Walks with Dogs

My posts are further apart these days. That’s because I need an audience and feedback. Will send out some notices and try to assemble such. If anything I ever did deserves an audience, it is this picture of Crotaphytus bicinctores , the Great Basin Collared Lizard.

Years ago I saw a huge one — possibly a foot long – in Mayberry Park near the river in the old days when you could be alone with your dogs all day in that park. This one is smaller. I’m not good at length estimation, but I would hazard 9 inches. He was where I’ve seen one other of his species in the past — the steep trail up to the higher grounds. He crawled around his rock to avoid me, but very slowly and he finally gave up and just posed. Here’s the best shot of him. When I recall how to create a Gallery in WordPress, I’ll put up the other pix.

Pleasant expression. Question: Does he like me?

Largest of his species I’ve yet encountered. Perhaps five inches including tail. He scuttled around a bush as I approached on a misty day, then held still for a photo op.

Click for larger image.

BadaBing: Graceful in Defeat

Six weeks seemed like eternity living too close to this  mouse. When I thought it would never happen, he ended up in the CatchMaster Live Humane MultiCatch Mouse Trap with Clear Lid — $14.99. His lust for peanuts in the shell was his undoing. His name is BadaBing, after the mobster hangout in The Sopranos.

Every night I heard him crashing around in the kitchen. Thuds when he landed on the floor. He could disappear in a corner where I couldn’t see any opening, not even the penny-sized opening mice presumably can squeeze into. I was never ready for him to dart out and I screamed every time. Eventually he lost all fear or respect for me and would appear from behind the couch or in the pantry or behind the refrigerator, or once, he shot across the bathroom floor in front of me – that was indeed a dark night. My fear and dread increased with the weeks and months and I became super-aware of him; I could sense his presence by a crawling in my skin. It was as though my nerves picked up his little emanations.Daily he increased his range, lengthening the little paths he followed. But still it seemed to be just one mouse as indeed it proved to be.

Six years ago I had just one, but it was a female, and I found mounds of feathers, peanut shells and other debris under the toaster oven where she planned to nest. Her reign of terror ended when I adopted my Border Collie, Sadie. In fact, it ended the first night Sadie was in the house, so I thought my mouse problems were over.

Note: I do not kill animals if at all possible, but ethical or not, I don’t have a problem with predators killing. My rationale is that predators, such as dogs, are hard-wired to kill whereas humans have options. You can argue with me if you want to, but if you’ve ever had your house over-run with mice, as I did in 1974, you won’t want to repeat the experience.

But Sadie is an old gal now and proved useless against BadaBing. He stood glaring at me defiantly from the counter. I picked her up until the two were nose to nose. “Mouse,” I told her. No action. I told a friend about this and we concocted a character for BadaBing: dressed in a tight striped T-shirt and leather vest, hands on his hips, sneering at the world, “I pity the fool. . . ”

So I tried three models of humane mouse traps before investing in the CatchMaster.

Famed Havahart® Two Door Mouse Trap: $19.68

The famed Havahart was useless. The trip mechanism consists of  tiny metal rods delicately balancing on one another. BadaBing learned to get in and get the peanut or the cheese or the cracker and get out, tripping the doors shut behind him, but never trapping himself. I tried taping the bait to the floor of the trap, but he got it out of the tape every time.

Smart Mouse Trap - By Humane Mousetrap

 So then I tried the Smart Mouse Trap –shaped like a little house, which I found on Amazon.com. They tell you to insert a saltine which doesn’t work – the saltine crumbles — and BadaBing ignored this device entirely.

Victor® Live Mouse Trap $4.06

He also ignored the little gray traps, the Victor, you get at Ace Hardware that tilt over to close. Sometimes he’d tilt them from the outside just for fun, and I’d hear him laughing in the dark.

So I was as shocked as he was to come out one morning and find him in the CatchMaster. Now what? I didn’t want him to die, but I didn’t want him to come back, nor to bring his friends. So I set him free on the grassy slope by the local elementary school. He tried to hide in the trap and I had to shake it and lightly pull his tail to get him out. By now I felt nothing but pity for the varmint who so terrorized me so recently. For the first time, I saw his delicacy and helplessness.

CatchMaster Live Humane MultiCatch Mouse Trap

Are humane traps really humane? I would never use the glue strip or the classic snap trap. Nevertheless, just the act of relocation may signal his demise. Now an animal designed to live indoors is outdoors. He faces lack of feta or Havarti cheese. He faces cold, wind and rain (although I read mice can swim). Predators abound.

My best hope for him is that children will drop lots of candy where he shivers, alone and lost. Or that he’ll find a penny-sized entrance to the school and a warm closet.

Meanwhile, have I solved my problem, or will another mouse move in now that the alpha male (yes it does work that way) has lost his territory?

Karma is intricate, my friends, and the path is full of curves.

I skulked him and he obliged with some action shots. He’s heading almost 90 degrees vertical up the side of a gully about a foot and a half high.

One small step for human; one giant mountain for horned lizard.

This guy ran right in front of me. His defense, not very good, was to scuttle then stop, scuttle then stop. What a fragile creature. He got under some roots just seconds before the dog bounded on the scene. I like the second photo best; there he is in action. 

Click on thumbnail for full size image

The leaves in the squash beds are so large and dense by now that monsters can grow undetected for weeks. I literally stumbled upon first one, then a few days later another: 15-inch veterans that take two hands to hold. So heavy they had sprung forth from their boundaries and lay upon the ground outside the raised beds, still firmly connected to their thick stems. They seemed to appear overnight, but they must have been growing all summer.

Probably some gardener out there can tell me: squash or gourd? Summer or winter? Predatory or friendly? Picked too early or too late? Suitable for drying and gourd art?

After portrait time, I baked the first one with feta cheese, butter, raw sugar and cinnamon. Rind is too solid to eat; interior is wonderfully delicate flavor.

I need to show the latest off for a while, maybe take it places with me, before sacrificing it. When vegetables get this big, they’re more like pets.

Click on thumbnails to see full image.

Monstro One: dressed up

Contrast: ordinary mortal

Monstro Two

Monstro Two and relative

The fire was summer of 2007. I didn’t see the damage until a year later. This used to be an especially pleasant landscape with Utah junipers for shade and gently varied terrain: round hills, sandy side canyons, winding arroyo. I had just lost a significant friendship, and the devastation of this place where we used to walk, was a startlingly apt metaphor.

They say juniper takes 80 years to mature; so I won’t see it restored in my lifetime.

To make matters starker, the first time I went there and experienced the shock of the charred waste, there was also, inexplicably, a dead steer by the road where I parked. The dogs set to munching on it, despite the flies and rotting stink. Sadie gave up when I yelled, but Roger persisted until I got out the leash — my symbol of authority — and brandished it at him. Then he skulked back to the car, his only refuge from my fury.

Now, two years later, I can take it. This week was the first I could bear to take pictures. Click on thumbnails for full image. Sadie is in the pipe. The tree with the nest used to be the grandfather tree. Oddly, the hawk’s nest survived.

An often-repeated walk is never boring if one observes clouds. It’s about time I looked up.

Slide show:http://websighttrish.com/clouds0809/clouds0809.htm

Or click on thumbnails below. This is why I live in Nevada.

Horned Lizard 2-a Notice orange spots on sides. Gravid female?

Horned Lizard 1-b

Horned Lizard 1 -a

Hiking with friend Christi saw not one but two horned lizards bringing the total to about four I’ve discovered in my life. They’re everywhere, most often lurking by anthills. And they don’t run as fast as the thinner lizards, so once you spot one your chance of getting a picture is good. I spotted the first one and Christi found the second. These pictures occupied my desktop for a long time.

I avoided vegetable gardening until 2009. I do not like to fight nature, especially when backache is involved.  My soil is mostly clay with the thinnest of topsoil layers, no nutrition to speak of, no drainage, and hard as cement. So gradually I gave up on anything that required spectacular effort. A beautiful yard grew up around me over 16 years with volunteers and some plantings from the previous homeowner: aspens; honey locusts; a carpet of Virginia Creeper; apple and pear trees; blazing star, a desert flower some despise but I admire; a stick whose identity I do not know but which is today a graceful tree; cottonwoods sprouted from the neighbors trees; juniper now towering over the 2-story house . Yarrow flourishes even in my demonic killer flower bed, so does mallow.

I don’t like square angles. I don’t like trees in rows. My yard is graceful as a Tai Chi master and hardy as an old coyote. There’s some desert with rabbitbrush, another desert plant I happen to like, and some All American lawn.

I learned through painful setbacks to cultivate volunteers and introduce only the toughest survivors. Leyland Cypress did beautifully as did Scotch pines and that street thug of plants, pyracantha. Some roses blossomed; some died. All the carnations died, all the sunflowers died, although this season one sprang up in another part of the yard, possibly from birdseed.

I started talking to my plants as though they were candidates for a Special Forces green beret unit: if you can’t hack it, hit the road. No sissies. I avoided conversations with anybody dealing in fripperies like annuals and flowers. In fact, I avoided gardening talk altogether because it drove me crazy with everything they were doing and I was not. “You just go out there at midnight if the temperature drops below 48 degrees and you cover each leaf with a special coating that you have to order from a catalog and then you wrap them in plastic, but not just any plastic, and then you stay up and blow the hair dryer on them from a generator…”

The sunflower year further embittered me. There is a section delineated by wood strips in the center of my back yard presumably for flowers. So a ray of foolish optimism motivated me to buy starter sunflowers. Within a week they were crawling with aphids. Chemicals are out of the question, so I tried every home remedy on the internet. Soap suds, tobacco juice, garlic; then a noxious mixture of all three. My sunflowers were rapidly degenerating into chewed-up stalks resembling broccoli stems. I tried the ladybugs, only later finding out they are a joke among experienced gardeners. I purchased and set loose in the so-called flower bed an army of ladybugs. Within minutes they disappeared somewhere. I never saw them again. The aphids munched on until my sunflowers were bumps in the ground.

Interestingly, such invasions localize themselves. The aphids never left the flowerbed. By now, about six years later, I found the one plant that would not perish in that location: grass. And one of the five eunymous bushes remains. Nevertheless, that area is now lovely, the best feature is vinca, donated by a former handyman, thriving in an old stump.

The underlying truth, however, is that I was jealous. I was jealous of the neighbor leaving anonymous zucchini on my porch; jealous of an ex-boyfriend who raised all his own food (there’s a long story there), jealous of all the obsessive compulsive control freaks who had wrestled nature to the ground and produced vegetables in Nevada. I knew the answer was raised beds. I finally had the money and the time and I got the beds. The results were spectacular. Today I give overflowing bags of squash and Swiss chard to St. Vincent’s and various friends. Eggplants and melons are coming down the line. It’s a miracle to me and, like the birth and development of my grandbaby, ordinary in the big picture, but astoundingly magical if you really think about it.

See photo show of beginning stages in May. The soil around the beds became pliant from constant watering, then we got a miracle rainy June. By now I can throw melon seeds on the ground anywhere around the raised beds and they will sprout. The farm in May:

The produce: