Mule Deer with Llama Ears

Cattle ID

Cowboy V often manages his cattle by walking and watching.

The cattle operator, Cowboy V, brought another load of cattle to the Dipper Ranch on Wednesday.  For once, I was around.  The sky was overcast and sometimes sprinkling, but unloading the cattle was easier than I expected, and certainly easier than rounding them up.  I didn't help much, but I did ask lots of questions and took photos.

Denning

Wet, cold and dark induce dreamy illusions as a storm envelopes Long Ridge.

Denning - a personal definition - reluctance to leave the lair; the time of year when wet, dark and cold conditions cause a shift towards low metabolic activities:  reading, writing, searching for thermal underwear and down comforter, mending, walnut-cracking while watching movies, sleeping, thinking about but not actually waterproofing boots, dreaming of a functional woodstove, baking, and more reading this time with a cat sitting in lap.


The season of glorious clouds has been superseded by the wet season with increasing periods of cold and darkness.  Morningside, I argue with myself in the hot shower, "See you are waterproof.  Get going!"  Instead, I find lion faces in the fake marble patterns of the cheap shower walls and the daylight just gets shorter.

Get Ready

Rain and snow greeted newly arrived cattle in December 2009

Cowboy V called today and he'll start trucking in cattle soon.  This weekend, rain or shine, we'll be closing gates.  I tend to leave the interior gates open after all the cattle are gone by midsummer, so the deer and I can frolic from one pasture to the next without pause.  Actually, the deer just stot over or flex under the wire fences, but they'll detour through an open gate if handy, and by staggering which gates are open, I guide the deer's sharp hooves along gentle slopes rather than carving up the steep ravines.

Seasonal Attention Disorder

Sunset 11-05-10
One day too early for the walnut harvest party

The clouds are back.  I say that every year, don't I?  After the summer dry season, the tinted, shape-shifting clouds highlight the huge space looming above us, and then by association, the curved earth we scratch upon.

Pretty sunrises start the day and spectacular sunsets inspire evening thoughts.

Vote for 2010 Estate Walnut Label

Every year, we harvest English walnuts from the two grand trees behind the barn.  I give many of the walnuts away under the label of Happy Snake Ranch Walnuts.  Last year, we made a party out of it with guests, sunsetting, an appearance by the Deer Whisperer, and I boldly claimed that these are Estate Walnuts.

With the arrival of the 2010 storms, the walnuts are dropping and it is time to decide on the snake to be featured on this year's label.

The 2010 candidates are:

Warrior Celebrates End of Thistle Season

Impalement - another hazard of thistles.
I found this honey bee speared on a yellow starthistle spine while weeding in August 2009.

Hooray, it's the end of the thistle season.  I welcome the brief respite from digging, pulling and scowling at thistles.  Usually the first few rains of the wet season are modest, but today's storm was big enough to pound into the ground any seedheads still clinging to the brown thistle stems.  That's when I concede the battle for another year.  At least until the thistle seedlings start germinating in about six weeks.

It was a long and unusually cool summer and those thistles just kept blooming.  Long after the cattle left the Dipper Ranch and travelled on to the brussel sprout fields, the stockyard, or wherever their bovine destiny took them, the yellow starthistle plants kept putting out more dang-blasted, spiny blooms.

Travels with Nightsnake

California nightsnake.  Ranger E has a calm way with snakes.  She's observed that individual snakes often have uniquely shaped spots.  With careful photodocumentation of their spots, I may be able to tell the difference between future nightsnakes.

This is the third fall season I have found a nightsnake on the Dipper Ranch.  In October 2007, I had just moved onto the ranch and didn't know what a nightsnake was. Fortunately, something seemed odd about the small, brown-spotted snake in the springbox in those first few weeks, so we walked the dripping net back to the house to take photos.  With frequent reference to our burgeoning natural history library, I eventually learned to tell the difference between the 4 local brown-spotted snakes:  gopher snake, rattlesnake, nightsnake and juvenile yellow-bellied racer.