Posts Tagged ‘coyotes howling’
Middle October
You wouldn’t know by looking, but November is just a couple of weeks away. Terror movies, scary costumes, and campaign lawn signs will only intensify between now and then, but soon, it will all be behind us.
For much of my life, I have practiced the fine art of ignoring most of the crafty ways marketing whizzes attempt to grab my attention. When it comes to several house-sized monstrosities erected in and around River Falls with the name of a felonious candidate, I feel a significant dose of smugness in successfully averting my gaze to avoid looking at them every time I drive past.
Conversely, I take great pleasure in rereading the tiny little sign in one farmyard near our home that says simply, “HATE WILL NOT MAKE US GREAT.”
I see what I want to see.
I’m afraid that by the time November arrives, we won’t have any trees with leaves left in them. They are falling fast and furious now, even though some leaves are still pretty green.
I’m a little sad about how many of the leaves have just turned cardboard-brown before dropping to the ground.
One thing about the warm weather that we have enjoyed lately is having our bedroom window open to hear the hoots of our resident owls reverberating through the forest.
We’ve also noticed some instances where wailing sirens from emergency vehicles in the distance have triggered packs of coyotes to respond in kind.
I think the dwindling foliage is leading to sounds carrying further.
It sounds like fall. I think I can even hear the frost forming on the pumpkins.
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Grand Opening
One of the first projects we did shortly after we arrived here ten years ago had to do with the rusted old barbed wire fence along our northern property border. We climbed into the thick bramble of thorny trees and pulled up much of the old barbed wire, replacing it with a new nylon fence rope.
Our thinking at the time was that we might have horses coming near the fences along the property borders and barbed wire is inappropriate for horses. What we didn’t realize at the time was that the area we picked to start working was the least likely to ever have horse traffic near it.
For ten years since, much of that area has been ignored and allowed to grow unconstrained. That resulted in a wild thicket of grape vines snarled around the sharp thorns of wild plum trees. It was easy to cut vines and trees down but an incredibly frustrating battle to pull the branches apart and then shove them into a new tangle parallel to the fence line.
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We decided to leave a couple of nice-looking maple trees alone, even though they look like they are right in the middle of the pathway. They are easy enough to walk around and will be a nice asset as they grow to maturity in the years to come.
We ended up with a pleasing alleyway between the pine trees and the wall of tangled branches along the property line. My goal, as always along this stretch of our northern border from the road up to the shop garage, is to continually trim back new growth until that thicket begins to look like a giant hedge delineating our property line.
It was the grand opening of a pathway that took us ten years to finally accomplish.
I stacked a few rocks on the old pine stump we had saved for just that purpose. It was an expression of our interest in opening up this portion of trail for more regular visits.
Like every other new trail we have opened up, this one is suddenly our new favorite and beckons us to return for a stroll each time we venture outside.
We walked it with flashlights in the dark last night upon our return from rolling the trash bin down the end of the driveway by the road. Shortly after we had gotten back inside the house, one of the largest and loudest outbursts of coyote howling started up. We stepped outside to listen and I got the sense it was coming from two different directions.
I whistled my most shrill loud whistle and their yelping stopped. Cyndie walked to the barn and turned on all the outside lights.
My guess is they were all excited about our new trail and were feeling in a celebratory mood over it. It gives me pleasure to know they won’t be getting any chicken dinners from us. Not for a while, anyway. One never knows when the urge to have free-ranging chickens again will override our frustrations over losing so many of them to predators.
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Relative Something 