Dinner and a show (The Wind in the Willows)

“Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wild World," said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or to me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all.”

Helen sent me the link below to a pizza eating groundhog today, which I absolutely loved.

https://twitter.com/abc7/status/1250492458686771200?s=11

The video reminded me of the menagerie of small mammals (and some that are not so small)  that creep, crawl and hop thru the grass in front of the porch of our cabin. Unlike some, I'm looking at you Justin, we are going to follow the Federal and Provincial guidelines about unnecessary travel. Which means we will miss spring at the cabin, and I suspect the little critters will miss the bird feeders. However since everyone in our circle has been spared the virus, knock on wood, we have nothing to complain about. 

Okay the moose and bear were photographed from the cabin 

bur across the slough. Which is just as well. 

“He saw clearly how plain and simple - how narrow, even - it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”

Meet the neighbours: Red Squirrels

One of the longest tenured of our mammalian neighbours is the Red Squirrel. It is probably the one I am most familar with as well, having encountered them in both the country and occassionally in the city since I moved west, They had been replaced by the larger Eastern Grey Squirrel in Sounthern Ontario where I grew up. In our Edmonton apartment one claimed the spruce tree next to the window of our third floor apartment and chattered at us when we entered the room. In one archaeological field camp one would drop a spruce cone 30 or more feet unto the corrugated plastic roof of the outhouse, which sounds like a gunshot in the narrow space. At the cabin the one moved in one year and began to build a nest at the peak of the   roof in the kitchen. We have also had a number of encounters with them in the outhouse which started when they attempted to fill it with mushrooms, spruce cones being in short supply in the aspen parklands. They also go after the young birds and we suspect they are responsible for the disappearance of the robin nestlings from the ledge behind the cabin. One also likes to come up on the porch in the early morning and proclaim its mastery of the territory. They also have the occasional dustup with somewhat mystified neighbours unaware of their status. 

"With an host of furious fancies

Whereof I am commander,

With a burning spear and a horse of air,

To the wilderness I wander. 

By a knight of ghosts and shadows, 

I summoned am to a tourney 

Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end: 

Methinks it is no journey.? "

from Tom O’Bedlam

Coming thru.

Excuse me, do you know who I am?

I am bigger then I look you know.

Okay the sneak attack.

Attack from the rear, he suspects nothing!

My rock.

I got a new squirrel proof feeder for Father's Day (the chipmunk likes it as well)

"There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,

A quiet house, some green and modest acres

A little way from every troubling town,

A little way from factories, schools, laments."

from A Dream of Trees

by Mary Oliver

   We got to the cabin Monday. About five trees were down on the lane, so we had to get my brother-in-law to come by with his chainsaw. Had mice in the cabin for the first time. So lots of laundry to do, they picked my sock/underwear drawer for their nest. It looks like they all suicided in the bucket under the bathroom sink. About 4 or 5 but it was a pretty disgusting mess so I did not look too close. 

   A squirrel also started a nest inside by the kitchen door but he moved out when we got here, I don't think he was there long but we need a new pest proof door. My wife is duking it out with another squirrel in the outhouse, I may sprinkle some black pepper to drive it out of there, that normally works. 

   Another first, we have tent caterpillars in large numbers. Not close to the cabin yet but the trees around the slough are grey. We do have some nice orioles around the cabin, also coyotes yipping at night but I can no longer hear them. I can hear the grouse that are really drumming in the evening. 

   The beaver cannot chatter at me from the trees like the displaced Red Squirrels, but in the evening they circle in the slough below the cabin and slap their tails on the water to mock me.

(Week 1)

Hit the road Jack, and don't you come back, no more, no more..,

"He took then to waiting

till the night smoke rose from the boil of the sunset

But the moon carved unknown totems

out of the lakeshore

owls in the beardusky woods derided him

moosehorned cedars circled his swamps and tossed

their antlers up to the stars

Then he knew though the mountain slept, the winds

were shaping its peak to an arrowhead

poised

But by now he could only

bar himself in and wait

for the great flint to come singing into his heart"

from Bushed

by Earle Birney

I mentioned we went to the park with the dogs last week.

Shaun, Nina, and Whateley not only saw the ducks but

they made a new friend.

"If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, 

it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, 

and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. "

George Eliot

"Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"

from Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branchess

by Mary Oliver

These shots of the Red Squirrel are from last year.

at the cabin. I am still trying for good photos from 

this year.

"Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches 

of other lives --

tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, 

hanging 

from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, 

feel like?"

from Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branchess

by Mary Oliver

"Let us hope

it will always be like this

each of us going on

in our inexplicable ways

building a universe."

                   Song of the Builders

                             Mary Oliver

On a trip to Edmonton in the early fall I was able to watch a small red squirrel interact with the magpies. He lives in the spruce across from the window of the desk where I work but claims the entire area including the bushes in front of the window and the two trees down the slope. I first noticed him when he shot up the near tree a couple of times after a pair of magpies.  One flew to the top the other moved to a spot where he could not be easily reached.  The squirrel returned to the ground then crept closer it would disappear, then it's head would pop up here and there like a character in a Looney Tunes cartoon finally it rushed up the second tree and zipped along a branch to reach the magpie who finally gave up and flew off.

I am familiar with the territorial behavior of red squirrels, although they are rare in the city now having been replaced by black squirrels.  Many years ago one moved into a spruce tree next to the window of our apartment's kitchen it would hang from the screen and chatter at us if we moved about in the room. This lasted until a neighbour chained a German Shepard to the tree hopefully it simply moved.

Another time we were in an archaeological field camp, the outhouse was off by itself in a grove of spruce with a red squirrel chattering at you the entire way. The outhouse had a corrugated plastic roof, once you were sitting there having a quiet moment the squirrel would launch a spruce cone from 20 to 30 feet up the tree the noise was incredible, like a rifle shot.  It also crept into our tent trailer at night and boogied under the kitchen sink, a great place to store cones. A handful of black pepper ended that but the outhouse remained an experience.

I returned to Edmonton to work this winter and the squirrel magpie drama continued.  This time there had been several enormous snowfalls the magpie would land on a tree next to the next the spruce the squirrel would attack.  Since the layers of snow where so deep he often tunneled under neath, the squirrel used a different strategy.  It launched itself from the tree, sometimes from 5 or 6 feet up trying to intersect the magpie in the tree or in the air, upon missing it would break thru the crust and disappear. Twice I saw the magpie struggle into the air and then saw something fall away and the squirrel reappear.  I do not know whom latched onto to who but the magpie only made it a few inches into the air. The number of magpies increased the snow continued and the "game" ended. 

But the great and flashing magpie
He flies as artists might.

A magpie in Picardy
Told me secret things—
Of the music in white feathers,
And the sunlight that sings
And dances in deep shadows—
He told me with his wings.

                                                    Magpies in Picardy

                                                                                 T.P. Cameron Wilson

The rest of this poem and more information on

it's author can be found at Tim Kendall's blog on war poets.