to do a rain dance. I’ve been dancing around the garden all night long in my PJs like a dementor screaming at all the wild animals.

The doe’s breakfast
Morning aubade

Missy the Deer (photos)

Missy the deer I caretook last year munching on chicken feed & rolled oats in the garden.

Last year I clandestinely took care of a young deer who was hit by a car. She was one of our deer, born and bred in my grandmother’s garden. Well, the other evening I had an interesting interlude with her. I haven’t seen her in nearly a year, and she came right up to me, almost expectantly, as I was getting out of my car—like she knew me. I was so shocked I just stood there. I rolled some lemon cukes her way, and slowly walked away. We tend to talk to all animals, she was no exception.

So later, she came to the back door and peered in expectantly. Her enormous ears swiveling like semaphores. It was as if she were saying, I know you. C’mon! She had also brought her twins. I thought, oh, great, she was somebody’s pet. She’s so tame someone’s been hand-feeding her. A practice I condemn. They’re gone and interfered with the boundary between keeping wild animals wild and leery of us. I also thought, there was no way it was last year’s deer I had taken care of. I looked for a limp. She seemed to favor her hind leg, but I couldn’t be sure. It was clean.  Deer movements are sporadic, at best.

Then, the day before yesterday, she came up right to me again when I was in the garden. There was no mistaking it. She was wanted a connection with me. I stood stock-still. There was only an old Adirondak chair between us. She kept watching me and edging closer, so of course I talked to her. She pricked those marvelous ears at me, never taking her eyes off me. 

This time I saw the big scar on her hind leg where the bone had broken through, and realized it was the same deer that I had secretly fed last year. I suppose I could anthropomorphize a bit here and say she was thanking me, but I think it was hunger talking. But most animals tend to like me and will often approach me. Do I stink, or smell like the forest? We had just returned from huckleberrying so we were manky. Maybe I should bathe more often.

She hardly limps at all now. And there is no doubt that she definitely remembers me. It’s uncanny. Apparently my cover has been blown. She has no fear of me, but her fawns are afraid of us—and that is good. Despite my best intentions not to interfere with her wildness, I’ve gone and named her Missy. But her guardian, Bucky the mascot is missing, so I fear the worst.

It was Alex Call who told me to get her some high energy corn to help her survive. I couldn’t find any cracked corn, so I got a sack of chicken scratch with corn in it. I think she found it an odd choice, so I added some rolled oats too, which she gobbled right up. She loved rose petals and leaves. I tried to stay within her food range but spinach, bok choy and squash were a no-go.

Since I still had some chicken feed left over from last year, I sprinkled in the dry grass for the birds, I gave some to her. She ate it, plus the apples we left in the grass. I put out some other greens too as she’s pretty thin. She still won’t eat spinach. So I sprinkled more oats and chicken feed in the grass. We shall soon see if she will lay eggs, or begin to crow like a rooster at dawn.

You can see the wounds on her hind leg, she figured out how to walk, but it must’ve hurt.

For the most part, last year, I kept out of her line of sight, only putting food out when she wasn’t around. I was hoping she wouldn’t make the general fatal connection between humans and food—but still she figured out who and what I was—the feeder. So, my scent was probably the main clue. It was either that, or let her die. I think Bucky’s trust in us put her at ease. But she was still very leery of us. I never approached her. I didn’t want her to become accustomed to us. 

Some a-hole hit her with a car or truck, probably one of the day workers up the hill, and he left her to die. Didn’t even call the humane society. Coyotes smelling blood and opportunity, were trailing her, mama and cubs were waiting in the wings for an easy meal. Over my dead body. We drove them off yelling like banshees. Sean permanently scared them off with an air gun. Talk about a chain reaction set in motion. We sure didn’t want them hanging about or snatching one of the cats either. 

Bucky was a gentleman, he stood guard when she ate & chased off predators, but not us.

But this was also during the tail end of the drought, and the young deer was having trouble finding food, Bucky, who quickly figured out that I was a friend, not a foe who was feeding the doe, was reduced to eating lichen, toxic cotoneaster and ivy—which she couldn’t reach. She couldn’t even walk down to the creek, not with that blown hock, so I put out a bucket of water as well as assorted lettuce greens and grain. 

After all, generations of her deer people have drunk out of my old horse trough, and eaten my horses’ hay. These deer were born in the upper garden where Missy was currently sleeping, so it is as much their natal stomping grounds as it is mine. Besides, during the summer, I often sleep outside in the tent when I come visiting. So they know me. I am merely part of the garden furniture.

I am so not into feeding opportunistic wild animals, thus altering their behavior, but I don’t mind cohabiting with them. So this is a bit of a hybrid event, keeping her alive. Luckily, her fawns are afraid of us. May it continue to be so.

• The doe’s breakfast
• Morning aubade

Hick’s Valley chicks

Every time I pass the Hicks Valley Chicken Ranch, I keep an eye out for escaped chickens. There are three naughty chickens that have figured out a way to fly the coop, and make their way towards freedom, rather than be stuck in the pasture with hundreds of  hens, all grubbing for the same morsels. 

It’s not for lack of food, there is plenty of food in the pasture. For some reason these three hens think that life is always greener on the other side, though they are not cattle. We’ve taken to naming them since we only see three escapees every single time we drive down the road several times a week, so I know the stretch well. 

I have named the chickens Galloping Gertie, because she lummoxes along with her sides heaving like bowls full of jelly. She is built like Jabba the Hutt. The other two have more pedantic names than anything else—or swearwords for lack of a better term. 

Chicken number two is called Fuckwad because she is a little fuckwad. She is so small, she can slip through the cracks to get her own way. And the third one, because she is so excellent at being busted, is called Jailbait. No matter what, even if they re not the same chickens, three chickens always escape. These are their names. 

You may well ask what happens if a fourth chicken escapes. Good question. However, because we are partial to the Indo-European law of threes, we inherently like this balance of three chickens versus four. Now, of course, if this were Japan, then it will be de rigueur to have four chickens as four as considered a lucky number in Japan. Three is bad juju. 

However, we are not Japan. We are in the west. This is the land of cows and rolling hills. A chicken ranch is all little exotic here, but with, shall we say, designer foods free range chickens and free range chicken eggs have become a big thing.

Even though there is heavy frost in the mornings, after the deluge of epic proportions breaking the spine of the drought, there are riotous signs of spring everywhere, from the butter cups, showing their little yellow heads, pale creamcups, and the dandelions grow taller, not to be undone by their splendor. 

But more than anything else there are formerly amorous dead skunks littered all over the middle of the road, not to mention by the side of the road. Usually they come in pairs. But every once in a while, there are a few ménage a trois. Kind of like the hens. Good things come in threes. 

The owners of the chickens at Hicks Valley Chicken Ranch say that every night they round up those errant hens and lock them back in their chicken palace. It’s a lovely monstrous affair with two turrets, and those chickens should be very proud of their abode. 

Why these three chickens are not contented with their pasture, defies logic. Tonight the chicken wranglers will round them up and put them back in their corral. But come morning they will make a run for the border. This might be the place where you ask where did the chicken cross the road? Entirely appropriate and I do understand the reason why you ask that. 

So far, so good—the chickens have not decided to take on that particular aphorism, a good thing too, because a lot of creatures get squished along that particular stretch of road—human, or otherwise. 

For a while, there, there were escaped domestic bunnies living in the culvert alongside the road, near where the chickens love to hang out. They did well, until they got too full of themselves, and decided to cross the road. 

Wayward wethers

Alex, an Aussie wiley wayward wether wandered far away from his home ranch, or sheep station, roughing it out in the bush for a few years, thus avoiding all detection. He was so laden with his own success, he couldn’t even stand up. Shorn of 88 pounds of fleece, he was severely malnourished under all that wool. You could say he was given a new fleece on life. Alex has yet to make it to Wiki status. But Shrek the Kiwi merino sheep was the clear long-distance winner of escapee wayward wethers avoiding shearing, by hiding out in caves like Moses, on the lam for more than six years, carrying 60 pounds of dreadlocked fleece. He couldn’t even reach the ground to eat. Then there was Baarack who wandered alone in the Aussie outback for five years, also avoiding detection, a victim of his own success. he flogged a whopping 80 pounds of fleece. Some seeds sprouted in his crufty fleece. Then there was Chris the Ram, yet another merino sheep, heavyweight fleece champion, he clocked in with a world record fleece at 90 pounds. Forget about the Golden Fleece. His was the ultimate poopy fleece. But Chris the Canberra sheep and his hefty fleece made it to the Guinness book of world records. The average merino sheep grows enough wool (10 pounds) annually to make one sweater, and 61 socks. Chris’s wool, had it been usable, would’ve yielded 72 sweaters and 574 socks. What did they all have in common? Well, they were all merino sheep, three out of four were castrated, but all the boys who wandered far from home. And all were from downunder.

Housesitting for KitaKat, journal

Because I was kitty sitting, I missed last Wednesdays, writing segment, I was too distracted, and besides, my pen was out of ink, and somehow, procrastination was my best friend. I thought that I would get back to it, but no. New house, new things to see. Oh look, shiny.

I also thought I would do all this scanning on memorabilia, so I hauled boxes of memorabilia down to Fremont with me. Nope. I didn’t have the focus. But I did read, or, rather, I tried to read a letter from Rosalind Sharpe Wall which mentioned the Cherry Foundation, dated 1986 and she had suggested that that I apply for money. And of course I never did.

Rosalind also mentioned that she was still working on her book that I helped to edit when she lived in Petaluma. It’s called Pioneers of of the Big Sur Coast, so that makes it a valuable letter to decipher as archival material, not that it said very much.

I expected to get back to my writing prompts next day, but it didn’t happen. What makes moving to a new location so distracting to the point of exhaustion? Here I am sleeping indoors these days. I’m not cold there’s central heating. I lack for nothing. I even have a kitty to pet.

Here’s the thing, for the first time in months, I’ve been sleeping indoors every night. Something I’m not used to. While I was sleeping outside during the fall, I was battling record cold temperatures. One night it got down to the high teens, all that cold sapped a lot of energy from me. As Sinead said, you’re in a warm dry place. enjoy it. True. So I caught up on a massive backlog of sleep deprivation that I didn’t know I had.

Watusi cattle of Wilson Hill (photos)

And on Wilson Hill Road, Stubbs Ranch, are some extraordinary African Watusi cattle. Mama bathing her calf, I suspect the older calves are hers too by the way they hang on her every breath. No, she’s not a hermaphrodite. They have weird bellybuttons. Bulls also have dewlaps on their necks, and brahma style humps on their backs. Check out those horns! Those horns are used somewhat like a car radiator to cool their blood, not to gore you. But the Watusi cattle are related to the original longhorns, that is, the Egyptian Hamitic longhorn, also ancestor to Mexican (and Texican) longhorns.

The following article on Watusis was so windy it was practically a hurricane, so I paraphrased it. You’re welcome.

“Ankole-Watusi cattle with their distinctive large-diameter horns, trace their ancestry back more than 6,000 years, and are referred to as "cattle of kings."

Long-horned, humpless domestic cattle were established in the Nile Valley by 4000 B.C. Egyptian or Hamitic Longhorn, appear in pictographs in Egyptian pyramids. Over the next 2.000 years, the Egyptian Longhorn migrated from the Nile to Ethiopia, and to southern Africa.

By 2000 B. C., humped cattle (Longhorn Zebu) from Pakistan and India also reached Africa. When the Zebu reached Ethiopia and Somalia, they were interbred with Egyptian Longhorn to produce the Sanga -- the breed spread to the Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, eastern Africa, becoming the base stock of indigenous African breeds. The Sanga had Zebu characteristics, pendulous dewlap and sheath, upturned horns, and a neck hump. Modern descendants of the Sanga, however, vary greatly in size, conformation, and horns.

Particularly remarkable are the cattle found in Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. In Uganda, the Nkole tribe's Sanga variety is known as the Ankole. In Rwanda and Burundi, the Tutsi tribe's Sanga variety is called the Watusi. The Rwanda common strain of Watusi is called Inkuku. 

Night heron on the Petaluma River, photo

Night heron. He’s no singing canary. I told him not to give up his day job. With a voice like that, he could wind up in Sing-sing. The song of his people is somewhere between an Edgar Allen Poe inspired death rattle, and someone being vigorously strangled. Looks can be deceiving. He’s got a long neck stuffed underneath that feather ruff. Like a jack in the box. Otherwise, he’d starve to death as his beak couldn't reach the ground.

• NOTE: THIS POST ALONG WITH 12 OTHER POSTS WAS ERRONEOUSLY REMOVED BY BLOGGER FOR VIOLATING COMMUNITY STANDARDS ON 5/14/21. It was reinstated as a draft the next day. I am still pissed off.

Bushtit gang in the fennel

Is there a bird more ridiculous than the bushtit? A gang landed en masse on the fennel bush looking for seeds, nearly knocking it askew, sounding like cartoon chew toys as it swayed like the mast of a boat in the harbor. Meanwhile the bees carry on, following the mad dance of branches. 

The one, just there, on the edge of the meadow, contemplating the morning mist, where it gathers in the branches, like soft flocks of birds.

Nickel the Bison

 

I wonder what the heifer thought of the bison? It looks like the only romance going on was with the hay. Old Man Nunes was so proud of his bison calf. What was he thinking? They're completely unpredictable and are like bulldozers when it comes to fences.

There's a backstory, bison are part of the fabric of my childhood—when I was a kid, there was another bison—yes, we called them buffalo—in Nicasio right by the church. The only reason why Belle the Buffalo stayed put in the church pasture was because she liked the cows. I used to save my buffalo head nickels and named them all Belle. Then one hopped up Saturday night some hoodlums came out and shot the poor buffalo for no reason at all. Or, so the story goes. We were all devastated.

So when Nickel showed up, we were all insane with joy. I used to take my grandmother up to the Nunes ranch for a visit. It was a case of Meet the new family pet, Nickel. I wonder what happened to the little bison when Old Man Nunes died. He was fence resistant as I recall. The bison, not Mr. Nunes. Now there are fancy houses on Portola Road (the fire road) once my own private Eden, and I can't imagine they'd tolerate a wayward bison.



(Maureen Hurley photos)
from a Facebook photo album

Blessed sleep, freewrite

I am almost narcoleptic now, catatonic, somnbulent even. A serious lack of sleep deprivation even, but the show must go on. Despite a profound lack of sleep, the night before a big day when I need to sleep most, sleep abandons me and leaves me out to pasture, counting sheep, until I want to sucker punch the woolly apparitions.

Not that I actually count sheep, but as a child, I tried, and no matter how much how I visualized them, queuing them up in order to get them running fast enough to build up enough steam to clear the log fence, was a nightmare. Try herding sleep sheep sometime. They’re absolutely unruly. You need a sleep sheepdog. If anything, the process gets me so riled up, I could kiss any fleeting hope of getting some blessed sleep goodbye.

Then the damn things won’t shut up with their baahing like goats with an occasional basso profundo ewe chiming in with her bleating lambs, not exactly chiming, no bell, she. Not even the bell of the ball.

We stopped on Coleman Valley Road overlooking the sea to watch a gang of lambs playing on the hillside, each one shoving the other off the ledge. None could keep still for more than two seconds. They’ve been alive for less than two months. They gambol about with such energy.

Sonoma county sheep are born in January in February so they’ll be ready for Easter dinner. Little fresh guys, youngsters, rowdy, and on the move. No clue as to what’s in store for them. Not blessed, sheep, but blessed sleep. Forever and a night, will they count dinners jumping over a dinner table for an eternity to come?

324, 2007? Writers’ Group