Tag: Wildlife
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Learning to Live: Sweet Corn and Raccoons
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. ~ Henry David Thoreau I’ve never successfully grown sweet corn at…
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Garter Snake in the Snow in Summer
That was one jumbo garter snake, friends! Even longer than the timber rattlesnake I witnessed a couple of weeks ago in a friends barn, though falling short in girth, rattles, and venom. Though this Common Garter Snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) was docile and quickly retreated into a crevice in the stone wall, it’s a common misconception…
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American Mink
I few evenings ago I remembered that I’d left my iPhone on the runabout, so I headed down to the waterfront before dinner to grab it. As I stepped out onto the dock, I noticed an energetic mink playing around on the rocks. I froze. Would he vanish if he saw me? He continued…
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Timber Rattlesnake? Massasauga Rattlesnake?
Have you ever ever heard of an Eastern massasauga rattlesnake? Or a Sistrurus catenatus? Me either. Until recently. I’ve just come across notes that I scribbled almost three years ago on May 15, 2009 after seeing a large, unfamiliar snake behind the carriage barn. I tried to identify the exotic serpent but never solved the…
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Hawk Attacks Dove
Last Sunday my bride and I settled in for a post-lunch-tea-and-snooze in the parlor. The previous week’s unseasonably temperate spring-going-on-summer weather had yielded to cold and rain, so we weren’t feeling too guilty about playing hooky. No gardening or tidying up the waterfront for spring boating. No orchard pruning or apple tree grafting for us.…
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Fox & Squirrel
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8vmPSvUNps] When I was in middle school my parents moved our family from a circa 1876 manse in Wadhams that they’d restored gradually over a decade, to a new home tucked into a tree-lined meadow near Lake Champlain. Formerly part of the Higginson farm, the homeowners association comprised a little over a half dozen camps…
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Make Way for Ducklings
As a child, one of my favorite picture books was Make Way for Ducklings, by Robert McCloskey. Really… Okay, am I giving away too much? Probably. That’s the way of the storyteller! There was something about those illustrations — simple unselfconscious line drawings halfway between representational sketches and cartoons — that captivated me, that compelled…
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Tasha, Tennis and Wildlife
Tucked into a meadow surrounded by forest, the tennis court was starting to show a quarter century of soggy springs and icy winters. The net drooped, but we decided not to tighten it and risk breaking the rotten netting. Besides the droop better accommodated our rusty tennis skills. The twelve foot tall fence around the…