An Early Blush

I know quite a few Midwesterners who have transplanted themselves here in Montana. They don’t seem terribly confused and have adapted well. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the buckeye tree (of Midwestern origins) Desiree and I planted in front of our house. Even though fall is not scheduled to arrive until September 22, the muddled, out-of-its-element tree pulled the pin, as the saying goes, and turned autumn red this week.

Apparently, buckeye trees are known for being somewhat rash when charged with prepping for fall. Still, it’s pretty weird to see the blush of colors when the apples on a nearby tree have yet to fully ripen and our first frost is not yet knocking at the door.

Buckeye Tree

Apple Tree

—Mitchell Hegman

A Bullsnake at the Door

In case you’ve ever wondered what a bullsnake would look like on the front stoop of your house, I’m sharing a photograph of one on mine as an example. I first spotted the snake when it poked its head inside after I opened the garage door to walk outside.

I’m hoping this snake is a good mouser. I could use the help.

—Mitchell Hegman

Softwood

You’ve likely heard that thing about using the internet to self-diagnose an ailment from which you might be suffering. You’ll find an answer alright, but it will be the worst-case scenario. You have something unpronounceable and cured only by drinking castor oil and eating lots of liver.

Unfortunately, a similar strain of bad news awaits if you search to find what you should and shouldn’t burn in your trusty woodstove. The “interweb” is going to tell you that burning softwood is bad. As the story goes, when you drill down (maybe up in this case), softwoods produce a lot of smoke and chimney-clogging creosote. Also, log per log, softwoods produce fewer BTUs than hardwoods.

Here’s the thing. All needle-bearing conifers are softwoods. This includes the pines, firs, and cedars out West where I live. I could accurately write that this effectively includes pretty much everything available in my region of the Rocky Mountains.

We don’t have oaks and walnuts proliferating at our back door. We’ve planted ourselves amongst the pines and firs and must make do. In fact, I spent considerable time this spring and summer cutting and chopping a reserve supply of lodgepole pine and fir for my stove.

Those of us who have not known better have been successfully burning softwoods for hundreds of years. A little damper control. A finely marbled steak. A well-aged single malt Scotch. And a stack of split pine. That’s all we need to laze through winter.

My Softwood Reserve for the Coming Winter

—Mitchell Hegman

Smoked Fish

Something near three weeks ago, smoke rolled into Montana from fires in Washington and Oregon. The smoke not only persisted; it thickened with contributions from wildfires in Canada and then right here in Montana. At the same time, extremely hot temperatures settled upon us.

Early in August, my car logged a temperature of 105°F, matching our all-time record high.

Yesterday, while driving through another hot afternoon of ever-thickening smoke, I said to Desiree, “Honey, I can’t even see the mountains for all the smoke. I think if we get another week of this, we’re going to be smoked fish.”

—Mitchell Hegman

The Mouse Thing

There seems to be no end to the supply of mice living around my back deck and hot tub. I have captured and released something very near 50 of them in the last five weeks. If you are keeping track, that's a lot.

If I had my druthers, they would be living over at Billy's place, and a bunch (can we call them a herd?) of hummingbirds would surround my deck.

It's not because a mouse is particularly intimidating. In fact, if you met just one out in the yard, you'd probably find the tiny fellow rather endearing. Twitchy pink ears. Bright eyes. Busy whiskers.

This is no grizzly bear.

But ultimately, they are after my peanut butter cookies. And as you can judge by the number I have captured, they procreate like mad.

A female mouse reaches maturity in only six to eight weeks. Her gestation lasts a mere nineteen to twenty-one days, and she typically produces five to eight pups. Under favorable conditions, she can become pregnant again within a day after giving birth.

That schedule doesn't leave much room on her calendar for hobbies.

Suppose you start with one healthy pair of adult mice in the throes of rodent love. Three weeks later, six pups arrive. Three weeks after that, another six. Two months in, fourteen mice isn't exactly a furry apocalypse.

Then the daughters grow up.

About six to eight weeks after they're born, they begin having litters of their own. Suddenly, reproduction isn't happening one family at a time. It's happening several families at once.

By the end of the third month, you might have thirty or forty mice. By the fourth month, it's easy to top a hundred. Five months in, several hundred isn't out of the question. By six months, under ideal conditions with plenty of food, warmth, and shelter, the descendants of that single pair could number well over a thousand.

I don't have that many cookies. So, I trap and relocate.

—Mitchell Hegman

Three Horses and One Mule

Even though I’ve lived in horse-infatuated Montana my entire life, you’d be surprised how impressive I find the sight of horses (and one mule) frisking about in a pasture with mountains as the backdrop. Desiree, of course, is impressed with elk and horses above most things, both of which have a proud, regal air about them. So yesterday, when three horses and a mule pranced up to a fence line to check us out, we stopped so Desiree could talk to the critters and capture them in a sun-washed portrait.

Three Horses and One Mule

—Mitchell Hegman

Cooling Down

It’s a full hour before the robins will bribe the sun with their quickest song. The sky remains as still as solid stone and colored Wedgwood blue. My back door is open, and I’ve flung open the windows like clams. Near the door and two windows, floor fans whir with firm insistence.

I’m sitting on my sofa under wan light, allowing the mountain air to rush in and lay cool hands on me. I close my eyes and think of the snowcapped peaks west of me, and of the monkey flowers I found nodding along the bounce-and-run Arrastra Creek on my last mountain drive.

I’ve never been fond of summer’s heat, and this hour before sunrise is entirely mine. I have this hour, and perhaps two more, to draw in cool air so I may face another scorching day. The cool air has a weight I desire.

—Mitchell Hegman

In the Bag

We must save the apples.

"We" in this instance is 95% Desiree and 5% me. The issue is worms attacking our apples. I am not in favor of spraying insecticides and would actually allow the worms to have their way with a few apples. As an alley kid from East Helena, Montana, I've never been opposed to working my way around the worm in an apple.

The classic wormy apple, by the way, owes its reputation to the codling moth. After hatching, its cream-colored caterpillar bores into the apple like a miniature miner, heading straight for the seed-filled core. If you've found a worm in a Montana apple, you've almost certainly met one. Given this, the damage is usually confined to the core.

But my island girl prefers purity in her apples. Our particular variety is the Golden Delicious. They are sweet late in the season, but I prefer them in the last stages of green, with a dash of salt. I converted Desiree to this preference last year with our first harvest.

To save this year's apples, she procured some net bags that can be secured around individual fruits. Although she may be a little late pulling the trigger, she started bagging the apples yesterday.

I must admit, there is a certain weird charm to the bagged tree. It's something akin to decorating a tree for Christmas. The effort makes it feel a little special. I am posting two photographs so you can get a feel for it.

Desiree Tying Bags Around the Apples

Apples in Bags

—Mitchell Hegman

Return of the Voles

The voles have invaded Desiree's flower garden again.

Though they are often mistaken for mice, they live very different lives. While mice are quick to invade and take advantage of the luxuries of our homes, voles are creatures of meadows, fields, and forest edges. They spend most of their time hidden beneath dense grasses, scuttling through narrow runways they weave through the vegetation and retreating to shallow burrows where they nest and store food. Their diet consists mainly of grasses, roots, seeds, bulbs, and the bark of young trees, which can make them unwelcome visitors in gardens and orchards. Although a vole may occasionally wander into a garage or shed by accident, they rarely take up residence inside houses.

If you spot a small rodent scampering across your kitchen floor, it's almost certainly a mouse rather than a vole. A vole is easy to recognize by its compact body, blunt nose, tiny ears that nearly disappear into its fur, and its short tail, which is only about a third the length of its body.

Yesterday, I live-trapped two voles from the garden and carted them down the road for release in the place we nicknamed Voleville in honor of previous releases there. I'm sharing two photographs of one of the captured voles. The second includes a Cold Smoke beer for an accurate reference of its size.

A Trapped Vole

Vole Next to a Cold Smoke Beer

—Mitchell Hegman

Fledging the Loud Way

For some years, ravens have been nesting in the bull pine near my property. Yesterday, two of this year's brood attempted to fledge and ended up stranded in a tree immediately below my house for much of the day. For the entire time, a group of adult ravens hung around monitoring, protecting, and encouraging the fledgling birds as they hopped from branch to branch, testing their wings.

Here's the thing: both the newbie ravens and the adults spent the entire time cawing and croaking. The little ones often made return calls that sounded like someone thwacking short lengths of dried bamboo.

In other words, the entire event was utter cacophony.

I stepped out onto my deck several times and, to no avail, "encouraged" the young birds to fly off. Eventually, the birds in the tree flew off, towing the adults along with them.

An Adult Raven on My Fence

—Mitchell Hegman

The Grim Thing in the Grass

The inside of my house grew notably dark in the mid-afternoon. Obviously, something big was wrestling with the sun and winning. When I stepped out the door to investigate, I found a purple sky out there.

Not Barney purple. Zinc and rotten plum purple.

To the west, I saw a big, churning storm spilling over the Continental Divide and pouring darkness into the valley.

Opposite the storm, to the east, puffy white thunderheads had stacked up into an impressive wall of their own. A brewing wind rather urgently ushered me to the east end of the house, where I discovered the grim thing still there in the grass.

Early in the morning, Desiree discovered what can only be classified as bunny rabbit parts. In the dark hours of the previous night, something killed and ate most of a bunny there, punctuating another day of country living.

To be honest, Barney always annoyed me.

Barney

Bunny Parts

—Mitchell Hegman

The Stackers versus the Pilers

Sports never interested me as a kid, and I have never followed any professional sports. About all I understand is that when the Packers are playing the Whomevers, it’s a bitter rivalry and somebody is going to drink too much beer while watching and get a little snotty.

Oddly enough, I am entertaining something similar to what I just described right here in my garage. Not the drinking beer and getting snotty part. The rivalry. In my competition, the Stackers are pitted against the Pilers.

I’m talking, of course, about lengths of firewood I have been chopping for the upcoming winter, which can begin on any day of any month here in Montana.

Some lengths I manage to axe into sleek, uniform pieces, making them easy to fit into a cordwood stack. Hence, the Stackers.

Other chunks split into gnarly and misshapen things, with bulbous knots on one end, weird twists of grain, and so forth. These, the Pilers, I heap into a jumbled and entirely disordered pile, something that looks like a Gaudí (drunken) version of a trash mound.

Obviously, I am rooting for the Stackers here. I appreciate a tidy stack. But the knotted chunks readily fit in my woodstove and accept flame just as well as the Stackers.

I’m sharing photographs of the rivals.

The Stackers in Orderly Rows

The Pilers Heaped Together

—Mitchell Hegman

The Chauffeur of Voleville

Something a bit less than a mile down our country road is a place Desiree and I have named Voleville. It’s really nothing more than the mouth of a gully populated with ponderosa pine, sagebrush, and juniper. It earned its name owing to the fact that I released a mess of voles there after live-trapping them from our flower and garden beds.

This spring we’ve been trapping hordes of mice from near the hot tub and occasional wayward chipmunks zipping through the plant beds. As the unofficially designated chauffeur of Voleville, I am always on standby should a captured critter need a lift for release down the road. Yesterday, I drove one mouse and two chipmunks down to Voleville. Mice tend to try and hide as best they can in the traps. Once caught, chipmunks absolutely freak out and fling themselves all over inside the live trap. And while music is said to calm some critters, I have confirmed that listening to Led Zeppelin does not calm a chipmunk in any fashion.

I’ve posted a photograph of one of the chipmunks I drove for release yesterday.

A Chipmunk   

—Mitchell Hegman

Embracing the Weird

Mountain living can be pretty unconventional. Between wild critters and untamed humans, you never know what to expect from one minute to the next. Last night, by way of example, we visited our neighbors at their campfire.

Turns out, they had a few friends overnighting with them. So along with the standard scattering of folding chairs and stumps arrayed around the fire pit, there was an extra dog rooting around and a naked doll flung off to the side.

I suppose a naked doll might be worth a conversation in most places, but around here we just embrace the weird and gather around the fire, tip a beer, and talk about the latest tree blown down across the road.

Naked Doll

—Mitchell Hegman

A Home for Someone Special

One of the property owners adjoining me decided he would plant a fence along the property line demarcating our parcels. After pounding in a few far-flung treated-wood corner posts, the fencing process languished and then stopped entirely.

Speaking to my neighbor later, he told me he’d opted out of that fence location. Shortly after our conversation, a fence appeared along his access road south of the posts he’d previously planted.

One of these rather lonely posts can be seen from my bay windows and has been greeting my southward gazes for about two years. It recently occurred to me that the post might make a good home for another neighbor: the bluebirds.

I’ve decided to affix a bluebird box to that post, and two others in different locations.

Bluebird boxes on fence posts make excellent sense because fence lines already function like avian boulevards. Mountain Bluebirds, in particular, spend much of their day perched low, scanning open ground for insects with the concentration of snipers. A fence post gives them both a lookout tower and a ready-made nesting site in one neat package.

Here in Montana, bluebirds favor our swaths of open country: pastures, hay fields, ranch land, and any grassy edge where they can swoop down after beetles and grasshoppers. A nest box mounted on a fence post in the open prairie places the home exactly where they already make their living.

It would be a shame to let a good post go to waste.

The Home Post

—Mitchell Hegman

Deer Proof

Over the years, I have tried every deer-proofing trick known from here to the coldest corner of Mars: smelly oils, soap, hanging widgets that make noise or motion. Eventually, I gave up and promoted only plants they found unpalatable.

That’s a short list, by the way.

In my yard, the following plants proved unpalatable to deer: Russian sage, mint, Dame’s rocket, coneflowers (Mexican hats), salvia, and blue flax.

Well, the list I just shared is entirely too short to comply with the prodigious plant sensibilities of an island girl from the Philippines. And you might be surprised by how impressive some of our high-north Rocky Mountain entrants compare in the competitive world of flowering plants.

Desiree wanted more. A purple this. A yellow that. A lovely-scented whatchacallit.

You know, deer stuff.

The only sure way to keep deer from dining on your (Desiree’s) pretty flowers or trees is with a tall fence. Yesterday, Desiree and I completed fencing in a small section of yard so she can chase her floral dreams within.

Me Captured Inside the Fence

—Mitchell Hegman

Springtime in Montana

Spring does not tell Montana what to do with the weather. The trees may be in bloom and the tulips standing tall, but if Montana feels like dropping twenty-some-degree temperatures on May 6 and frosting everything in sight, that is exactly what it will do.

So we answer in kind, tucking in our flowers for the night and turning up the heat inside.

—Mitchell Hegman

Fencing Logic

There are plenty of decisions to make when building a fence. You have to decide where it will run, what materials to use, where to place gates, and how tall it needs to be. A short fence works fine if you are keeping a toy poodle in, but if you are trying to keep deer out of a yard or garden, you need something much taller.

Desiree and I are building a tall chain-link fence to keep deer out of a section of our yard. One final detail remained: how far off the ground to hold the bottom of the fence. That one was easy. About two inches. It gives my weed-eater string room to work and leaves a quick escape route for any snake I might run into near the fence. Where I live, this is a serious consideration.

Posts for our New Fence

—Mitchell Hegman

Pick-up Sticks

Between pine beetle infestations and raucous windstorms, many of the surrounding forests are filled with fallen trees. This includes the Forest Service property adjoining the parcel for my cabin. That particular forest is comprised primarily of lodgepole pine.

Nature has not been kind.

The forest looks more like a giant pile of pick-up sticks. The lodgepoles have crashed down crosswise against each other, stacking high and making it nearly impossible to walk through. For the last few years, I have been sawing much of my firewood from this patch of timber. I have carved a clear swath through the mess and gradually worked my way up a fairly gentle slope. But the rounds are dry and easy to manage.

Honestly, I enjoy my time cutting into the downfall. I’ve always enjoyed anything that presses me harder against my mountains. I’m sharing a photograph of the forest and my truck filled with rounds.

My Truck Filled with Rounds

The Pick-up Sticks Forest

—Mitchell Hegman

A Cascade of Flowers

The Southeast Valley Honeybees, after several years of absence, have laid claim to our Mayday tree, now in full bloom. The entire tree hums and vibrates with the sound of dozens upon dozens of bees.

Nothing in my northland world outdoes a Mayday tree in the production of pearly white flowers. It doesn’t scatter its blossoms like loose change; it gathers them into long, crowded tassels, turning each branch into a chandelier, if not a floral waterfall, of small blooms. Mayday trees also bloom early and produce a sweet, beckoning scent, boosting the odds of pollination before other trees and ground flowers even get off the starting line to compete.

Yesterday, at midday, I wandered out and stood beneath the Mayday, a halo of blossoms and bees above me.

If not heaven, close.

Desiree and the Mayday Tree in Bloom

A Bee at Work

—Mitchell Hegman