Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Something to squawk about

Up in Vermont for Easter and the week following. Our young gander is the self appointed watch dog of our goose bunch. He squawks at least one time during the night and then off and on during the morning -- when someone's humping nearby or when the Canada Geese pair, patiently waiting for our pond to thaw, flies in for a visit. The wild and domesticated geese are getting along very nicely this year. We'll see if that changes once eggs are laid on goose island and the air becomes more territorial and North Korean. 

It's 28 degrees this morning. The last 2 dawns have provided a voila of newly fallen snow. So weird to have it dusting the frozen ruts of mud season on the roads. Hiked to the back of our property on Easter to discover that someone has tapped a whole grove of maples that we thought were on our land. Went down to the town clerk to get to the bottom of the controversy, but some lands have only been spottily surveyed. There's supposed to be the twisted remnants of an old barbed wire fence that went right along the border, but it's still below the frozen snow. More shall be revealed. It might have made it easier to take if they either had tapped them the old fashioned way with galvanized taps and buckets or that they had one new tap per tree. These tappers put multiple taps - popular, but not really good for the trees - connected by strands of colored plastic tubing which makes the backwoods look like a triage unit. Ugh.

Heard my first fox call the other night - the first that I was aware of, that is. Maybe that's what the young gander was squawking at. The howl - no it didn't sound like a howl, not in a wolf or coyote sense. It was so distinct, other worldly, spooky and wonderful, very much a creature of the night laying claim to its private part of the air, calling "I am here" in wildness. Cool.



It's a few hours later.  Been sleuthing up in the woods.  Went back the first time and right when the trail hit the shade of the woods it turned to a sheet of ice and my feet flipped out forward from beneath me and I slammed down on my back and elbow and head.  Resilience, thy name is body.  Thanks.  I skedaddled back down to the house for crampons and as I did I thought of my mom going ass over teakettle and cracking her pelvis.  She's just a twig.  A resilient twig in her own right - and she ignored the pain for about a week - but then had to go in and get patched up.  

I retrieved the crampons, slipped them on over my muck boots just before stepping into the icy shade of the woods, and was off Sherlocking.  Got to the back of the property, and traced the survey pin to several snatches of old barbed wire, over old logs, through thickets of saplings, down the hill to where the barbed wire abuts the original stone wall.  There are definitely 6 trees, possibly twice as many, that have been tapped on our side of the line.  Now to find the culprit.  Actually, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, that it's not an act of defiance or lack of courtesy, they simply thought they'd been given permission on someone else's land and didn't know that these groves were not included.  We'll ask for a couple gallons of syrup as compensation and ask them not to tap the trees again.  Our realtor friend Dale feels it may be Mike Emerson who has a goodly amount of the taps around.  More to be revealed.

Temperature is not 39 and all the new fallen snow has vanished.  Just the old piled up stuff remains.

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