The 2013 summer edition of The Quarry Farm Newsletter is done.
Click on the cover to the left and see for yourself what’s coming up.
There are three events planned, so get registered while the getting’s good. Not all require preregistration, but still. Take a look.
It’s been summer for a little over a week now. On the quarry, and elsewhere in the region, I suppose, that means raspberries. Here they’re mostly wild and black, though there are a few domestic red raspberry brambles planted in the big back field nearly two decades ago. Now the picking of raspberries, dependent on where it is that they’re being picked, can involve some little bit of a blood-letting. Here, along the wildest areas of The Quarry Farm, that is certainly the case.
There are the brambles, of course, with their little thorns that snag cloth and skin. And then there are also the multiflora rose bushes, the thorns of which are a bit more than little and, consequently, do a bit more damage. Hawthorne and honey locust trees have thorns that, for the unwary, can prove literally life-threatening: honey locust thorns can grow to as long as five or six inches, come in clusters of ten or twelve at a time and are as sharp as needles. But botany is only one aspect of the blood bath. Mosquitos range in clouds of hundreds, along with midges, horseflies, deerflies and a host of other little biting beasts.
But the berries themselves make the challenges worthwile, not to mention the sights that come along with the raspberries. Things like dragonflies and damselflies seesawing back and forth as they chase their meals, those same pesky insects that are intent on syphoning blood; little black toads that scurry from spot to spot; robberflies pursuing the same kinds of prey as the dragons and damsels, but in a much more “point A to point B” kind of way; turkey vultures soaring across skies of blue and grey, catching thermals and various drafts that send them scooting to the horizon; and ropes of grapevine and poison ivy.
The berries, though, are the goal, and this year’s crop is bountiful. Speaking of which, the telephone just rang and it seems there’s a pie cooling on a counter not too terribly far from here.
Time to go.
If you’re lucky, we’ll save you a piece.
It’s been a bit longer than we like between posts. But since spring is finally here (knock on wood) you will forgive us since you, like us, are probably running around in today’s sunshine before tonight’s predicted rain.
Silence on the web does not mean it’s been quiet for The Quarry Farm. The new chicks are growing, as is the grass for Buddy and the goats. Fezzik and Inigo are displaying for every female fowl that could conceivably give them the time of day. Inconceivable? Not so for the little red hen that follows Fezzik around. The wild turkey hens on the nature preserve could care less, however.
Eventwise, The Quarry Farm has been on the road for the last couple of weekends. Saturday, April 20 took us up I-75 into Michigan for the Monroe Conservation District Tree Sale. Tim Kwiatkowski, good friend and conservationist for Michigan Agriculture Environmental Assurance Program (MAEAP), invited us, and an assortment of aquatic macroinvertebrates from Cranberry Run as well as an opossum that matured overwinter here, to be part of the Monroe County Earth Day celebration that was held alongside the tree sale pickup.
It was cold and the wind blew. Despite the weather thousands of trees were sold and the buyers learned a little about biological indicators and that Virginia opossums are fantastic garbage collectors. Some even decided the little guy was cute.
He was cute. And we assume he still is, wherever his nomadic opossum ways take him. Once the evenings warmed toward the middle of the week he finally ventured out of his open hutch and into the wild.
Cassie poses
Today, we had a short drive to the 6th Annual Mutt Strut and Craft Market sponsored by Putnam Pet Pals to benefit the homeless and neglected dogs of Putnam County and Northwest Ohio. They do good work and put on a great, loud show every year at the Putnam County Fairgrounds. Last year we set up a table at the Strut; it turned out to be one of the best offsite events that The Quarry Farm has ever been part of as we handed out packs of newsletters, talked to some amazing, compassionate people, and produced more canine caricatures than we could track. Although this year’s weather was sunny and warm, a day for breeding garage sales and other such competitions for public attention, the fairground was still hopping.
Better make that barking.
Good times.
It’s only Tuesday and it’s already a busy week.
On Monday, we received a call from the Pandora branch of the United States Postal Service.
“There is,” a woman explained, ” a package for you.” Long pause. “And it’s talking.”
The chicks we’d ordered late last winter had arrived: five Black Australorps, five Black Giants and, as it turns out, six (though we only ordered five) Buff Orpingtons. Now ordinarily we don’t buy the animals that live here. There are more than enough domestics out there in need of a different situation that we don’t have to. But chickens? Well, they hold a special place in my heart and, frankly, they feed us. Not with their bodies; we’re vegetarians. But we have absolutely no issue with eating the eggs they produce, 
particularly since the eggs they lay are infertile. This is not to say that we don’t take in wayward chickens. We do and have: Barbara the Australorp, Karen the Rhode Island Red and Big Girl, the Ameraucana, just to name a few. But there’s something about raising a chicken from virtually her first breath. At least, there is for me.
Then, on Tuesday, today, we received a call from Nature’s Nursery Center for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation Education. A couple in our county had found an orphaned red fox kit and were looking for assistance. I met Rachel and Andy in Ottawa in the parking lot of the local Rite Aid. They explained that they’d found him huddled next to a dead sibling and kept a watch out for the mother. 
When nearly two days had passed without an appearance, they took the kit in and contacted NN, which in turn called us. We provided him with a little watered down formula, which he gladly drank, and, since he was severely dehydrated, gave him a subcutaneous injection of sterile saline solution. So he’s here for the interim. Tomorrow, we’ll try him on a slurry of soft cat food and formula.
From there, thanks to Rachel and Andy, the sky’s the limit.
Ready For Love
It’s spring, the time of year when love is in the air, or, as Walt Disney put it, when all the animals are twitterpated. Insofar as The Quarry Farm is concerned, noboby shows their love quite so dramatically as the two bronze turkeys we recently took in. The fact that both birds are male hasn’t dampened their ardor. Not one bit. They strut about the property, feathers fluffed and tails fanned, gobbling for all they’re worth. But it’s their heads that provide the real entertainment.
Not in the mood
Turkeys, both wild and domestic, have two prominent features on and about their heads: wattles and snoods. The wattle hangs below the beak while the snood sprouts from the cere just above the bony part of the beak. During peak periods of romantic interest, both the snood and the wattle fill up with blood and turn bright red. Contrarily, when they’re scared, tired or simply don’t find you attractive, both features turn a grayish blue.
I woke up this morning with this in my head:
[In Just-]
by e.e. cummings
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
I have a passion for poetry and cummings is one of my favorite artists. Inevitably, this particular piece of work comes to mind at some point in March. While not the first sign of Spring, it is a significant one for me. Still, you needn’t look to the page, or even delve into the convolutions of my sleep-addled mind to find the artistry of onrushing Spring.
Of late I’ve seen the return of turkey vultures and red-winged blackbirds and American robins in arguing masses so large that they’ve painted an acre of the big back field nearly white with their droppings. I’ve heard the buzz of a woodcock and the whickering of its wings as it flew toward the moon to prove its worth to a potential mate. Skunks and ‘coons and squirrels quarrel and fight in the woods and Canada geese and mallard ducks, in flocks and individual pairs, holler from the quarry.
In the lowest lying areas of The Quarry Farm, back in the woods and well below the quarry itself, on the ground referred to by locals as Coburn’s Bottom, vernal pools have already formed. These temporary ponds serve as habitat for a host of ephemeral animals: fairy shrimp and salamanders and mayfly nymphs and dragonflies. Within a few months, the pools will have evaporated, but their inhabitants remain in burrows underground or as eggs, tiny packets of a potential future.
And then there’s the greening of the woods, with mosses already climbing up the trees and laying soft blankets on the ground. It’s easy to forget that this whole area was once rainforest. It’s easy to forget, that is, until you take the time to walk into an Ohio woods and take an honest look around. And if it’s not a matter of forgetting – if, in fact, you didn’t know – then the realization of where you are is an epiphany and you’ll never look at a stand of trees in Northwest Ohio in quite the same way again.
(e.e. cumming’s [in Just-] was originally published in The Dial, Volume LXVIII, Number 5: May, 1920)
Five years ago, while bringing Anne home from a stint on the EPA vessel Lake Guardian, her car, a seven year old Toyota we bought used to begin with, gave up the ghost in dramatic fashion. As we came into Findlay from the east, the car gave a thump and a shudder and began belching thick, black smoke.
We limped into town and into the first car dealership we came to, then walked the roughly half-of-a-mile down to a second, having seen nothing we were interested in at the first. There Anne spotted a Scion xA and almost immediately fell in love. We had her old Toyota towed to the dealership and used it as a downpayment on what she now fondly refers to as her “little rollerskate.” If you’re unfamiliar with the xAs, they’re a smaller version of the current xD and similar in shape to the Honda Fit. In short, they’re microSUVs.
We’ve hauled just about everything in that little car: hawks, falcons, vultures, pigs, dogs, cats, ducks, geese, foxes, opossums, crows, owls over a dozen species of songbird, 55 gallon aquariums, bales of hay and straw and the list goes on. Most recently, Anne’s Little Rollerskate faced what we thought would be its greatest challenge: three pygmy goats.
Willow
We’ve talked for years about maintaining a small herd of dairy goats, but the closest we’ve come are Marsh and S’more, the two Nigerian Dwarf wethers that have lived on The Quarry Farm for nearly three years now. So, when we were told about these three goats, an intact buck and two does, we contacted the woman with whom they lived. As with so many others, the recession had hit her hard. Having been without work for months and still recovering from a necessary surgery nearly a year ago, she found herself without the means to care for her herd of goats. Most went to a local farm (she lives in Rootstown, south of Ravenna in eastern Ohio), but she was left with these three until she contacted The Quarry Farm.
Elora
It was a miserable day for a drive when we left Putnam County. There was just enough snow to make the roads treacherous and it took nearly four hours to make a trip that should have taken only three. Add to that some skepticism on my part that we’d be able to fit three adult goats and ourselves in Anne’s little subcompact and it made for a tense trip.
As it turns out, I should have left my doubts at home.
Once we arrived at our destination, we were delighted to discover that the goats were even smaller than we’d imagined. The older doe and the buck, Willow and Madmartigan respectively, stand no taller than eighteen inches at the shoulder, while Elora, the younger doe, is even smaller. Even with a full set of horns, horns that we initially padded turban-like with a towel, Madmartigan could easily stand up straight in the car, and all three were able to move freely around the cargo compartment.
Martigan
The ride home was uneventful and we introduced all three to their new living quarters. Now they’re permanent members of The Quarry Farm family. And you’re all welcome to come and visit them and the rest of the facility. Just give us a call. We’ll be happy to show you around.
NOTE: Before anyone tells us that we have the wrong kind of goats for milking, we know. The animals that live here on the conservation farm of The Quarry Farm are here because, in almost all cases, they had nowhere else to go and we could offer them a home. Most do carry their weight: goats eat invasive plants, chickens give us eggs, Buddy and the geese guard the property, etc. The pygmies will make it possible for school groups and other visitors to see goats being milked. And we’ll have goat milk.
If you have ever had an affinity for writing, someone at sometime has said to you, “Write what you know.” It’s good advice. But what they don’t tell you is that sometimes what you know is what you love and, on occasion, you are so close to what you love that writing about it becomes more than simply difficult. Your love becomes a chasm that words can’t bridge. I’m going to type a word now that, to me, embodies this whole concept.
Crows.
It’s a little word and they are a common bird, but even so, I have been enamoured and fascinated by crows for decades. By those who study animal intelligence, they are widely considered the most intelligent of birds. They aren’t simply tool users, but meta-tool users, designing tools by which they can get a tool to accomplish a task. They raise their young in multigenerational family groups, teach specific lessons to their young who, in turn, teach their own offspring these self-same lessons, communally avoid areas of known danger and may even use the same insecticide (formic acid deliberately obtained from the crushed bodies of ants) they use to rid themselves of lice and other pests to attain a state of inebriation.
That’s right. Crows may get loopy on ant juice.
And here’s the rub: I live with two of them. Literally live with them. In my house. And have done so for over a year. Their names are Blackie and Jo. Both came to us through Nature’s Nursery Center for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation Education. Blackie first and then Jo. Over that time, a day hasn’t passed that one or the other of the two hasn’t done something noteworthy, engaged in behavior that wasn’t worthy of mention. Even so, getting the concept of them down, the enormity of their impact on my life, has proven overwhelmingly difficult. So, although I’ve tried, and there are literally dozens of drafts on this site that support my claim, I haven’t passed along a single anecdote.
Until now.
To get to the meat of it, though, I have to seemingly stray away from the subject. Be patient.
Recently, we took in an additional fourteen hens. We acquired them locally from a pair of farmers who found themselves swimming in chickens. As I understand it, they were told by their supplier that their order of 150 chickens couldn’t be mailed, that they would have to drive to the hatchery and pick them up. Which they did, only to receive, a few days later, a shipment by mail of another 150. They were completely unprepared for so many birds, didn’t have the facility to house them all, although it appeared that they had tried. When we picked up our fourteen, the most the farmers were willing to part with, there were easily 200 hens and several roosters housed in a building no more than ten foot by fourteen. The birds had pecked each other raw, stripping the feathers from one another until many were half-plucked. To make a long story short, two of the chickens we took in have died, the (hopefully) last of them either late last night or early this morning. And now we get back to the crows.
Of the two crows that live with us, Jo is my girl. We bonded immediately. She greets me each morning, and I, her. It’s a complex thing involving specific crooning vocalizations. We visit with each other and preen one another. And when I’m outside where she can see me, she caws loudly and sits on the windowsill, watching me as I go about whatever task is at hand. Today, the one she watched me perform was the disposal of the body of the chicken that had died sometime during the night. As I was coming back up to the house, in the window of the room where the crows stay, I saw a small blob of brown bobbing in the window. It was obvious that Jo was in the window waving something around, but it took me a moment to figure out what it was.
As I mentioned earlier, crows are highly intelligent and they need a variety of stimulations to keep themselves occupied. We give them puzzles to solve and simple objects that they find interesting. One of Jo’s favorite toys is one of those tiny little plastic ducks, and by little I mean just a couple of inches long and maybe an inch and a half high, that you find all over the place. I’m sure you’ve seen them: little plastic ducks dressed like firemen or doctors or executives or sports figures. At the very least, you get the picture.
In this case, the little plastic duck looks like a little, brown, lifeless chicken.
And she was waving it in the window after watching me walk down the path behind our house with my own little, brown, lifeless chicken.
Think of it what you will. Maybe Jo was just showing off one of her favorite toys, trying to entice me back into the room for a little play time (which, by the way, she succeeded in doing). Maybe it was simply coincidence. It’s possible.
But I don’t think so.
Perhaps you recall the quiz that wrapped the January 14 post?
“Here’s a little quiz for you: Your eyes and nose present clues that can help you determine cause and effect. We all know that. When you study the photo above of the flooded foot bridge (click for an enlargement) you can see different kinds of plants, trees, and even water. See the stacked foam along the bridge? What does an accumulation of six inches or more of foam along a water body’s edge indicate?”
Thanks to Daryl Bridenbaugh who pointed out that the answer was not forthcoming the following day as noted in the original post, here’s the rest of the story:
A) Too many toad eggs to count
B) Everyone in the tri-county area did laundry today
C) Something smells fishy!
ANSWER: Both B and C. The foam build up on this particular day was piled up above six inches on the bridge and stream bank and did not break apart easily. It smelled musty…kind of like laundry that been left out on a rainy day. However, there was patchy foam floating in the current.
Some of this foam is caused by naturally occurring dissolved organic compounds. Foam that doesn’t build up very high and that breaks apart easily. This kind of foam sometimes smells fishy.
The day-old-wash stuff may be a different story. It can be a sign of human activity, including detergents and excess nutrients that can increase algae growth, more suspended solids and lower dissolved oxygen for the fish, insects and everything else that makes its living in the aquatic food chain.
Sometimes you don’t need a chemical test kit to get an idea what’s flowing downstream. Just use your eyes, ears and nose. If they tell you something’s fishy (and not in a good way), then it’s time to take a closer look for the source.
For more detailed reading, visit http://www.umaine.edu/WaterResearch/FieldGuide/onthewater.htm.
Alicia and Andrew Phillips review a winter star chart before leaving Red Fox Cabin for the trails.
Astronomers have posited that if you were to count each and every grain of sand on all of the world’s beaches, you still wouldn’t come close to the number of stars in the sky. As a matter of fact, it’s suggested that you’d have to multiply that number by ten before you’d even come close. So it should come as no surprise, then, that the human imagination has configured the stars into any number of shapes over the thousands of years that we’ve been staring skyward. This past Saturday night, a group of participants in The Quarry Farm’s first Star Walk had the opportunity to view a few of these constellations.
It was nearly a perfect night for such an event. Although cloud cover had made star-gazing next to impossible for most of the week, a cold front moved in late Saturday afternoon and swept the sky clear. And while still chilly, the woods that surround the big back field provided a windbreak and pulled the teeth of the worst of the cold. While the wind howled outside the preserve, some stargazers even removed an outer layer.
Mike Erchenbrecher looks to the stars
Mike Erchenbrecher, an award-winning retired Franklin County science teacher and avid amateur astronomist, escorted more than a dozen people through the woods and back to the big eleven-acre field where we all turned our faces up. Mike immediately pointed out the Hunter’s two dogs, Canis Major, the big dog, and Procyon, the little dog, and then the Hunter himself, Orion, with his belt of three stars. His finger traced a giant W as he talked about Cassiopeia, the Queen, who is forever chased by Cepheus, the King. And then, of course, there were the zodiacal constellations. At this time of year, the most readily recognizable of such is Gemini, with its two bright stars, Castor and Pollux. Taurus is also recognizable, as well as Cancer.
Some closeups of what we saw:
Jupiter and its moons*…we could make out a moon on either side of bright Jupiter overhead.
The Orion Nebula** below Orion’s Belt appeared to us as a hazy spot.
Our Milky Way was outshown by the half moon, but the Andromeda galaxy** was visible to the north.
Mike handed out star charts and independent-study over hot chocolate and cookies. Here are satellite passes for the next few days:
International Space Station
| Brightness | Start | Highest point | End | Pass type | |||||||
| [Mag] | Time | Alt. | Az. | Time | Alt. | Az. | Time | Alt. | Az. | ||
| 20 Jan | -0.8 | 06:11:53 | 13° | N | 06:11:53 | 13° | N | 06:13:03 | 10° | NNE | Visible |
| 21 Jan | -0.9 | 06:56:32 | 10° | NNW | 06:58:23 | 14° | N | 07:00:13 | 10° | NE | Visible |
| 22 Jan | -0.8 | 06:08:04 | 13° | N | 06:08:04 | 13° | N | 06:09:28 | 10° | NNE | Visible |
| 23 Jan | -1.2 | 06:52:31 | 11° | NNW | 06:54:49 | 18° | NNE | 06:57:12 | 10° | ENE | Visible |
| 24 Jan | -0.9 | 06:04:09 | 15° | N | 06:04:14 | 15° | N | 06:06:16 | 10° | NE | Visible |
| 25 Jan | -1.8 | 06:48:34 | 13° | NNW | 06:51:01 | 29° | NNE | 06:53:57 | 10° | E | Visible |
| 26 Jan | -1.4 | 06:00:13 | 21° | NNE | 06:00:27 | 21° | NNE | 06:03:04 | 10° | ENE | Visible |
| 27 Jan | 0.1 | 05:11:53 | 11° | NE | 05:11:53 | 11° | NE | 05:12:04 | 10° | ENE | Visible |
| 27 Jan | -3.0 | 06:44:40 | 18° | NW | 06:46:56 | 62° | NNE | 06:50:11 | 10° | ESE | Visible |
| 28 Jan | -2.2 | 05:56:22 | 37° | NNE | 05:56:25 | 37° | NNE | 05:59:30 | 10° | E | Visible |
| 29 Jan | 0.0 | 05:08:06 | 13° | ENE | 05:08:06 | 13° | ENE | 05:08:37 | 10° | E | Visible |
| 29 Jan | -3.0 | 06:40:53 | 24° | WNW | 06:42:33 | 50° | SW | 06:45:44 | 10° | SE | Visible |
Iridium Flares
OK, so what’s an iridium flare? Iridium flares are relatively new ultra bright objects in the sky, produced by the glancing reflection of the sun’s rays off a particular type of satellite–the Iridium satellite. Because the main mission antenna are pointing towards Earth, at predictable points in their orbit, they pickup the sun’s glare and direct it towards the Earth, producing the “flash”. Because they flash so quickly, here are the dates and times to look fast:
| Time | Brightness | Altitude | Azimuth | Satellite | Distance to flare centre | Brightness at flare centre | Sun altitude |
| Jan 22, 18:18:55 | -0.5 | 31° | 198° (SSW) | Iridium 46 | 33 km  |
-7.0 | -7°  |
| Jan 23, 18:12:57 | -2.6 | 31° | 200° (SSW) | Iridium 49 | 17 km |
-6.9 | -6° |
| Jan 23, 19:48:44 | -0.9 | 34° | 155° (SSE) | Iridium 58 | 34 km |
-7.6 | -24° |
| Jan 24, 19:42:42 | -3.7 | 35° | 156° (SSE) | Iridium 55 | 14 km |
-7.6 | -22° |
| Jan 25, 19:36:36 | -0.1 | 34° | 155° (SSE) | Iridium 31 | 40 km (E) | -7.6 | -21° |
For these and other updates realted to satellites (natural and human-made): http://www.heavens-above.com/?lat=40.94806&lng=-83.96111&loc=Pandora&alt=227&tz=EST
To find out where the International Space Station is in relation to you, enroll at http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/ to get alerts for your specific area
Find yourself looking at the night sky with your cell phone in hand? Use to “GoogleSky” to help you navigate the view.
* Michael Stegina/Adam Block/NOAO/AURA/NSF
** Satellite images taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope
