Nature – doreenslife.com

Badger Mountain

Once upon a time, my husband and some friends were planning a hunting trip to Colorado, elk and mule deer hunting. I had heard many stories about past hunts and asked if I could go also.

I had hunted even before meeting my husband, and wanted a chance to see game, other then deer, rabbits, squirrel, etc.

Some of his group were not too happy about having a “woman go on a hunting trip”. Everything from bad luck to scratching and itching whenever they want.

Anyway, my husband said I could go. The morning we left, I had a terrible head and chest cold. I don’t know if it was emotions from leaving my teenage daughters with my parents for 10 days or what, but I felt awful. We pulled an enclosed trailer behind the truck with all of our supplies in it. We unhooked when we got to the camp, so we could drive around and check out the area.

Our cabin was very nice. It was more like a huge storage shed converted into such. The loft could sleep 8 comfortably, in sleeping bags, and there were 2 sets of bunk beds, and table with chairs and a wood burner for the rest of it.

The bathroom, however, was about 100 yards away, down and up a ravine. It was not enclosed and had a blue tarp in front of it to hide you sitting down. Your head and shoulders were above it looking at the cabin. Plus, the guy that let us stay there said they found mountain lion tracks as big as a bread plate, so I definitely was not going to the bathroom at night…

After stomping around a few days and not seeing but one elk that was so far away, I thought it was a dog, we decided to drive around and scout some places they might be.

The sign at the bottom of the hill said “Badger Mountain”. We started up in our dualie (a truck with 4 wheels across the back), and the road kept narrowing. I was on the outside edge and was seeing tree tops and a sheer drop off. I HATE heights especially combined with a drop off with no guard rails…

At one point, the road looked like it was smaller then our truck and I asked about it. My husband said that one tire of our back 4 was off the road, hanging over the abyss. Ok, so severe panic set in and I started yelling, “Let me out of this truck, right now”. If there had been a back window into the bed of the truck, I would have been out, but the road widened a little and he stopped for me to get out.

I don’t know what a person would do if someone was coming down the hill in a vehicle. There was NO passing room. It looked like we were about at a 500 foot drop off. I wished they had put me to sleep before we left, like the old “A Team” used to with B.A.

So, I’m walking down the mountain and began thinking, “This is called Badger Mountain. Why in the world did I leave my gun in the truck?”

A little while later, the guys came and picked me up. They found a slightly wider spot up the way, and eeked it back and forth until they got it turned around.

My husband never has gone back to Colorado since. Maybe too much yet. 🙂

Why Don’t Husbands Ever Listen

I’ve been married 22 years and I’ve asked myself this question probably 100 times. Our first few years of marriage, I worked six days a week in a factory and he worked 5 days a week in a grocery store. He is a meat cutter by trade.

So, one summer, I was working the next day and he had it off. He was going to mow grass and burn a brush pile we had. He had been mowing too close to the edge of our pond, so I told him he shouldn’t get so close. I had told him many, many times before, but reminded him again. We were also in a drought long enough that the grass was crunchy. I told him to hook up the hoses to the spigot outside and run it down close to the fire, in case it got out of hand.

I came home from work that day only to find him sitting in the easy chair with his feet up, watching television. I was a little irked, thinking he had spent his day doing nothing. Then he told me why he ended up there.

He was mowing around the pond, when the mower, with him on it, fell in. He had one knee in the muck, trying to push the mower up and out. Then after he got the truck and pulled out the mower, he put it away. Said it needed to dry out.

His next bright idea was to light the brush pile. As the grass started burning toward the woods in several different places, he had to run uphill, get the hoses, attach them to the spigot and started down with the hose. It was too short, so he had to run uphill and find buckets to fill. Then run back and forth filling buckets and throwing it at all the flames threatening the woods. So, okay, he’s off the hook for today.

The next thing I can think of, is he was going to spray some kind of dust into a yellow jacket nest that made its home on our back porch in the ceiling. I am a beekeeper, so I told him he should wear my bee helmet, long sleeves, and gloves to do that job. Next, I see him through the back door with a ball cap and short sleeves on, with some kind of sprayer, on a ladder, reaching up to the hole in the ceiling. I watch him spray one puff and then the dance was on…Yellow jackets don’t like it when you invade their territory and were flying around his head. I have never seen his hands move so fast. I was wishing I was video taping it.

You don’t have to feel bad for him, he only got one sting on his ear. The next time I looked on the porch, he had a bee helmet, long sleeves and gloves on. Hmmm…..

And why is it that when he comes home with some fantastic tidbit of information, it is usually something I have been telling him for years…

Hunting with Pam

I was raised in a good family. My Dad and Mom worked hard to give us a nice life. I had a lot of fun with friends and my brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles.

I’ve always had an interest in shooting guns. But my family was not really into it. When I was grown up, I had a boyfriend that took me target shooting with a .44 mag pistol. We went to a friends house for a party and they set up a box with sticker dots around it to shoot at.

I had done a little shooting with a .22 rifle and loved it. So I said I’d try the pistol. So, standing with both arms up in front of me with the pistol in hand, I took aim and shot straight through the 1″ dot at about 50 feet away. I took aim and did the same at the next dot. Nailed it. My boyfriend looked at me and asked if I was aiming at the dots. I said that I was, that’s why I hit them. He must not have quite believed me so he told me to aim at the lower right dot and “boom”, I put a bullet right through that dot. He said he would never make me mad…

So now, I wanted to deer hunt. I borrowed a 20 gauge gun from a friend of mine and went to my best friend, Pam’s house. We had been best friends for quite a few years and she wanted to get some deer for the freezer too.

She borrowed a gun and we went out to her woods the day before gun hunting season started. We looked for trails and took some hay bales out to hide behind and some chairs to sit in while we waited for the deer to come.

This was both of ours first time trying to hunt a deer. We went out in the dark and took our seats. Had drinks, snacks and a pad of paper and pen to write notes if we needed.

So we watched and listened, the sun came up and we heard shots over on the next hill. Basically we got bored and started writing funny notes back and forth to each other. Each of us tried to stifle the snickers and then belly laughs but the more we tried, the worse it got. We figured we scared every deer off of that whole valley that day. Probably had a lot of hunters not too happy with us.

I eventually got some deer in my freezer, but not hunting with Pam. We have too much fun to be serious hunters together. And that’s okay with us.

Bats

My earliest experience with bats was when I was about 11 years old. My family was staying in a cabin in Maine, for a vacation. My grandparents were there for the evening. I was playing “war” with cards with one of my brothers when we heard a scream. Grandma ran to the bed and pulled the covers over her head, soon followed by my mom, who called me under the covers with her.

My brothers were yelling and running around so I looked out from the covers and grandma was yelling, “a bat, a bat, get it!” I guess we got under the covers because bats fly around and get caught in women’s hair. I later found out this isn’t really true. But it sure made for a wild night, until grandpa got the bat.

When I moved into a 150 year old, two-story brick house, that I bought in the late 1990’s, I found out that bats were not what I had previously thought.

I worked afternoon shift, and one night after work, I was going to sleep on the couch on the first floor. I had a beagle that played games with the coons all night. He would lay on the door of his box and the coons would come to eat his food and drink his water. He let them start and would run out barking his head off. Run up and down the run, and when he was sure they were back far enough, he went and laid in the door again. Only to run out barking again in three minutes when they came back. With no neighbors to complain, it was too much noise to sleep through.

So, I had just laid down and pulled a cover up to my chin, when I heard wings go about 10 inches over my face. Jump up, lights on, saw a bat flying through my rooms. Since I was there alone, I called a neighbor friend up the road and told him I had a bat in the house. He told me to leave the lights on until the bat lands somewhere. Put some heavy gloves on and get a towel. Then move slowly and, with the towel in your hand, slowly close in on the bat and pinch lightly his wings together on his body. I thought sure, he’s going to fly in my hair. So I also put on a ball cap with all my hair tucked inside.

As I was getting close to the bat, he opened his mouth and kind of yelled at me, squeaky like, but didn’t fly. He let me get ahold of him and pick him up and take him (or her, who knows) outside. Cool, that worked great!

About a week later, my husband was in the shower and called me in to see what was in the tub. It was on the tub floor and he said looked like a wet mouse. I got close and it was a wet bat. It must have been on the shower head when he turned the water on. So, gloves back on and bat outside. (My big brave husband)

This continued enough that we looked into finding out how they were getting in the house. The chimney to the fireplace just happened to be opened to the sky. The next weekend, it got sealed off.

The bats stopped getting in the house, but they were in both attics above. One was a walk-in, and the other you had to use a ladder to get up in. At first, I was so afraid of going in when they were there. I thought they would fly at me and chase me out. The fact is, they never flew at me. They were hanging on the rafters and would yell at me, showing lots of teeth, but were never aggressive or menacing. I guess they didn’t like getting woke up in the middle of their night, which was my day.

They were such an organized bunch, I would sit in the driveway at dusk, and watch them come out of the roof. It was like clockwork. They came out, one after the other, every few seconds. I had a pond close to the house and had no mosquitos at all. Those wonderful bats kept them ate up…

Plus, in October, every year, I would hear one bat squeaking in a cadence. For several days this would happen. Then about a week later, they were gone. I think they migrated to Mexico, but they never told me where they went. Then, in March, they were home again.

I really came to love those bats. Mosquito clean up. Plus, the free bat quano. I’d go in when they were gone and sweep up all the manure, and put on my garden. People pay a high price for that stuff.

Since I have moved, I see a bat once in a while. I bought a bat house to put up next year to try and lure some here. I miss watching them.

My Bird Friend

When I moved to this property, seven years ago, I had room to put a nice big garden in. There were lots of deer and critters around here that like to eat gardens, so I put a fence up to deter them.

While I was planting my first garden here, I heard birds singing. I have always mimicked and whistled back what I hear to keep the birds “talking” to me. One bird would even come and light on a far post of the garden and “talk” to me. It made all kinds of different sounds and when it flew, it had a white circle under each wing and its tail. I had never noticed a bird like it before.

My mom is a bird watcher and has always named birds when we saw them together. So I asked her what this bird was and she didn’t know. I had looked in a bird book she had and the only bird that looked similar was a mockingbird, but the book didn’t say anything about white spots underneath. So I was still unsure of what it was until a friend was over and identified it for sure, as a mockingbird. That explained why it made so many different sounding songs and tweets.

That summer was fun because whenever I was outside in the garden, that bird always seemed to come around to “talk”. After the third year of this going on, as soon as I would step out from under the porch to work outside, that bird found me quickly. I even knew which couple of trees it was usually in and started looking for it, but it would start chattering excitedly as soon as it saw me.

The last two years, that bird would even find me when I would be in the big garage with the door open, working out there. It would come out and sit on the wood pile by that door and “talk”. Which was very brave because of the cats we have had. The very last time I saw it, was on that wood pile and I was in that big garage painting something with my husband.

The next day, it wasn’t anywhere and I never saw it again. I have seen several mockingbirds since, but none are “my” bird. It was a six year relationship with a creature that weighs only a few ounces, but when it disappeared, it left a tiny hole in my happiness. I never knew what happened, whether it had lived its full life, or a predator got it, but that little piece of nature left a warm and fuzzy place on my heart.

Here Kitty Kitty Kitty

After Gma Kate had lived with us with all those cats she brought, I just kind of was tired of cats for awhile. They fought with each other, were persnickety, divas, you name it. Then a little black kitten with a white tuft under its chin started sneaking in for food. Long story short, we named him “Charlie”. He’s been a wonderful cat that we say is half dog, because whenever we are outside, he finds us and follows us around the whole time. Lots of petting goes on to.

Cats were eating my cats food as soon as I went inside after putting food in the bowl, so I started putting a heavier metal bowl on top to take off periodically, so the food would last a little longer. By 9 am every day for a couple of weeks, the bowl was knocked off the top and all the food eaten. And I thought, “who is eating that much?”

One day, I heard the metal bowl hit the ground. I went out and saw a large cat down by the chicken coop. I thought that must be the hungry one so I call out, “here kitty, kitty, kitty.” The cat stops and turns around and looks at me and then continues on.

The next time I hear it the cat is only half way down to the coop, and I see one of our cats, flattened along the ground a couple of feet from the larger cat, just looking at it, giving it plenty of respect. I couldn’t believe the size of that cat and when I called, “here kitty, kitty, kitty”, it turned and looked at me and I saw that it was a bobcat. Yes, I was calling a bobcat in. It kind of reminded me of the glasses commercial when the lady calls for her kitty out the door and a raccoon runs in and she says, “come snuggle with mommy”. That would have been a mistake. Getting ahold of the bobcat…

A Berry Picking We Will Go la la la

I was going out back to pick blackberries a few days ago. I ride my four-wheeler out a trail through the woods, to the open fields where the berries grow along the tree line.

I don’t know how fast I was going, but about one foot in front of my face, a spider web came into view about one second before I ran through it. It couldn’t have hit me more directly in the face if I had been aiming at it. It covered my face and neck and was in my hair. I was going too fast to see if there was a spider in it, or not, so I started swatting all over my head and shoulders, while still going down the hill. Yuck!

A pair of turkeys with two young ran off the trail as I came through. I think they were laughing at me.

From now on I’m going to ride with a pole stuck out in front of me to catch any webs first. This kind of thing is exactly the reason that I let Tom ride in front of me. Heh heh.

A Neat Encounter

Since I don’t have chickens at this time, I thought it would be a good idea to plant squash in my chicken run. Lots of fertilizer at the ready 🙂

I went down to water them and had this little guy on the coop door. I’ve never seen a moth like this before. He didn’t move, so I stood there and studied him for awhile.

Last year, I had a luna moth that stayed here for a few days. It was so neat to watch it and look at it up close.

I also have resident praying mantises that I love to watch. I like it when I find the egg case or sac in the cold months. And especially like it if I get to see the babies in the spring. I try to locate them when mowing to stay clear of where they are. However, they always jump me if they take off flying and I don’t know they are nearby.

I suppose that insects don’t pay us much mind (unless they are a mosquito), but it sure is nice to get to watch them and see them up close sometimes. I always got my children those insect cages, to trap and watch insects, when they were young. I probably enjoyed it as much as they did.

Here are a couple of this years batch of baby praying mantises. Second picture is a little left of center. So cute!