Phenology Report

Spring has been a stone-cold bitch. No one has sunk a truck. The ice remains hard but only a complete moron would put anything with a license plate out there now. Thus, the only thing at risk are ATVs, which don’t count. And rednecks of course. But they don’t count either.

The calendar says April and the days are longer and occasionally I feel a hint of heat, but nothing more. Two visiting cranes turned into three and are now one. I presume the two (presumably a mating pair) went back south a bit, or at least somewhere with better food. Or perhaps the “third wheel” ate the other two Donner Party style? Nature is harsh.

Is it spring? Like the cranes (wherever they are) I have my doubts.

It’s snowing hard and the wind is enough to blow the balls off a Bison. Every few days it warms a bit and everything starts to thaw and I get that feeling of rejuvenation and optimism that only spring can bring. But then, like hearing a politician discussing budgets, I realize I’m about to get shafted. Mother nature grins evilly and smacks me upside the head.

I’ve been lax with winter heat planning this year. We’ve got firewood but nobody wants to haul it. I’m tired of driving the whip and frakers made fuel cheap so we’ve been relying on the furnace. I wasn’t paying attention until the fuel ran out last night. It was 56 in the house. So, I hauled a few armloads, much less than I would with my carefully planned mechanized wood loading system; the one that’s so unpopular among the homestead workforce. I lit a fire in the stove. In April. First one in a while. We’ve gone soft. It was 61 in the house when I went to bed. The pipes won’t freeze and that’s enough for me.

Repeat cycles of thawing and then freezing created an interesting mosaic of overlapping mini glaciers in front of my garage. Every day I observe the pattern. Meltwater from warm moments flows over an area but then freezes solid in the next cycle of chill, only to be overtopped by the meltwater of the next cycle. The alternating crystalline structures in the ice could be cored and tell me the history of the last few weeks. It gives me cause to reflect on the bigger pattern of glacier advance and retreat that played such an enormous role in our geography. We are said to be in the Holocene; the new and extra special era of a certain species of clever monkeys. The ones who mastered agriculture and subsequently disappeared up their own ass signaling their moral superiority on social media. Is this truly climatically distinct from the Pleistocene, the period of not one but multiple “ice ages”? I have my doubts. Mile thick sheets of ice that kill every living thing in their core areas have often advanced and retreated. I assume they’re completely unaware of the smart monkeys chattering away on their networked hive mind. Did anyone tell the glaciers that the pattern of countless millennia was suddenly off the table? Did they get the memo? Is that not the lesson of the ice?

Then I trip and fall on my ass because ice is slippery.

The driveway thawed and the UPS truck clawed deep ruts in the mud. Then the mud froze. It remains as such today. Hard as concrete, impervious to the tonnage of my Dodge, jagged ridges lying in wait to rip a stray brake line from my wife’s low-slung hatchback. So, the hatchback remains immobile, waiting until things settle. Or I get the tractor running again and smooth the driveway. Which ‘aint gonna happen because it’s too cold to be dinking around with a tractor in this weather.

Two rabbits are dead. I notice this because I’m a demographic outlier. When I was young you would meet “old people”; survivors of the Great Depression. They had quirky habits, like saving bits of string or old cloth or buttons. To them, another depression always lurked on the fringes. I am not a child of the Great Depression but somehow a portion of that… let’s just say awareness… resides in me. It shows in many ways. One is small game hunting. Lots of red blooded American deplorables chase big game; deer and elk. It’s practically a religion here. But very few go after the smaller critters. I do.

I categorize wildlife into two basic groups; food and not food. If there’s something running around out there and it fits my definition of “food” then I pay careful attention. I watch its habitat and its proclivities and root for its success and fecundity. Alas, nature has variation and one part of that variation is that rabbits are not common on my homestead. It could be the cats. I blame the hawks and eagles. Other folks suggest it is the coyotes. (I know it’s not the coyotes.) Regardless, rabbits occur around here but they’re not common. In fact, I see more of them near my mowed lawn that I see in the woodlot or in the swamp.

This fall rabbits showed up. First one, then two (a breeding pair!), then three. (Rabbits all look alike so I wasn’t sure there were several until I saw them simultaneously.) They hung out under the bird feeder but only irregularly; disappearing weeks at a time. I would occasionally toss something beneath the feeder to attract them and also give them an unfair advantage against the other critters trying to make it through the winter. I didn’t see them often and almost never more than singly. If I hadn’t seen the three simultaneously it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to assume the count was one. I’ve been rooting for those little bastards. My hope was that at least one breeding pair would make it till spring and do what rabbits do best. Perhaps by fall I could be out there with my air rifle playing Elmer Fudd. Squirrels are too scrawny for my tastes. Rabbit sounds better. I think like I’m from the food sparse 1920’s instead of the time of other specters like ICBMs and Carter’s fucking cardigan.

Alas, one rabbit met its maker near the woodshed. Likely a cat did it in. Score one for the theory that the cats are the issue. The receding snow gave the hint, like a frozen mammoth coming to light in the tundra. Yesterday I found another one; or rather the telltale bits of fur. It too was visible only because some snow had melted and it was temporarily partially visible. It was just a fleeting glimpse. It is snowing now and it’s already hidden again. Last night I saw one rabbit still scampering about. I hope it has friends because asexual reproduction isn’t a rabbit specialty.

Lesson learned. The cats are better hunters than I’d guessed.

Tonight, I’ll add the idea of frozen rabbit pelts locked in the ice to my observations of the mini glaciers near the garage. I picture the rabbit fur, hidden for a season, only to be seen for a day, and then lost again for weeks or days as something like a Viking artifact in Greenland or a mammoth’s skull in Alaska. When winter’s grip finally loosens I’ll scoop the mess up and toss it into the woods. In the meantime, I think of Al Gore’s hyperventilation of a decade past and laugh at it all.

And I’ll probably fall on the ice because ice is slippery.