White tail

We see white-tailed deer quite often on our farm. They appear out of the woods around dusk or dawn, when they feel most safe. But it’s the does we usually see, traveling in groups of two to four -typically an adult female and one or two fawns.

The bucks are much shyer – we almost never see them and then only when the light is so weak that it’s difficult to tell if you’re seeing something or not.

Once, on a January day, after an unusually heavy snowfall, we were treated to the rare site of a group of eight bucks traveling together. We’d left our backfield uncut that winter and the bucks were grazing and butting heads, practicing for rutting season. The scene was so classical, mythic, that I could almost hear Beethoven’s pastoral symphony playing.

White-tailed deer are actually more plentiful today that they were when Europeans first came to Kentucky. These deer exploit tree lines, moving among them and using them for cover and quick escape from open pastures. The more tree lines, the better for the deer, and there are many more tree lines and pastures in Kentucky today than 200 years ago.

A voice in the silence

On certain days, when the wind is out of the northwest, our farm falls silent to the noise of the outside world. There is no drone of traffic, no siren, nor background city noise, only an uncanny silence that we of the modern world find so unfamiliar that it is, at first, unsettling.

Sit by a calm lake on such a fall day and open your senses to the natural world. Listen to the leaves rustling in the trees. There is a voice there like no other. Open your eyes to the detail and in a short time you’ll realize that there is more life around you than your everyday eyes can see. Take in the scent of the lake and its surroundings. Your senses become clearer, your mind quiet, and you have time to realize that you are alive and, for a moment, part of the Earth - not a machine. It is not a feeling of loneliness, it is a feeling of belonging, and there is none more satisfying.

I have felt triumph, pride, love, hate, sadness, jealousy, wonder, and frustration in my life. All the moments I’ve lived have brought me feelings, but most of those experiences swirl together in a frantic, blurred, muddle. They all fade, pale and irrelevant, when compared to the sensation of serenity I have experienced in those moments of natural silence.

Shagbark

You can recognize a mature Shagbark Hickory (Carya ovata) by its flaking bark. I’d never seen a Shagbark before we moved to our farm. These hardwood trees use to be very common in Kentucky, which is part of the Central U.S. Hardwood forests. When the Europeans first came to the Americas the old growth forests they found astounded them. They has never see forest so abundant and deep. The Central Hardwood oak-hickory forests consist of white and red oak, shagbark hickory, locus, poplar, flowering dogwood, sassafras and hop hornbeam.

If you ever visit Pleasant Hill (Shakertown) in Mercer county Kentucky make sure to stop by the cistern house. There you can see beams supporting the cistern reservoir that are four inches thick, twenty-five inches plus wide, and fifteen feet long. “Boards” of these dimensions were once common. The oak-hickory forest the boards came from were so vast that it was said “a squirrel could travel from the East Coast to the Mississippi River without touching the ground,” but no more. An amazing ninety-nine percent of the Central Hardwood Forests was destroyed by development and agriculture.

The Fox squirrel (Sciurus niger) is just one of the squirrels that populate the Central hardwood forest. They are larger than the Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) that you see in towns and cities. The Fox squirrel also has a reddish color and stubby ears and they are very shy. When we first moved to our farm we couldn’t get within a hundred yards of one – the are now more tolerant, letting us get fifty yards away before they run for the safety of a tree. They love Shagbark Hickory nuts, which taste good but take too much work for me to bother. The nut has two layers – the outer later is inedible, and the hartnut is hard containing only a little meat.

The last blooms of Fall

Autumn is close at hand and the animals and insects on our farm know that the cold days of winter are upon us. The squirrels are working hard to put up winter stores of nuts and when the days are warm the bees are scrambling to gather nectar. They will collect flower nectar and convert it to honey for their overwinter. It is very important that they have sufficient honey to keep the colony large enough for winter – a hive must cluster together in winter in order to maintain the temperature (9 degrees Celsius - 48 degrees Fahrenheit) required for their survival.

A couple of weeks ago the Sedum in our garden was still blooming and humming with honey, bumble and sweat bees. The Sedum is withered now and the bees have moved on to other flowers that are still blooming.


It is good to see the Honey bees so hard at work. In 1991 Honey bees in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky were hit with Varroa mites – a parasite that attacks adults and the brood. This parasite often kills entire honeybee colonies and greatly reduced their numbers in Kentucky for more than a decade.

Cotton or Scottish thistle (Onopordum acanthium) does not seem to be much loved by bees. Perhaps it’s the thorns – which, legend tells us, are so bothersome that they helped protect Scotland from the Vikings.

Praying Mantis (Mantodea)

It’s mating season for the praying mantis in right now. The females are working extra hard in our garden eating insects to build up enough energy to produce eggs. A gravid female praying mantis – like the green one shown - will produce an ootheca (large foamy mass that can contain up to 300 eggs). The ootheca sack helps protect the eggs.

Mating season is not an easy season for male praying mantis. They don’t need to feed as much as the females, but the mating ritual is risky for them. About 20 percent of the time a female praying mantis practices cannibalism with their mates. They bite the males head off during the act and, surprisingly, he keeps mating. The reason for the cannibalism is not entirely clear. It could be their aggressive nature or just the need for additional nutrition to produce eggs.

Praying mantis are exceptional hunters. They have excellent vision and hunt by stealth and a rapid striking attacks. They usually hunt other insects but some have been known to go after small vertebrates. The praying mantis has the distinction of being one of the few insects that can turn their heads.

Heritage

I shall not leave these prisoning hills
Though they topple their barren heads to level earth
And the forests slide uprooted out of the sky.
Though the waters of Troublesome, of the Track Fork,
Of Sand Lick rise in a single body to clean the valleys,
To drown lush pennyroyal, to unravel rail fences;
Though the sun-ball breaks the ridges into dust
And burns its strength into the blistered rock
I cannot leave. I cannot go away.

From The Wolfpen Poems by Kentucky writer James Still

Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis)

In our sheep field, on the top of a fencepost, we have a Bluebird house. This dwelling hosts about two broods of chicks per year. Bluebirds are magnificent songbirds, medium-sized thrushes really, that love open woodlands, farmlands and orchards. Bluebirds have a white belly, blue wings, and a reddish brown throat and breast. They range east of the Rockies from southern Canada to the Gulf States and as far south as Nicaragua. Bluebirds are very territorial and this evening four or five males were trying to claim the ground over the house as their own.

Bluebirds like to nest in old Woodpecker holes, natural cavities, or nesting boxes. Bluebirds are particular about their houses. This birdhouse sits about five feet off the ground, has an eight inch tall cavity, with the entrance that’s 1.5 inches in diameter and six inches above the door. As I said, they are particular.

We see all kinds of birds on our farm including Yellow Finches, Blue Jays, Red birds, Crows, Turkey Vultures, Red Tailed Hawks, Wild Turkeys, Killdeer, Great Blue Heron, ducks, Canada Geese, Meadowlarks, Swifts, Humming Birds, and occasionally Pileated Woodpeckers, Red-Headed Woodpeckers, and American Kestrels. Some times at night we hear Whip-Poor-Wills, Barn Owls, and Mocking Birds. We usually leave a field uncut in winter – the birds pick off the grass seeds all the way through spring.