a walk in the woods

After all of the birding excitement on Saturday, I decided to go for a walk Sunday morning to see if I could find any more unusual birds lurking around. With the leaves off the trees, our woods seems much more open and the way things are laid out I have practically no chance of getting lost for any length of time. There's the road to the west, swamp to the south and east, and creek to the north. If my feet get wet or meet road, it's time to turn around.

I started out in the tamaracks between the new house and the creek; some day I hope to have a trail from the back door to the creek. But I didn't see much there, except for fallen tamarack needles, so I went back through the yard up the driveway and started exploring some of the land south of the pond. This part of the land used to be a gravel pit; I don't know exactly when they stopped digging, but the pit shows up in a 1939 aerial photo. There are some mature trees in the pit area, so I'm guessing no gravel has been dug for at least thirty years. But whatever machinery was used to dig gravel left a nice ridge which is still a clear trail. It is one of my favorite places to walk on our land, but one I hardly ever get to. Imagine living on 40 acres and having my experience on mostly fifteen at the most. Pathetic, isn't it.

gravel pit trail
I found my way from the gravel pit ridge (which, if I ever won the lottery or procured my own backhoe I would proceed to make into a lakeshore, connecting with my existing pond) into the woods south of the house, eventually meeting up with the old barbed wire that roughly marks the south property line. From there it was an easy walk to the old railroad grade, which I have kept clear as a trail, and back to the house.

The only birds I saw were the three or so ruffed grouse I flushed during my ramblings. I actually had six flushes, but the first three may have been the same bird flushed three times. I later saw three grouse flush from the same area, so there are at least three grouse on our property.

I think the best place for birding on my land is right by the house. Chickadees were incredibly active Sunday; I sat on an old tree stump and watched them flit about the feeder for a long time. There were also goldfinches, red breasted and white breasted nuthatches, and an occasional downy or hairy woodpecker. I'm still hoping to see the gray jay or the black backed woodpecker again, just to prove I'm not crazy. Wait, I think it's too late for that. :)

evening light and dinner

I just had to run out and take this photo as the evening light lingered across the swamp. And as I was doing so I thought "Damn! I'm lucky to be able to live here."
I'm lucky to enjoy some pretty good meals too. Today The Hermit had some lumber shopping to do at Menards in Duluth, and he called me on the way home to say he had picked up some steaks for dinner. Inch thick ribeyes. Mmmmm... We're getting a quarter of local grass-fed beef in a month, but our craving for steak could not wait.

So I thought about a side dish. Rice...done that last night. Potatoes...had them for breakfast. It was then I noticed the bin of rutabagas and the few parsnips, already starting to shrivel. I guess I have been suffering from Rutabagaphobia: the fear of cooking a vegetable with which you have no experience. I thought it would taste so bad I could not eat it, or that if I could eat it of course the kids would not. What was I thinking?


I went online and found, among the usual bland recipes for mashed, pureed rutabaga, one for rutabaga with caramelized onions. If I'm going to go down, culinarily speaking, at least I'm going to go down fighting. So in the above picture, lower left you see a skillet of onions (from the garden) on their way to caramelization, and, upper right, a pot of boiling rutabagas, along with the parsnips.

To make a long story short, I was impressed. I liked the earthy, nutty flavor the rutabagas had to offer, and they were wonderful along with the onions, salt, pepper, lots of butter, and a pinch of nutmeg and curry.

It's a good thing, because I have a whole bin of rutabagas to go, including the gigantic one I described earlier.

Oh yeah, if the steak and rutabagas weren't enough, we had sauteed mushrooms and onions, and fresh Swedish rye bread from the bread machine. I'm on a heritage kick lately; Swedish bread, Swedish music, I guess even rutabagas are a Swedish thing. Anyway, God natt.

Unusual birds

In the space of half an hour this afternoon, I have been taunted by not one but two birds that I don't normally see here. I was trying to make a quick pop-it-in-the-oven lunch for the kids, so I was back and forth between the cookshed and the house, when I saw the first one. Actually I heard it first, a strange call that almost sounded like one of our sheep, but higher pitched. The blue jays were going crazy. Then as I stood on the step I saw it come swooping down, something a bit larger than a blue jay with white below and steel gray above, and a very definite black "mask" on the head. I had time to watch its irregular flight as it swooped down to the ground then perched in a bare maple tree, but of course by the time I grabbed the binoculars and Sibley's it was long gone. At first I was thinking small hawk, but none of the usual suspects (sharp-shinned, merlin) matched the distinctive markings I was able to see. Then I thought shrike, but again the picture in the book was definitely not what I saw. I'm thinking it might be a gray jay! I have seen them in far northern Minnesota, and they are known for hanging around camps and cabins looking for food. I'll leave some food scraps out and hope it comes back.

The second bird came when my awareness was still heightened from the first. However, I had put the binoculars down so again it flew away before I got a good look. I did see a very definite black back with white breast, and it was acting very woodpecker-like, so I'm calling it...a black-backed woodpecker. Again, this is a northern species, uncommon in this area, but I have seen one here before a few years ago.

It is partly sunny here today, a bit on the cold, windy side but it's nice to see the sun. I think I'll go out to the cook shed and bottle my beer while listening to two new CD's that arrived today: another Vasen (Swedish group), and Yonder Mountain String Band live. Then maybe play some music of my own; Robin from Dharma Bums has got me thinking about Kate Wolf again.

progress

This is what three men can accomplish in eight hours, for less than the cost of us buying all the necessary equipment and doing it ourselves. That is to say, we had a local crew come out and do the base of the roof. Hiring out a job makes for good neighbors. By tomorrow, a good portion of the roof should be under cover of 1x6 inch tongue and groove boards.

As I was looking at the end results, I noticed a strange illusion. Previously, when I had looked at the floor layout under open sky, or even under roof rafters under open sky, the interior space seemed...small. But with less than half the roof covered up, the interior of the house suddenly seemed much bigger. I guess if you view something against an infinite sky, of course it will appear to be small, but if you define the space and give it ample height, as our house design does, it suddenly grows on you!

I am so anxious to have this all closed in. I will even do drywall myself, just to be in.

snow buntings

photo from Wikipedia

The snow buntings are back for the winter. A bird has to be really far Northern Hemisphere if it considers Minnesota to be its wintering grounds. I don't know if it is called Snow Bunting because it follows the snow, or because the adults, especially the males, in winter are the nearest thing to a pure white bird that can be found anywhere. They are like the horned lark in habit, hanging around roadsides and scattering in flight like snowflakes whenever a car passes. I am told another species, Lapland Longspur, occurs in flocks with snow buntings, but I have never observed a flock long enough to identify one.

The owls are hooting. One of the "luxuries" of living here is I get to go outdoors in the middle of the night at least once. I have heard barred owls calling to each other at all hours of the night in the last few days.

It was a sunny day, finally, and I got to spend some time outdoors at work, enjoying the sunlight. That must have energized me because after I got home from work I took Togo (the husky, the outdoor dog who deserves more blog photos than he gets) for a walk. I have not done that nearly enough lately, and he sure appreciated it. Come next week, I won't have that daylight after work.

All in all, not much to blog today, but then there is so much that goes unnoticed.

Deb's diet secrets--revealed

Remember on Friday I posted about how my jeans were suddenly fitting more loosely?

Simple explanation: They were a pair of The Hermit's jeans, which look very similar; I had mixed ours up sorting the laundry.

Which also explains why my jeans felt tighter Monday morning. At least now I know I didn't suddenly gain a few pounds over the weekend.

I think I'll just wear his pants from now on!

Oh well. I'm enjoying a laugh at my own expense. :)

The Larch, up close

Yesterday afternoon I remembered that I had promised someone closeups of tamarack needles. It was a good excuse to go exploring, but I only had to walk a few yards beyond my compost bin to find this tamarack that, unlike most of the others, had a very showy branch close to the ground.

I was only going to use one picture, but I think they both turned out well for being shot at 1/60 at F4. It was a bit cloudy at the time.

So I won't have to make a separate post, I'll say here that Calvin, Starflower and I saw both an immature and a mature bald eagle this morning on the way to work/school, both strategically positioned in trees near a road killed deer. Is this commute cool or what?

dog blog

Sally, left, is about nine months old. Hopi is three months. I rarely catch them together at this level of inactivity!

That used to be my blanket.

crystalline H2O

It barely got above freezing yesterday. Last night the temperature was in the teens.

I am so not ready for this!

Well, at least I have water in my pond, unlike some folks.

first wood stove fire

The kids and I are enjoying the first wood stove fire of the way-too-long heating season. The last fire will probably happen about the time the trees are budding out in late April or early May. But we don't want to think about that now. This evening the fire feels good; there's nothing like the radiant warmth of a real fire. Up until now we have been using the propane heater, but it just sends the heat straight up to the peak of the ceiling, not radiating it like the wood stove.

The Hermit is at duck hunting camp tonight, about sixty miles north of here. There have not been many ducks to be seen lately, but maybe something will show. It's more for the tradition, I'm not waiting for a duck to put in the roaster.

Oh, it's time for The Red Green Show. Gotta go. Maybe I'll even stay up for Monty Python at 11.

Foods you thought would never go together

It all started with a Lyle Lovett song...don't worry, explanation follows!

Last night we had one of The Hermit's specialties, fried fish (walleye, and no, it was not the "too-large" ones from the walleye ponds!). He essentially dips the cut up fillets in an egg wash and breads them with cracker crumbs, pan-frying them in oil. I made one of my specialties, oven fries, with potatoes from the garden, sliced and tossed in olive oil, and baked until just crisp. Much tastier and healthier than those bags of frozen French fries we until quite recently bought without question. We topped it off with two sliced tomatoes; we're still eating from the garden, although for every one we eat I throw probably two on the compost.

We were listening to the local independent public radio station, but after a while the music took a turn for the blues, not quite what a chilly Minnesota evening calls for. We weren't in the mood for any of the dozen or so CD's in the cook shed, so The Hermit pulled an old Lyle Lovett cassette tape from the several cassettes we had handy. It is one of my favorites of his; I'm not sure if it is his very first album, but it is definitely early Lyle. My favorite song from it is The Front Porch Song, which he cowrote with Robert Earl Keen Jr., another favorite musician. One line goes like this:

This old porch is just a steamin' greasy plate of enchiladas
With lots of cheese and onions, and guacamole salad...

Hmmm...guacamole...it's been a while...sounds good...

"That reminds me, I bought some avocadoes the other day," The Hermit said. "They were cheap at Chris' (grocery store). They should be somewhere in the refrigerator."

"I almost feel like making some guacamole. You think it would be good with fish?"

So I mashed and mixed avocado with picante sauce, and we tried it in place of tartar or cocktail sauce.

It was really good. So good, in fact, I think I'll make guacamole every time we have fried fish.

Who woulda thunk it? Do you have any unlikely combinations of foods you like?

just a few Friday night musings

I spent the day outdoors on a walleye pond--again. This one was more a shallow lake than a pond, a shallow lake more infested with Northern watermilfoil--the native milfoil--than any other I've seen. Even now in late fall, with cool water temperatures, it was still growing strong. Walleyes, however, were hardly anywhere to be seen: a few eight-inch yearlings, one fifteen inch fat and happy adult, and one puny, very dead fingerling. Lots of small bluegills, bullheads, and crappie. But that doesn't get a lake stocked with its quota of walleye fingerlings. I got my exercise pulling all ten trap nets out of the lake. It was a mediocre day to be outdoors; cloudy with temps in the upper thirties, and snow showers in the morning. But on the lake there was no wind, and riding in the front of the boat I was mesmerized by the mirrored reflections of almost bare trees and oaks still holding on to red leaves. I saw a bald eagle perched in a tree, just watching us motor on by.

When I arrived home late afternoon, I glanced out the window by the bird feeder just in time to notice a small hawk-like bird alight on a branch. I ran for my binoculars and my Sibley's field guide, knowing it had to be a Cooper's hawk, sharp-shinned hawk, or merlin from its size and markings. After observing its activity, with it occasionally swooping and going back to a perch with sharp wing beats, and reading about the usual habitats of the species, and deciding it was too small to be a Cooper's, I made the call of sharp-shinned hawk. It was beautiful to watch, but it made the chickadees anxious.

One very good observation of the day, as if an eagle and a sharp-shinned hawk aren't enough, is that I seem to have finally lost some weight, or at least inches, in the last week or two. I put on a pair of jeans that had had a slightly tight waistband before, and they were just out of the wash which usually means extra-tight. The waistband actually had an inch or two of room to spare! This is great news, since I have managed to gain nearly forty pounds in the last three years, during which time I have been extra-conscious about diet. I rarely eat sugars, have no unavoidable food cravings, and my appetite is rather small. My only weakness is beer, but everyone's gotta have an Achilles heel. :) My secret? I have not changed my eating habits except perhaps consuming more bread since I got my bread machine. Homemade, whole grain bread is a real treat. But I have been doing some Internet research into possible causes. I suspect thyroid issues; actually the other night when I thought I might have a fever I was taking my temperature and could not get the digital thermometer up to 97. I thought something was wrong with the thermometer so I gave it to Calvin, who promptly registered 98.8! I have started taking a couple of carefully chosen supplements (not miracle diet pills!). It's probably too early to declare cause and effect, but at least something positive is happening!

A crew is coming on Monday to start working on the roof of the new house. Maybe, just maybe, we'll be in there by the new year. It can't happen soon enough!

So that's what's happening in my corner of the world. I found my copy of Chet Raymo's The Soul of the Night, which had been missing for a few days under some household clutter, so maybe I'll go catch up to the rest of the bloggers at Whorled Leaves. I'd really love to get out an instrument and play a tune, but that may have to wait until morning.

autumn's last hurrah

tamarack gold

Growing up in the suburbs, I didn't know for a long time that tamaracks existed. I remember my dad getting all excited about "discovering" a tamarack bog in a city park just a mile or so from downtown Minneapolis, on one of his weekly bike rides. I went to college in the southern part of the state, beyond the tamarack's range in this state, and went on to graduate school in South Dakota, where trees are a rarity. ;) When we bought our land here, I was finally botanically aware enough to know that we had some tamaracks around, and from my job I had learned that their wood makes good, long lasting poles.

Still, it has taken a few years of living here, being in touch with the land on an everyday basis, to really know tamaracks. I mean, they are interesting trees; they are the only conifer that completely sheds its needles annually. They do this with quite a brilliant display of gold in the fall, that typically occurs about a week after all the other, deciduous trees have completely lost their leaves. They also turn a unique shade of green in the spring, as the new needles emerge, right about the time other trees are just starting to leaf out. And, there is some variation in tamarack stands; I know of one down on the corner three miles away that is still a light green in color, and last year had shreds of gold at least until December.

Our new house is right in front of a stand of mature tamaracks that extends north to the creek. However, this stand does not show the brightness of gold like some of the younger stands do.

Shine on. Lighten these last days of autumn.

more fall melancholy

It's been weird weather here; the winds last week blew all the leaves off the trees so it looks very gray and November-like, and now although it's been warm (40-50 degrees) at night, it's been gray and misty and dreary during the daytime hours.

I spent today working walleye ponds; that is, going to the small natural ponds where we stock walleye fry in the spring, hoping they will grow into six inch or so walleyes to stock into larger lakes in the fall. It's pretty much a hit-or-miss operation; it is essential that the ponds "winterkill" the winter before, their oxygen levels dropping enough to kill off all fish life in the pond, so the young walleye will not have any competitors for food. And this year seems to have been a bad year for walleye production; the fingerlings I saw were very small, not the fat and happy six inchers or more that we like to see.

Our harvest today was pretty dismal, less than fifty pounds, so we decided to pull the nets from the ponds, it was not worth it to keep them in. Of course we ran up against some second-guessing from my boss, but he was not out there walking a boat over mud flats because the water levels were so low.

We stocked what we got into a beautiful lake, one of many that Minnesota has to offer. The public access is located just yards from a small dam and outlet, and that is not the ideal situation to stock fish because they will likely be swept over the dam. So we went to a resort on the lake, deserted for the fall it seemed, and stocked the fish there where they would have a better chance. It was so quiet, no one around, no boats out on the water and the water dead calm. I looked up and down the lake and saw the mist meeting the water and the bare branches of the trees. All dreadful and lovely at the same time.

The fish I stocked today were most likely drops in a bucket. But being out today, being forced to be out, was priceless. Tomorrow I'll be outside, dipping muskies from a drainable pond, not quite the same experience. That's one of the benefits of my job: lots of time outside, and no two days are the same.

root vegetables

I finally did it!!! I grew a vegetable as big as my head!!! Or nearly so.

It was a lovely afternoon, sunny with very little wind, high in the fifties, so I spent some time harvesting the last of the root vegetables and planting garlic. I don't know what I am going to do with this giant rutabaga, or if it will taste good at all, but I can always feed it to the chickens. Besides rutabagas, I had carrots, a few parsnips (which is better than I've ever done with them), and Kennebec and Katahdin potatoes, both fairly productive white fleshed, yellow skinned taters. Here's the harvest:

The soil in the garden beds was delightfully cool and moist and earthy smelling. I still have some lettuce, Swiss chard and cilantro that survived the fifteen degree low temp this morning, and my experimental "winter greens" bed with spinach, kale, and lettuce.

There's something so melancholy about putting the garden to rest for the winter, but at the same time planting for next year. This is my second year doing it here, so it's almost a ritual. I was moving about as if in prayer, the sun hanging low in the southern sky and casting long shadows with its still radiant warmth.

Now...anyone have any good rutabaga recipes? :)

By the way...the garden trowel, visible in the picture of the rutabaga, I made in my seventh grade obligatory metal shop class. Still useful, and I did end up getting an "A" in the class!

weary Friday night

I just spent an evening doing what I do not normally do, watching a DVD movie with the kids. Normally I don't have the patience to sit thru a whole movie, but with the weather, snow flurries and high winds and all that, and me having to do chores in that after working all day, because The Hermit has had a work obligation all this last week that has kept him away from here, and this morning I was going to drop S and C off at school and there was a bomb threat so I had to bring them to where the buses were waiting behind the school, then listen to the radio for updates...of course it turned out to be a hoax but you never know, and I think the school handled it well.

Anyway, it's been a stressful day, and I hate wind and cold, especially in mid October! and The Hermit called, he should be home tomorrow early afternoon. So I polled the kids, they thought Tombstone pepperoni pizza was okay for dinner, who was I to complain. After dinner I put on...The Big Lebowski. Consensus of two out of three kids, and I was in the mood. Cuss words be damned, the kids can read the whole story better than I can.

Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you.

I'm just trying to break even tonight. It gets cold, and quiet, and sometimes I wake up praying it stays just cold and quiet.

I could not do this alone, for any length of time.

Pupdate- Sally, The Great Protector

It's hard to find foot space in this bed...

snow on the garden

well, it is kind of pretty...

Snow on Bright Lights Swiss chard. A unique combination.

my young spinach. Luckily it can take this kind of thing.

Just another fall morning

This is what can happen in October in Minnesota.

It won't stay long, (I hope). It's supposed to warm up again by the weekend.

I'm feeling a little under the weather today so I'm taking the day off from work. It's a good day to take a nap with a chicken soup in the slow cooker.

kids on the rocks

This is the kind of scene that can and should induce heart palpitations in parents.

That said, they had a good time, and no one was injured.

This is at Robinson Park in the town of Sandstone, MN, on the banks of the Kettle River. There is a wondrous pile of sandstone slabs, striking terror into the hearts of many a parent, but nevertheless available for climbing. My kids, well, if there's danger, they'll go for it.

This used to be a real quarry, for the sandstone that lines the banks of the river and that gives the town its name. After the mid-20th century, apparently it became much more cost-effective to build out of cement block, never mind that sandstone buildings last forever and have a timeless quality about them. But the quarrying couldn't have gone on forever either. And so it goes.

Anyway, this park is a wonderful, out of the way place to have lunch and take a walk.