When our doggo has her On/Off switch in the Off position she is most certainly off.
Whether it is at the end of the day sprawled on the couch getting toasted in front of the fire;
or basking in the warmth of an early morning sunbeam.
That big yawn says she's all business.
Don't poke sleeping dogs.
At this age if you go out of your way to wake them from a nap they think you'll want to go outside and play.
This year the NFL is expanding its international series to a record
eight regular-season games across five countries: Spain (Madrid),
Germany (Munich), Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), the UK (three games in
London), France (Paris), and Australia (Melbourne). These games will
feature match-ups in new cities, including the first-ever game in France
and Australia.
It is no secret the NFL wants to make their product a global brand.
People from other countries who might not even use English as a primary
language are going to figure significantly in NFL marketing. Old white
guys like me need to get over it because we're not a target market.
The NFL brand is a business and I don't think they care what the current
occupant of the White House thinks about their business model.
Why?
The NFL wants to expand their brand beyond our borders. The NFL wants
to grow profits. The NFL is bigger than Trump. The NFL will be around
long after Trump is gone.
If I were a fly on the wall of the NFL's boardroom I'd likely learn
they're tickled-silly that everyone's jabbering this week about record viewership
of a halftime performance interrupted by a thoroughly forgettable game.
From time to time I've had an opportunity to attend a woodland owner conference, compare notes with neighbors, chat with a wildlife biologist or simply ponder my own personal observations and encounters with the top predator in our neighborhood. Sure, we may occasionally encounter a gray wolf or a black bear around these parts but they're generally dispersing males and not found as breeding populations. And since we don't have large breeding populations of humans close to where I live; wildlife encounters around here are strictly from a rural perspective.
The purpose of this post is to draw attention to how Wiley Coyote has adapted to urban life and what, if anything, you might want to know about it or do about it.
The frantic animal in the photo below was photographed on a motion-activated trail camera while being pursued by a pack of trailing hounds belonging to some neighbors of mine a couple of years ago. Around here, coyotes are universally wary of humans. This is a consequence of being hunted.
Meet Canis latrans....
The translation from Latin - barking dog. Coyotes are wild dogs and depending upon their location sport a grayish-brown coat that can vary from silver-gray to black. The tail uniformly has a black tip. Unlike the brown eyes of a domestic dog a coyote's eyes are yellow. Adults can tip the scales at roughly 25-35 pounds and occasionally a healthy, well-fed specimen might grow to 40-45 pounds.
Native to the Great Plains and deserts of Mexico coyotes have dispersed over the last several hundred years and now range from the arctic to Central America. An exceedingly adaptable predator its numbers have grown as settlement reduced the numbers of larger predators such as cougars, wolves and grizzly bears.
Coyotes are opportunistic hunters feeding mainly upon small rodents, fruit, rabbits and deer - all found in bountiful abundance in a city. Regrettably, a small dog or cat is the same as any other smaller prey animal that a coyote might seek as a food source.
In Wisconsin coyote numbers have steadily increased and their remarkable adaptability to the urban environment has given rise to coyote, pet and human conflicts.
Most of these encounters arise because coyotes become habituated to the presence of people and lose their natural fear of humans. It is the abundance of food resources at the root of this. If you have a bird feeder coyotes will both eat from the feeder and eat the animals attracted to the feeder. Feeding the family dog or cat from a pet bowl on the patio or deck is a singularly bad idea. And the common denominator found in coyote attacks upon family pets is typically a lack of supervision while outdoors. If you have to let your dog out to do their business stay outside with it - especially during the periods of dawn and dusk. Finally, don't let your cats wander. It is dangerous for the cat on too many levels to count and outdoor cats are the single largest predator of wild song birds.
Sure, I know someone reading this is going to think this is nonsense and a huge inconvenience. They're likely thinking: Why not trap the coyote and release it somewhere else? of kill the varmint?
While it may be legal to trap and relocate the animal doing so simply makes your nuisance coyote someone else's nuisance coyote. Besides, in the absence of altering the conditions of wildlife feeding and corralling your pets you may most assuredly rely-upon another coyote moving-in to claim the territory of the prior occupant.
Counterintuitively, if a community expects to solve the problem by employing large scale lethal means to reduce coyote numbers the Town Fathers are going to run-up against the Law of Unintended Consequences. The complex biological response of coyotes to large scale lethal control efforts is to have larger litters with more females per litter. They are adaptable after all.
So what to do?
Take steps to discourage coyotes. In addition to removing food and being vigilant about your pets if you see a coyote you should haze it relentlessly. If a coyote approaches you or a pet respond by throwing things at it, yelling at it, spray it with a garden hose, a super soaker or (with some restrictions) pepper spray. Make the encounter miserable for the animal. Be fearless. You are bigger and coyotes naturally avoid people. Moreover, there is not a single documented case of an attack upon a human by a coyote in the Midwest. If your response is to pick-up Fluffy the Dog and run in the opposite direction you've reinforced the message to the animal that he is Top Dog.
This time of year is breeding time for coyotes and as a consequence activity will increase with the arrival of pups in the months of May and June. If a person is attacked or you encounter an animal acting aggressively contact the Department of Natural Resources or local law enforcement.
A word about the Coywolf. A coywolf - the eastern coyote - is a hybrid wolf coyote species that emerged a long time ago after coyotes dispersed from the central plains and colonized the northeast United States and southeastern Canada. Contrary to any breathless report you might see on Facebook coywolves may possibly be found in the northernmost reaches of Wisconsin; but evidence is sketchy and sightings scarce. Furthermore, to an untrained eye coywolves look and behave no differently than the coyotes we know to be around here. So I suppose none of us would know one if we saw one. You may relax.
In closing, if you live in a city environment and care to engage in some citizen science you might want to check out websites like iNaturalist.org - Milwaukee County Coyote Watch.
Chicago is not just home to the Bears it is also home to a resident population of several thousand coyotes. Chicago coyotes have been participants in a longitudinal study for more than two and a half decades. Started in 2000 this is the longest-running comprehensive study of its kind. Remarkably, researchers have documented den site locations near Soldier Field and Navy Pier. You can learn more about the Cook County Coyote Project here.
Meanwhile if you want to learn how to haze a coyote there is this...
It is Super Bowl Sunday and naturally, halftime fare around here is highly likely to feature venison brats.
On the subject of dogs today if we have clear night skies this evening there is this.
click on image for a closer look
The constellation Orion (the hunter) is a prominent, easily-identifiable object in the southern night sky.
If conditions warrant take the opportunity to venture out most anytime this entire month and locate this constellation. His belt of three stars (Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka)have an unmistakable tilt upward and the bright stars representing his shoulder and knee - red-colored Betelgeuse and blue-white Rigel.
If you draw an imaginary line down and slightly left from Orion's belt you will land on Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, which locates the heart of Canis Major (the big dog). Above Sirius and to the left you will locate Procyon in Canis Minor (the little dog). As the story goes - Orion accompanies by his two canine companions - strides across the night sky from east to west.
Fingers-crossed for cold, clear viewing conditions.
A couple of months ago I read an article that caught my interest. Having been raised during the cold war along with the accompanying promise and threat of nuclear technology, secret agent espionage and as an avid reader of National Geographic Magazine for almost six and a half decades you would understand.
In response to Communist Red China's nuclear ambitions and tensions between India and China - in 1965 a joint US-India mission conceived by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) launched Operation Blue Mountain. The objective was to monitor telemetry collected from Chinese missile tests conducted from the Xinjiang region.
To do so, it was proposed to install a surveillance (listening) device on the summit of Nanda Devi, India's second-highest peak with a commanding view of China from India's northern border. Expert mountaineers from the US, India and Nepal would carry a long-range listening antenna powered by a SNAP-19C radioisotope thermoelectric generator. The generator was fueled with seven capsules of plutonium-238, roughly one-third the amount used in the Nagasaki bomb.
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Nuclear-powered device that was installed by CIA climbers on another mountain near Nanda Devi. It’s the same as the model that is still missing. Rob Schaller, via Pete Takeda collection |
Arriving in mid September it was already the close of climbing season yet the CIA rushed to complete deployment of the listening station. Without sufficient time to acclimate the team of climbers and Sherpas were already suffering from altitude sickness at 15,000 feet. They faced a climb of an additional 10,000 vertical feet requiring the establishment of four camps along a dangerous ridge line. The mission was led by Indian Captain, and expert climber, M.S. Kohli. High winds, near constant snow, a shortage of food and frostbite hampered progress as the team struggled to attain the summit. Finally, out of water and out of food, on October 16 a sudden and violent blizzard near the summit forced the small expedition to withdraw. Abandoning the mission the team secured the heavy equipment, including the nuclear power generator, to an ice ledge and descended the mountain. The plan was to retrieve it in the spring.
Returning in May 1966, the team discovered that the entire ledge where everything was cached had been swept-away by an avalanche.
The nuclear device was gone.
Subsequent searches using heat detectors, metal detectors, infrared detectors and radiation detectors failed to locate it. Presumably, it had been buried somewhere within the Nanda Devi glaciers.
For decades both the US and Indian governments had an official policy of neither confirming or denying the mission citing intelligence security. But that did not deny the reality of the device being out there, possibly sinking deeper into the ice from heat generated by plutonium decay, in a melting, shifting glacier that supplied the headwaters of the Ganges River. Millions of people down stream could be impacted by contamination risks.
Whoa!
This is excellent journalism on the part of the Times revealing the CIA's loss of a nuclear device sixty years ago. I unblocked the paywall as it's a terrific read. I wonder how many more US Government and CIA misadventures/debacles remain to be discovered? Probably enough to keep investigative journalists busy for decades.
If they're found out.
Read the article in its entirety here.
And, by the way, I'm still reading National Geographic Magazine each and every month...
Getting-up before sunrise, flipping-on the coffeemaker and taking note of the single digit temperatures is a huge change compared to rising to the double-digit negative temps of only a couple of weeks ago. Change like this makes me ponder whether springtime is lurking just around the corner? Nah. I digress. How do the resident critters that make their home around here adapt and adjust to harsh winter weather conditions anyway?
The short answer is that wildlife does have adaptations to the seasons and this time of year they manifest as both physical change, behavior or a combination of the two.
Thinking of the critters that show-up most frequently on the trail cameras; the resident whitetails, raccoons, coyotes, fox and other mammalian species all grow a thicker coat of hair and fur that absorbs sunlight, and provides camouflage properties to avoid detection by predators. Additionally, this fur coat generally consists of several layers; the softer, thicker layer adjacent to the skin traps air and retains body heat. Next to this undercoat is an outer layer of guard hairs that repels rain, snow and wind.
So efficient is this winter-wear that the snow accumulating on a whitetail doesn't even get close to melting....
Co-written by country music artist Marty Stewart and Paul Kennerly this tune was released in 1991 as the third single and title track from the album Tempted.
It reached number five on the Billboard Hot Country Single chart.
I happen to think Stuart is channeling Buddy Holly with this song.
Tempted...
Pro Tip -
If you ever construct a new house or garage be sure to have the concrete contractors install floor drains in your garage - preferably one for each stall - so that the winter weather crap that collects on your vehicle will not pool underneath and around your vehicles.
Sure, after the water drains away and the floor dries the mud, road grunge and other dirt won't look very appetizing but you you won't be tracking it into the house if it spreads all over the garage floor.
With the arrival of spring you can sweep-up most of that debris followed by flushing the rest down the drains and out the underground pipe to a discharge in the backyard.
One more thing. Every garage should have a slop sink. A floor mount sink with hot and cold running water just like you find in a janitor closet. A great supplement for flushing the fore-mentioned floor, rinsing-off a vehicle, scrubbing your wood-fired oven implements, cleaning deer hunting knives, dirty boots and (drum roll please) shampooing your dog!
At the ball park a treasured memory is the guy hiking up and down the steps of the grandstand pitching salted-in-the shell ballpark peanuts. In my view the perfect game day snack. Just thirst-provoking enough to justify a frosty beer and easy enough to eat because you can leave the shells on the concrete beneath your seat for someone else to clean-up.
In any event, after consulting with my pal and mutual bird aficionado, Braumeister, I invested in this contraption.
Days passed and aside from an occasional curious chickadee nobody was acknowledging the presence of my bird-world ballpark peanuts. Days turned into a week without a single customer. At that point I reached-out to my buddy to inquire as to what might be the problem. He cautioned patience.
The next day, sure as shooting, there was a blue jay on the feeder pecking-away at my peanuts to break the shell and extract a nut. At which point the bird would fly-off, disappear to likely stash the prize in a food cache. Jays do that. In reasonably short order the word went forth and every day there have been jays hammering-away at the peanuts. Once and a while a chickadee or nuthatch might give it a passing sniff - but only jays have been actively feeding.
Braumeister says to be patient as other species will naturally become attracted and join-in the ever-growing bird buffet in our yard.
Peaaanuts! Get Your Peanuts!
Members of the Cherokee nation refer to this month’s full moon as the
Bone Moon. This was a consequence of depleted food stores and the
necessity of cracking-open bones to access the marrow for survival food.
My own people – the ancient Celts – remember this as the Moon of Ice as it is associated with the coldest month of the year.
Colloquially, the February full moon is the Snow Moon.
Simultaneous moonset and sunrise this morning. A doubler.
View east...
View west...
In my continued hiatus from the chaos that passes as news nowadays, on Sunday I performed an experimental bake. Before bedtime on Saturday I mixed my flours, salt and a slurry of starter/water into a sticky dough. Stretched (not kneaded) and formed a ball.
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| at 40 minute mark remove the cast iron pot |
Sunny with the temperature reaching a scorching high of 28F yesterday.
Did you know that New Jersey is running out of groundhogs? Ever since Milltown Mel passed-away, this New Jersey town has faced a groundhog crisis. Now the governor has vetoed an effort to import out-of-state replacement rodents. Not so in neighboring Pennsylvania.
Groundhog Day is a big event every year on this day over in Gobbler's Knob.
Someone provokes a hibernating woodchuck named Punxsutawney Phil to come out of his hole and predict the arrival of spring.
Even I can do that. Provoked by the alarm clock I crawled out of a perfectly warm bed this morning at 5:30 AM, poured myself a steaming cuppa joe and browsed news feeds on my laptop. It was snowing. I therefore concluded more winter before the arrival of spring.
The man in the picture above is a fool. You should never grab a groundhog - especially if you are going to wave it around in the air over your head.
From the Algonquian wuchak. Also known as the whistle pig – Marmota monax belongs to the vast squirrel family. They are big rodents.
They are also sinister-looking with their small ears, beady black eyes and very sharp teeth to go with all of their claws. I wouldn’t grab a groundhog any sooner than I'd make a grab for a beaver or a porcupine. They are capable of biting through a human hand. They are all much too dangerous.
Trust me. I know this.
I have had to deal with multiple critters infestations under my barn. This includes everything from bunnies, to raccoons to kittens. One year I had a groundhog. And that bugger was burrowing furiously.
Groundhogs are well-adapted miners. They have short but powerful legs and very sharp claws. They are capable of excavating hundreds of pounds of dirt. And this fella was chucking enough dirt that it wouldn’t be long before he seriously undermined the structural integrity of the barn foundation.
Shooting a woodchuck is against the law in Wisconsin. Yep. They’re protected – just like badgers and wolves. Not wanting to draw the attention of the local game warden and pleading a landowner exception I opted for the old reliable method.
Mothballs.
I poured a box of mothballs down the woodchuck’s hole. Oh sure, your barn will smell like grandma for awhile but critters cannot stand mothballs. And it worked almost immediately for me.
I was puttering in the machine shed when old Phil (smelling strangely of naphthalene) waddled his way into the shed and gave me the hairy eyeball. He was not happy. Actually, he was angry to the point of provocation because he reared-up on his hind legs and gave me a nasty bark.
Taking a machete from the peg board I waved it menacingly and told him to get the heck out of my shed.
He scurried away retreating behind a sheet of plywood leaning against the wall.
I grabbed a garden rake and thrust it in his face.
He snorted and whistled and parried back with his claws.
Claw for claw - back and forth we went. Parry and thrust. I was gaining the upper hand and Phil was losing ground.
Finally forced from the shed he scurried a safe distance from the crazy guy with the rake, turned and gave me a dirty look and waddled-off in the direction of a neighboring farm.
Nasty attitude the groundhog has.
Dangerous too.
*This post was first published on the JSOnline WauwatosaNOW Gas Pains blog on February 2, 2010.
...Salmon Dinner!
Cold weather and the over abundance of noise that passes for news
nowadays has lately opened my world to a welcome retreat to the kitchen.
After group and the running of Friday errands I fed my sourdough starter
children and made a third batch for a possible experimental bake over
the weekend.
There was a dozen of my signature blueberry muffins to bake followed by
our weekly imported salmon; pan-seared with rice pilaf and sautéed
spinach. Remind me to extol sometime about the virtues of browned
butter sauté.
A word about the muffins.
Growing-up, blueberries were a rare seasonal item and rarer still in our
household. Likely a consequence of scarcity-induced pricing.
In case you missed it, blueberries nowadays are available year-round as a
result of advances in Peruvian agriculture. And these blueberries grown
at altitude in the Andes are mutant things of fruity deliciousness..
Anyway, raising a toast to global supply chains and 2-3 extra minutes of daylight delivered with every sunrise.
Native Americans have long grown familiar with this
moon. Members of the Cherokee nation
refer to this month’s full moon as the Bone Moon. This was a consequence of depleted food
stores and the necessity of cracking-open bones to access the marrow for
survival food.
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| NASA image |
If it wasn't such a serious subject the appearance of a comic book superhero before a city council would be comical.
Extra credit to Batman for drawing attention to a gravely serious subject.
From a day it wasn't single digit or below zero temps.
Dang, it's been colder than (fill in the blank).....
Composed by lead vocalist Ray Davies the Kinks released this song on their 1972 album - Everybody's in Show Biz. My high school years.
Aside from mentioning Hollywood Boulevard and the Walk of Fame the song includes a Who's Who of film stars.
The Kinks have been featured here several previous Fridays. This is one of my favorites. And you'd likely agree Davies is a damn-fine guitarist.
Celluloid Heroes...
I didn't see this coming; consequently, it caught me by surprise.
Here we are, barely one month into the new year, and the Conference Board's long-running consumer confidence index fell 9.7 points from 94.2 in December. This was a sharp drop with all five components of the index deteriorating making it one of the largest monthly drops in four years and placing American's confidence in the economy at the lowest it has been in a dozen years.
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| click on image for a closer look |
Popular sentiment about the economy is both a curious and fickle phenomenon. Over the last couple of years consumer confidence did not necessarily reflect the underlying strength of the US economy. This drop is an assessment of survey respondents' current state of economic affairs and their expectations for the future. Notably, the index is now below the level it sank during the pandemic when unemployment was approaching 15%.
Asked about jobs the share of consumers who shared that jobs are plentiful fell to 23.9% from 27.5% in December. Similarly, 13.9% expected more jobs to be available in the next six months compared with 17.4% in December.
Economists suggest that these data point are the latest evidence of American's perceptions of a weaker labor market than the actual numbers may imply. It this a wariness of potential impacts from artificial intelligence?
Again, economists over at the Conference Board suggest that respondent's answers to the survey continues to trend pessimistic with elevated concerns over food and grocery prices, health insurance, utilities, future business conditions, income prospects and trade war impacts.
Despite robust GDP growth and an overall low unemployment rate U.S. consumers are pessimistic about the general economic outlook.
Go figure.
All of the foregoing involve different sub-decisions about how to layer-up or is the trip even necessary. How do the resident critters that make their home around here adapt and adjust?
The short answer is that wildlife does have adaptations to the seasons and this time of year they manifest as both physical change, behavior or a combination of the two.
Thinking of the critters that show-up most frequently on the trail cameras; the resident white tails, raccoons, coyotes, fox and other mammalian species all grow a thicker coat of hair and fur that absorbs sunlight, and provides camouflage properties avoid detection by predators. Additionally, this fur coat generally consists of several layers; the softer, thicker layer adjacent to the skin traps air and retains body heat. Next to this undercoat is an outer layer of guard hairs that repels rain, snow and wind.
As I observe the dark-eyed juncos scratching in the snow beneath my bird feeders they look like grey on white puff balls. They also have two layers of feathers to repel the elements and retain body heat. This effect, related to goose bumps, is called piloerection and animals puff up their fur or feathers to not only look larger as a defense mechanism but also as a means of thermoregulation to conserve energy and retain heat.
In the run-up to winter wild animals consume more calories to build-up stores of fat. This additional fat not only adds an extra layer of insulation it also is a store of energy reserves that can be metabolized during periods of food scarcity.
Deer and rabbits modulate their circulatory systems (an evolutionary mechanism - not a parlor trick) such that blood vessels found in the ears and other extremities have reduced blood flow helping to retain core body temperature.
Naturally, many animals (just like many of my neighbors and friends) beat it out of dodge before the Thanksgiving holiday and return with the warmer temperatures and lengthening days of springtime. The herons, cranes, orioles and many other birds winter in warmer climes along with many of their warm season human neighbors.
Other animals split the difference. They don't migrate and they don't recreate; they hunker down to ride-out the winter. The resident skunks, snakes, muskrats, salamanders, chipmunks, badgers, bears, turtles and other burrowing wildlife retire to their underground dens and enter a state of torpor or hibernation - a condition characterized by reduced metabolism where they survive on fat reserves or food caches over the winter season. While our apex species, the whitetail deer, do not have a location or den; they do regulate their movement during the harshest winter conditions and seek bedding areas in thick conifer cover which provides browse and serves as a windbreak and thermal protection.
Over millennia native wildlife have evolved and developed adaptations to managing all seasons and living conditions. It is both remarkable to witness and not so remarkable to understand. Get yourself a trail camera and situate it within view of a deer trail. Over the course of a season you can use your citizen science skills to document the changes one animal undergoes as they go through their annual molt.
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