07 March 2010

Birds and Meadow Voles

(Breakfast for the Intrepid Mayor of Refuge Farm)

I am down at the farm this morning. The time here is precious- never enough of it. There are affairs that must be dealt with back in the capital, trifling ones, but necessary.
 
The light is just coming up after a velvet night with a profusion of hard white stars in a wild profusion away form the light pollution of the urban sprawl.
 
It is still cold, but the brightness of the morning holds a softer promise.
 
Heckle the black-and-white cat was poised at the back door when I opened it, mewling for me. She has become almost passionate for me, appearing from the woods when I crush in over the gravel drive in the Bluesmobile.
 
Getting the dried food out is the first ritual, raising the doors on the garage to gain access to the little studio-cum-office that fronts the upper pasture. That is where the food-bin is located, and where I had established an automatic feeder and the bin. It is a nice little space. I will have to do something decent with it; it is finished, has two handsome ceiling fans and soft morning light it could be a place to work and listen to music without rousing those still asleep in the little house.
  
As a suburban and city kid growing up, I have had an indifferent relation with nature. I have back-packed the length of Isle Royale, gem of Lake Superior, hiked the Uintas Mountains of Utah and skied downhill and cross-country in Michigan growing up. But those winter sports whose secrets are locked away under the white blanket of snow.
 
Since the Navy, it has been mostly big things of steel and ugly industrial buildings and little plots of grass-covered earth in a variety of suburbs.
 
There were moments, though, like the Jungle survival school in the fecund hills on the sprawling naval reservation at Subic Bay, or running in fear of the SERE Trainers through the dry brush at Warner Springs in San Diego County. But those moments were by far the exception, and mostly me and nature have agreed to go our own way.
 
The moving life did not give much continuity for gardens, and then after the big melt-down, the apartment life restricted my green thumb to the four large plants that obscure the picture window in the dining nook of Tunnel Eight.
 
A friend wrote me about her aerie on a hill in the west. She calls the airborne fauna the LBB’s- “Little Brown Birds.” She is quite an authority. She has always been a birder and had a federal license, when she lived in Maryland years ago to aid injured wildlife.
 
Here at the farm we have ravens and hawks, and if there is anything smaller I have not seen them. She puts out food for her winged friends in the morning, and says she attracts a chorus of “California Quail, Towhees and a few Mourning Doves, which come at dusk after The Cooper's Hawk, Red Tailed Hawk, and Kestrel have gone to bed.”
 
She gets the occasional White Crowned Sparrow, too, which is common in the arctic, but apparently hers have better sense.
 
She has thistle seed and black oil seed for the Finches and sugar water for the Hummingbirds, and I have seen that a previous owner had the same arrangement here on the farm. The rest of the birds out west are ground feeders, and my friend has box gardens for her cutting flowers and herbs.
 
She puts some of the feed for the Quails between the box and a hedge to protect them while they dine.
 
She doesn’t put out ground food as a rule, due to the rats. My friend is normally gentle, but she is quite ruthless in prosecuting the rodents. They are undermining the bank on which her house sits with their persistent tunneling.
 
Of course my indifference to nature has all changed with acquisition of the farm, and that caused my friends note to resonate. Heckle the black and white cat is the mayor of the place, and she rules with authority.
 
There are all sorts of critters here- aerial and terrestrial. The deer come in the late afternoon in the lowering light, and sometimes cruise by in the dawn's early light. There are gophers and raccoons, and the dogs down the road are quite frantic about them. I am certain I have seen a vixen, and a myriad of little peskey ones that burrow or forage.
 
The rodents are why Heckle is here, since this was a place for horses, and that meant great feeding for the rodents. She was mewling last night and I stepped out on the porch under the glow of the stars and the sailing quarter moon and the bluish-white light of the mercury vapor light.
 
Heckle had stopped calling for me, and I saw why. She had a meadow vole in her mouth, apparently as an offering to the only human who has ever been so profligate as to offer her tuna.
 
The field mouse was still alive, I was surprised to find, clasped in heckle needle-sharp teeth. The little brown critters have burrows out by the garden in the front yard, and I traced their course when I walked the property in the late afternoon light.
 
Like my friend, I am basically a gentle person though resolute. When the vole scampered off I saw that Heckle was toying with it. I am opposed to the proliferation of burrows, though, and was confronted with the choice of enabling nature, red in tooth and claw, or granting a reprieve to the mouse.
 
I stepped between them and the little animal disappeared over the porch. Heckle had all night to hunt.
 
I have a little wood-stove in the living room with a glass window on the front that would lend quite a cheery note of warm red light while listening to the satellite radio and curled up with a good book on the sofa.
 
But it is a little more effort than I want to expend just for myself, and the time here is too short to make a mess. Maybe next weekend, and have one decent fire before the Spring comes for real.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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