Ranger Rob - Part II

Mrrrr Friends,

I know you’ve been wondering. But some of you knew we were going to think about burning. All those nice dry blackberry stalks and dead wood and things would make a nice little bonfire. And it’s autumn…so it just seems a nice opportunity to partake in one of those cross-cultural human obsessions – burning stuff. 

Obviously, cats are fascinated by fire. Visually, it is very interesting, and there is the warmth thing. But we are also fascinated by the human desire to set fires as frequently as possible. (We assume you do it because you can…the opposable thumb thing?) There’s the cooking thing, we get that…but this whole wood/brush fire thing, as long you haven’t treated it with anything, that’s just plain entertaining. Now, the trash burning thing is yucky. Especially plastic stuff - stinky, smelly, toxic yucky. Here in New York, they finally figured that out and have banned all trash burning effective soon. In the Adirondack Park, you can imagine that fires are a serious business from the get-go.

So my people applied for a burn permit from the Man. In this case the Man was the DEC, that’s Department of Environmental Conservation to you. I was very excited because the Ranger said he was coming over to the house to give us our permit.

The other morning, we were visited by our local Ranger, Ranger Rob. He lives upstream a ways and has a little boy person. It sounds like they play in the same stream we do.  He met me, gave Oom our permit and walked out and chatted for a bit about where we live.

We had questions about critters and plants and other stuff, and Ranger Rob had answers.

Let’s get straight to the big news: Oom was wrong, I was right. I knew I was seeing critters in my brook…Ranger Rob says the Brookies get to 12” upstream and that they live in our part of the stream too. I’ve always wanted to be engaged in the native trout fishery. I’m already making plans to improve trout habitat on our little portion of the stream.

Equally important: there are quite a few fishers among us. This kind:

Now, I know fishers can be dangerous, and that a cat might seem a tasty treat (though my tracker friends in Wisconsin feel that fishers don’t really want to eat house cats), still I feel a real affinity for these little guys. Look at that photo…doesn’t the little furry guy look a lot like me in action?

The trees in the wild side of the yard that Oom couldn’t figure out? Fire or Pin Cherry (Prunus pensylvanica). Nice little native that, in our yard, hangs out with a bunch of bushy alders that we can’t quite pin down species-wise.

And we talked about the likelihood of deer (certainly), moose (maybe), coyotes (maybe), skunk and raccoon (uh-huh), Ravens and Broad-winged Hawks (yep, yep). We’ve met the latter two, but I’m looking forward to meeting the others – from an appropriate distance, mind you. We’ll hope that if Alex sees a moose, she’ll choose not to chase it – she did this once with a deer…the deer was so amazed, it ran. I hear moose poop smells nice and musty.

Ranger Rob was full of information critically important to a furry feline looking forward to introducing himself into his new environment. And he was a nice quiet kind of man. I hope we can invite him back soon…maybe he could come and help with the new trout hatchery I’m planning?

Oh, the burn permit?

We had quite a little scorcher on the parking pad. Alex and I stayed in and watched from the windows. In a couple hours it was over…amazing how quickly all that work went up in smoke.

Ranger Rob - Part I

Mrrrr Friends,

I’ve mentioned my humans’ predilection for outdoor busy-ness? It seems to have reached new levels over the past 2 weeks. Boo kept going outside on the roof of the house with sandpaper and paint. After all kinds of sanding and hammering, he’d take out a can of white paint, and then cans of grey paint. I think he’s getting indecisive. Alex kept trying to help him, but the thought of her zipping around the rooftops makes his knees turn to jelly. Here he is out with the little scamp on his shoulders.

But Oom took the cake with her activities of late last week into this past weekend. She spent days pretty much murdering all kinds of brambly plants in order to make one particular part of the yard safe for big tall blackberries. Pretty species-ist, if you ask me, but then again, I kind of like the big, tall stalks. Walking through them makes me feel like I’m some cool explorer cat…and it has opened up a whole new area for digging holes and filling them up with goodies.

Here’s one end of the row of freed up stalks. Some of them are 6 to 7 feet high. Look at all those big piles of stuff! And this picture has about ¼ of what she pulled out. She was getting kind of possessed there at the end. We found a sweet little volunteer Trembling Aspen – we think – all covered by vines and shaded by Staghorn Sumac, something we have a bit too much of, in my opinion. I have hopes of climbing the aspen someday, but the sumac, just isn’t climbing material. The birds like it so, for their sake, much of it remains even after the hillside vegetation genocide.

Now we have all these nice blackberry plants all ready to do their thing next year. But we also had a big old pile of soon to be dead stuff to add to the already big pile of already dead stuff that they’d collected over the past few months.

Now what?