The News from Kenabeek

Very, very strange weather. The six to eight inches of snow I walked through a week or so ago, trying to track the deer I’d seen earlier, are about gone, after a week of abnormally mild weather and RAIN. On that walk, I couldn’t track the deer, but did see lots of small animal tracks, including partridge, squirrels, and mice, and also a line of great big canine tracks – much as I’d like to believe it was a wolf, I suspect it was a big dog (because of the roundness of the paw prints). The snow was pristine close to the house, but once I got a couple of hundred feet away there were small animal tracks all over the lace. Partridge tracks look like a line of four-pointed stars; they walk on top of the snow. The mouse tracks look like tiny railway lines over the snow. And there was something small and short-legged, so its stomach scooped out the snow between its foot prints.

The other night I went out later than usual to bring in the bird feeders, and there was a flying squirrel on the feeder. They look a lot like a “normal” squirrel, but gray-brown, with huge black eyes. They are surprisingly tame, or else their first defence is immobility – it didn’t move when I turned on the light, or when I opened the door, or even when I walked up to the feeder and talked to it. Once when we had one on the feeder while one of my daughters was here, she actually went out and stroked it and it just sat there. I couldn’t tell if this one is light enough to sit on the bar without activating the closure mechanism, or if it knew the trick previous flying squirrels have used to get seeds from our theoretically squirrel-proof feeder. The theory is that when anything as heavy as a squirrel sits on the bar, it depresses the bar, which closes off the seeds. Well, our squirrel had figured out that if it rested only one foot on the bar, clinging to the metal body of the feeder with the other three feet, it could lift the foot on the bar, quickly grab a seed, and then put its foot back on the bar …. over and over again … We had suspected we had flying squirrels nesting in the insulation between our bedroom ceiling and the roof, since some light-footed creature could be heard scurrying around in there, right above our heads. We have thoroughly squirrel-proofed the house, so there is no way for them to get in, unless: a) They can flatten themselves out, paper-thin, to get through minute cracks; or, b) it’s squirrel magic which we humans can’t expect to understand. They are not destructive like red squirrels, so we really don’t mind sharing the house with them.

The ground had started to freeze before the last mild spell, but now it’s just sodden. Water is standing all over the place, in the fields and ditches, and of course at the low spot in our driveway. I cannot imagine what it will be like in the spring, unless we don’t get any snow at all this winter! Where we are, it’s very rocky, and one wet spring a few years back we had a fair-sized fir tree fall over because water from the snow melting had washed away the skimpy layer of dirt on rock which it was growing out of, its roots spreading horizontally instead of going down. Spring is always very wet and muddy when the snow melts and the ground thaws – spring 2007 should be a wonder in that area. I suspect that all the people who claim to believe that global warming will be good for Canada think only of palm trees in Toronto, and it hasn’t occurred to them that climate change may be like the past few months – we’ll never see the sun for weeks on end and we’ll be in mud up to our knees with trees falling over all around us!

Just to put the icing on the cake, or perhaps I should say to take the frosting off the decorations … Every Christmas we put up, among other things, a (fake) pine garland, decorated with gold-frosted cones and bunches of (fake) red berries, in swags across the balcony railings in front of the house. This year we had several inches of wet snow shortly after we put it up, which looked very attractive. Then it got warm, and the snow melted, and it rained and rained – and one day we had white berries, and blobs of red stuff on the melting snow below … I don’t’ know what the Chinese used to coat those styrofoam “berries”, but it softens when it gets wet. And sticks to everything else it comes in contact with, EXCEPT the berries, and smells funny, and I don’t mean funny ha-ha. We only found out about the sticky party after bringing the garland, all 20 feet of it, inside the house, of course!

So now our garland is back out there, decorated with(fake) poinsettia blossoms, also made in China, apparently plasticized fabric. I can’t wait to see what happens to them!