Category: Local

Spring Equinox 2016

Well, spring officially arrived at Sunday March 20 at 4:30 Universal Coordinated Time or 12:30 AM EDT for you locals. We modern humans insist on having a definite official signpost to clue us in to the change of the seasons hence the above date and time for the moment when day and night become equal lengths (apparently we can’t be bothered with looking out the window).

In reality the transition from winter to spring is rather amorphous with balmy warm days switching over to chilly late winter conditions teasing us with the promise of pleasant weather then firmly reminding us we’re not quite there yet. Sap begins flowing in the trees during warm days and receding when the night temperatures fall below freezing, a process that makes for good maple sugaring when these temperature fluctuations occur. Birds begin migrating and early spring flowers like crocuses and snowdrops begin poking out of the ground.

The recent record El Nino has made for a very weird winter here in northern New Hampshire. Temperatures were well above normal multiple times this past winter, pretty much annihilating the snow pack we usually have up here. Any snow that did fall was less than 6 inches (at least where I live) and quickly wilted away under rains that followed. While we may yet get an early spring surprise snow storm dumping a respectable amount of snow on us, it definitely won’t last. The ski areas are hurting and I have not seen any snow mobiles this winter even though the town hopefully graded the snow paths they usually zoom around on. The warm temperatures only made the snow trails vanish under rain.

While many animals have benefited from the low snow fall, such as deer, moose and turkeys, there are animals that depend on heavy snow cover and suffer when there is a lack of it. One of them is a small mammal called a vole , a small rodent similar to mice and often confused with them or with moles which are small insectivores, not rodents, adapted for burrowing underground. Voles do tunnel but do not have the specialized digging feet that moles have. Voles average between three to five inches in length and have very short life spans, usually less than a year, reproducing frequently to replenish their numbers. During the winter they depend on a good snow pack, so they can safely tunnel through it, hidden from predators. Dependent as they are for snow cover, this winter has likely been a disaster for them. Without snow to hide them, they are vulnerable to hungry owls, foxes, cats and other animals looking for a quick bite of protein

Last February I looked out an upstairs window after rain showers had eaten away at the meager snow and spotted the tunnels that a vole had dug.

VoleTrail_A

The meandering structure was clearly visible and seemed to lead to a circular area, visible at the left in the upper half of the picture. Curious I went out to look more closely at it.

VoleTrail_B

Judging from the bird seed scattered about the edges, this was a storage area for the vole. A grey squirrel was cheerfully helping himself to the bonanza when I came out with my camera. Since it was almost all sunflower seed, I knew the vole had been scavenging fallen seed from my birdfeeder and carefully storing it in a chamber he had dug out in the snow where he could feast in safety. Alas, the unseasonable warmth undid all his hard work.

While one can feel some sympathy for the voles, those of us who are gardeners can only sigh in relief. Voles can be very destructive of plants, bulbs and root crops such as potatoes. A neighbor who lived many years ago down the street had a cat who was a terrific mouser (and voler apparently). She didn’t realize how good he was until after he had passed on to Kitty Heaven. Suddenly she began to find her garden potatoes getting gnawed on by the little varmints. Like mice, these troublesome rodents can make the life of a gardener difficult as we try to plant crocus bulbs or seed potatoes. The market as usual offers a vast array of rodent removers that, judging from the reviews, are more effective in separating you from your money than getting rid of the little beasts. As usual the old fashioned methods are the best.

VolePatrol

Soup – Plain and Simple

The weather has been unusually mild here in northern New Hampshire this month with temperatures in the forties and fifties instead of the low thirties. One can certainly welcome Old Man Winter holding off for a brief spell, though now and then he has sent a reminder he is not far off. Last week, several nights had heavy fog coupled with temperatures just below freezing. This triggered the formation of what is known as hoarfrost. The following mornings as I went walking, I was treated to the sight of branches, leaves, berries and other objects suddenly having what appeared to look like crystal thorns growing out of them.

SumacBerriesWithHoarfrost
It was quite a striking sight, not one you see very often. They melted quickly once the sun rose high enough to shine on them. On some mornings puddles that had collected during the day froze on their surfaces overnight and since the ground underneath was not frozen, the water would drain away leaving a shell of ice supported only at its edges. For years (starting when I was a child) I called this ‘krickle ice’ because that’s the noise it would make when I put my foot slowly down on top of it. I have since found out this type of ice formation is called cat ice. Personally I like krickle ice better.

With the onset (or not) of cold weather, thoughts turn to the making of soup to warm you on chilly winter days. Both cook books and the Internet abound with countless recipes of varying complexity. I avoid those with a long list of ingredients. The making of soup is not rocket science and shouldn’t require a dictionary to decipher what some of the items are. Soup can be hot or cold. It can be clear or thick. Meat and/or vegetables can be used to create the broth. Every region on the globe has its own variation of this ancient comfort food which some evidence suggests dates back to the Stone Age.

The latest food fad is the making of bone broth soup which advocates are touting as a cure-all for what ails us. While much of the claims for bone broth and its health benefits are fairly over-blown, broth made from animal bones or vegetables does deliver a nutritious boost to any diet. Elderly people who have difficulty chewing, sick people who don’t feel much like eating or even just picky kids all benefit from this easy-to-make food.

I don’t waste a moment of my time with the prepared or condensed soups sold in the grocery store. Their heavy load of sodium and overcooked ingredients makes a pretty feeble excuse for soup. They simply can’t compare with home-made soup using fresh ingredients. The easiest method is to collect left-over beef, chicken or turkey bones after dinner. If you aren’t going to use them right away, you can put them in the freezer to keep until you are ready.

StockPotB

Then using a stock pot, toss in the bones, fill with water, bring to a boil then turn immediately down to a simmer and leave for about an hour. Pull out the bones, clean off any meat (which should drop right off) and put the meat back into the broth. Chop up whatever vegetables you desire (I use carrots, celery and onions and occasionally add a chopped zucchini or summer squash). For turkey and chicken soups I add parsley and thyme. You can use whatever herbs or spices you prefer. I often toss in pasta. Then cook for an additional twenty minutes or until the vegetables are tender. Add salt and pepper to taste in the last five minutes or so of cooking. That’s it!

The nice thing about soup made this way, is that you can add leftovers, like peas or beans or rice, which you don’t quite have enough of to make a meal with, so they don’t go to waste. You can also freeze the soup to thaw out as needed for a meal or a side dish. I like to use mason jars, filling them about two thirds full to allow for expansion so the jars won’t crack. Plastic freezer containers tend to get a greasy feel to them if you use them to store soup and then want to reuse them afterwards.

Once your soup is ready, add a few crackers and enjoy!

Northern Pass – The Saga Continues

Several headlines made the front pages of the local newspapers over the past few weeks. The first; Northern Pass plan suffers a setback, reported that State environmental officials said the application filed by Northern Pass with the state Site Evaluation Committee is incomplete because the developers can’t prove they have the necessary property rights for the project. The Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests challenged that Northern Pass lacks the property rights to apply for this permit

Interestingly The New England Power Generators Association, a trade group representing independent power plant generators in the region advanced essentially the same argument in a November 10th letter to the SEC. While one can assume the Association is concerned about potential competition, the Society is more concerned about protecting the natural beauty of New Hampshire and duly filed a lawsuit in the Coos County Superior Court seeking to block the path of the line through a conservation area the society owns in Clarksville, near the Canadian border. Both groups have evoked wails of protest from Northern Pass.

You would think after five or so years of being consistently opposed that the proponents of Northern Pass would finally start listening and give in to the demands to bury the proposed line. At most they have thrown locals a bone by offering to bury about seven and a half miles of the line (out of the 100+ miles it wants to cover). It is perfectly doable to completely bury the line and eliminate the eye-sore towers they actually want to erect. So what’s the source of the resistance by Eversource?

Burynorthernpass blog has been documenting the controversy over Northern Pass and it’s clear money is a major factor, namely shareholder money. At a public hearing in Franconia November 18th, when asked if they made more money going down Routes 116 and 112 rather than Interstate 93, the lack of response was very telling. They all but took the fifth. One has to shake their head in amazement at the poorly concealed contempt these people seem to have for locals.

Eversource has certainly shown itself to be a very poor team player with its customers. Demanding deposits from customers, some of whom are good payers as well as some of who have trouble making ends meet, without bothering to distinguish between the two, is the unmistakable hallmark of a huge bureaucratic corporation. And these people are telling us about the bright new energy future their brobdingnagian project would bring? Excuse us for being a bit skeptical.

While we are on the downslope of peak oil , it’s past time we started looking at another option we don’t hear mentioned much these days. I’m talking of course about conservation. When was the last time you as an individual or business looked at your electrical usage and asked how much electricity do you really and truly need to have? When I drive home from work late in the evening, the road I am on is across the river from a large number of businesses which have a vast array of brilliantly glowing lights, mostly from box stores like Lowes, Home Depot and Walmart as well as a number of car dealerships. How much electricity is this gobbling up? Do they really need to have so many lights on and so late in the evening? When I drive along side streets at night, I see many houses which look like they have every room in the place lit. Now of course Christmas is nearing and the obligatory outside decorative lights are popping up. While they do look very pretty, is it really necessary to have so many? I’ve seen some places lit up like Broadway.

What about the electrical appliances you use? Will it really break your arm to use a spoon to mix with rather than an electrical mixer? Try line drying your laundry instead of using the electric dryer. Use a rake instead of a leaf blower. How about those hair dryers? Strange as it may sound, your hair has the power to dry on its own. How about going to bed a little earlier and turning out the lights half an hour or an hour sooner? You’ll be surprised at how rested you feel the next morning. Last but not least, given that the majority of TV programs are mindless drek, how about turning off the television (and the power strip it’s attached to)? You really won’t be missing anything.

If everyone makes an effort to cut back on electrical usage, utility bills will be reduced and firms like Eversource will have far less leverage when trying to push Northern Pass down our throats.

Mousecapades

Now that the weather is chilling down, a common problem for people (myself included) is the fall invasion of mice seeking warm places to hang out for the winter. This year has seen a lot more activity due to the heavy fall of acorns and other mast goodies (as reported in one of my earlier posts) which has led to a population boom. Already I have caught six mice and can still hear activity inside the walls or up in the ceilings. As this is an old house, there are plenty of spaces for them to sneak into and it’s not easy to find them or get at them to seal them up to keep the little pests out.

The enormous fecundity of mice is an adaptation to the unhappy fact that they are number one on the menu for a surprising number of creatures: cats, foxes, coyotes, weasels, hawks, owls, skunks, snakes, crows, blue jays, even occasionally herons, and oddly enough, squirrels. The mouse has out of necessity adopted a secretive life-style and it is possible to have mice in your house and not realize it. Of course if the population is large, a fair amount of scuffling ensues when they are moving in and begin competing for living space. There are a variety of signs that mice are sharing living space with you and it’s a good idea to learn what they are, if you are determined to make your home as mouse free as possible.

What kind of mice can you expect to find? There are a variety of species, but here in New Hampshire, the mostly commonly found in houses are the house mouse, white footed mouse, and deer mouse .

All are cause for concern as they can carry a variety of diseases such as Hanta virus,  salmonellosis,  Lyme Disease and a variety of less common diseases. So far bubonic plague, which is in the western US, has not made its way to the east coast (knock on wood…). While the likelihood of contracting some of these illnesses is fairly low, the risk is always there and needs to be kept in mind when dealing with these pests.

Which naturally brings us to the matter of getting rid of them. The search for a better mousetrap seems unending. Best avoided are the poisoned baits for mice. While they may get rid of the mice, it’s the kind of gift that keeps on giving as any predator (including the neighborhood cat) are likely to ingest these toxins themselves if they happen to catch and eat these mice before the mouse has been killed by the poison. I did try using poison bait once a very long time ago, but found that the mice often rather than immediately eating the bait would take and store it in various places, such as my clothing drawers, which I definitely did not appreciate. Also there’s a good chance the little creatures will expire in an inconvenient place (which of course you will not be able to reach) and create an unpleasant reek.

Glue boards and traps catch the mice but do not kill them. That apparently is left up to you. If you don’t mind bludgeoning mice to death, be my guest but don’t expect me to invite you to any parties. If you are too chicken to kill them, the alternative to let them die of thirst and starvation and… yeah I thought so. I guess there is a way to get them off the strip without killing them but it’s a bit of an operation that’s stressful for both the mouse and you. So unless you enjoy being exposed to mouse excreta ejected by panicky mice (and the diseases that go along with them) glue strips are definitely out.

Some people like to use humane traps which catch the mouse but do not kill it. They then can be taken away and dropped in an area far from your house, leaving you feeling virtuous but the mouse utterly terrified as it is now in a strange place it does not recognize. Now then, if a giant idiot grabbed you and dumped you off in a strange place, what’s the first thing you would do? Well, yeah, you’d tried to get home! Which is likely what the mouse will do. If you haven’t taken it far enough away, the mouse will eventually make its way back to your place. If not, it will probably get snagged by a predator somewhere along the way. The odds that the mouse will just shrug its shoulders and contentedly take up residence where you place it are pretty low. Even if it were inclined to do so, in all probability a mouse already resides there, and as they are very territorial, it will quickly give the intruder the heave-ho.

This leaves the old fashioned snap trap. The wooden ones made by Victor are still available along with a wide variety of plastic snap traps and electronic traps which zap the rodents. I have tried a good number of them as I have arthritis and find it impossible to set the wooden ones. Success varies quite a bit with a number of traps failing to trigger when the mouse comes along and blithely eats the bait. The single electronic trap I tried, killed one and only one mouse and never again caught anything. The Victor quick kill trap seems to work as well as any of them, provided you position it so the mouse has to come directly at it and not from the side.

I’ve read the various reviews people have given of the different traps available and get the impression success depends as much on luck and the ability of the user to follow instructions, as it does the trap itself. Of course there is one mouse trap that rarely fails and has yet to be improved on. It’s the one that likes to sit in your lap and purr. The only drawback to this one is that it will occasionally present one of its catches to you, sometimes still in wriggling condition. Oh, well….

ComfyKittyIsComfy

Autumn Equinox

Wednesday September 23rd was the first official day of fall. For those of us in denial about summer ending, the calendar is something we would like to turn to the wall but unfortunately nature is not one to coddle us. The nights are distinctly cooler now. Although the first frosts usually show up here in northern New Hampshire about the first week or two of September, they have been delayed allowing us to play ‘let’s pretend’ a bit longer. But now the first frost advisories have been posted and the leaves are inexorably if slowly beginning to change color.

Last Wednesday I went for my morning walk, a regime I follow in order to put off joining the wheeled walker brigade for as long as possible. The sound of flapping caught my attention and saw what at first I took to be two crows diving around the tree branches, the first crow making an odd rattling noise that apparently indicates extreme terror. The reason became quickly apparent, for the second bird was not a crow at all but a hawk.

The crow did some pretty fancy aerial acrobatics, enough so he was able to elude his attacker by the skin of his beak, the hawk finally breaking off, apparently giving it up as a bad job. Though it flew off before I had a chance to memorize its markings, it was likely a broad-winged hawk. I don’t recall that it had any black bands on its tail so it was possibly a juvenile. Peterson’s Guide describes this species as being ‘crow-sized’, which sounds about right. Northern New Hampshire has a wide variety of hawk species both large and small, Coopers Hawk, Sharp-Shinned Hawk, Red Tailed Hawk, among others. This is likely a good year for them for as I mentioned in my previous post, this is a mast year with abundant acorns, pine cones and other fruit. I have already noticed an increase in the grey squirrel and chipmunk populations feasting on the nuts so there is plenty for the hawks to eat. Many of them will fly south for the winter but a few hardy souls will hang around and stick it out through the cold weather.

We are finally getting some badly needed rain.

LowBrook

The past few months have been unusually dry with local brooks starting to dry up and rivers being reduced to streams. But with the weather now beginning to shift, rain clouds have shown up with potentially heavy showers and the weather man has hinted we might even see some rain from Tropical Storm Joaquin by next week. Seems to be feast or famine these days.

Mushroom2015

Just prior to the rain showing up, white mushrooms starting popping up on my front lawn. I had watered the gardens with a sprinkler hose and as some of the moisture inevitably landed on the grass; the sudden bonanza of water likely triggered their appearance. I have no idea what species it is and as I am not a mushroom aficionado, have no interest in determining if it is edible or not. It is usually best to assume all are poisonous which for me takes the guesswork out of it. Those of you who are the adventurous types can make the determination. For anyone who samples one, natural selection will quickly weed out anyone who didn’t do their mushroom homework.

As for what the coming winter will be like, that depends on who you like to get your weather prognostications from. The Farmer’s Almanac is predicting another shivery winter for New England. However others are suggesting the El Nino currently building up over the Pacific may produce a milder winter than usual though everybody seems to hedging their bets. For those of you who like to watch for weather omens from Mother Nature and place great faith in the color pattern of woolly bears the disappointing truth is, that the coloration is genetically determined. I have seen varying patterns on different caterpillars in the same year so unless you want to assume some of them are trying to pull the wool over our eyes (sorry, couldn’t resist), you won’t find any certainty there either.

WooleyBear

For now, let’s just enjoy the fall weather, with the accompanying show to be put on throughout October by the trees changing color, along with birds flocking together in preparation for migration, and all do our best in trying to ignore those nasty little white flakes starting to wing their way out of the sky to whiten the mountaintops of northern New Hampshire.