September and October Season (2021)

 

Animals

For the first time since we've been living along this Creek, we spotted early one morning a porcupine. Then our neighbors upstream saw one on their game camera. Then September 20 I picked up this one, dead, a few hundred yards up the hillside on the county road where it had been hit by a vehicle in the night.

And then there are the animals we didn't see, but someone else probably saw. Like the animal that may have been brought down by a prehistoric hunter, maybe as far back as 800 BC or thereabouts. We dug up this atlatl spear point downstream, up on a high bank, about five inches deep in soil we've been excavating on the hunch that prehistoric people often camped along these spring-fed waters. 

Late Archaic Castroville point from 2000-2800 years ago.

Here's more on the Castroville point.

The year 2021 was a tragic year for the sheep. Five have been killed by coyotes. We added barbed wires and electric wires to the fence, but coyotes kept climbing it. We finally took to penning them up in a small high-fence area and letting them out by day to eat.

September 21 (young ram)

September 30 (young female lamb)

Coyote

When a sycamore leaf is on a low branch,
beneath a perched vulture

Below is a video of our honey bees drinking away at the sheep's water bucket. (One of the sheep in this movie is no longer with us.)

Plants

Mostly yellows and purples, this season. 

Ironweed (genus Veronia)

Larger Bur-Marigold (Bidens laevis, daisy family)

These yellow ones next to the recently swollen Creek (big rains yesterday) join a small crowd of yellow flowers about the hills and within this little canyon. But this Bur-Marigold seems new to us.  How can this be?  For a decade now we've been living close to all the Creek life, and here is this bright yellow flower doing its thing unmistakably, without disguise, without excuse. 

Purple Bindweed, of the Morning Glory Family 
(Convolvulaceae)

Roosevelt Weed

Spent buttonbush

Buttonbush, morning storm-flow,
sycamores, and Bur-marigold

Curlycup Gumweed

Sesbania pods held high

Senna

Goldeneye (no plant quietly hangs with us all
year and then explodes the second week
of October like this humble friend) 

Same before it yellows out

Stonefield full of palofoxia

Delicious

September 3 and Cedar Elms going yellow

Buffalo gourd

Inland Sea Oats

Goldenrod

Sky and Canyon

September 29, 7:55 a.m.

Creek

Here's a slow version of the Creek on the morning of October 14.

And how dry the Creek got before rains the second week of October
.

September 20

October 16, 7:00 p.m.
(Goldeneye across the Pond)

March 2019

For three consecutive nights I woke every two hours to feed two large fires to try and save young peach and plum blossoms from freezing. Temperatures dipped to nineteen degrees on the coldest night, but the flames kept temperatures in the flowering trees to near thirty. Fruit is starting to form, so maybe our vigil was effective. (Video below: March 5)

On January 25, 2018, twins were born, one of which was an ugly black-nosed lamb with mostly brown hair. Fast-forward thirteen months, we see this ugly brown lamb becoming the first wet nurse we’ve ever raised. On February 22, 2019, triplets were born, but one of them evidently imprinted on the ugly sheep with the black nose, and she attached to it. A second set of triplets was born a few days later on February 26. To this day, the “orphan” is growing strong and fast, having stimulated hormones in its adopted mother to make her produce milk.
The ewe is shown here rejecting one of her triplets. (March 26)

The white ewe gave birth to triplets, but (because the mother rejected it?) one of them "imprinted" on a nearby brown sheep and the two struck up a relationship. And as the newborn lamb tried to suckle, evidently some hormones kicked in, and the brown sheep began producing milk. All are healthy as of date.  (Video below: March 1)

Winter algae.

A bit of radiant heat in the greenhouse saved tomato plants.

All those lambs.  Yes, all those lambs.

This from the Syrian cookbook.

This, a foreleg meeting garlic.

And same foreleg a minute before an eight-hour
slow cook in the crockpot. The bone must slip from the muscle.