Just Go Outside

It's a beautiful day in western Washington...I took the morning off and went to Monroe for some errands. It was a real treat to have to find my sunglasses as I headed north. Can't say I got everything done I needed to do, but did hit the used books at the library and added to my pile of "must reads". I do have to be careful that books don't keep me inside too much - It's a great time of year to just go outside.

The big disappointment was that the dog park by the river not only flooded, but seems not to be repaired in the aftermath. I'd hoped to make some connections there and find dogs to add to my Tracking Intensive project...but now I'll have to look elsewhere.

On a happier note, I was able to pick up enough Black Cottonwood (Populus nigra) buds to start a new batch of oil for making salve in the fall.

Just to spend a little while outside in the sun was fabulous! I've also noticed that the evening sky stays light a little bit longer - I'm so happy that spring is getting a little closer each day!

A Nice Surprise Today!

It's always nice to find a package in the mail! Today I got one of my favorite gifts - a book. My friend Madonna sent me a second editon copy of "The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R. Tolkien. It's a wonderful book, and one I haven't read in many a year. I'm delighted to have it, and will enjoy it all over again.


It's the second book she's sent me recently. "The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging" by Arianna Huffington and friends arrived in time for my birthday although she mailed it from St. Louis on December 12th. Given our record snows in December I'm surprised it's not still in a drift somewhere. It's a good book, and I have been using some of her hints in this blog. Madonna says I'm going to get rich off it someday. I could live with that. It's a great book if you are thinking about starting your own blog. You might want to check it out.


I've recieved other books as gifts this year, too...One of them I'll feature in another "episode" of my blog because it's a cool naturalist/travel book from my friend Laurie.

My Vision for the Dog Tracking Photos

This was Jackson, my last dog, and his tracks in the snow...It would be better if he was standing and outside, but you can see his body type, and his feet are visible...the track photo is not bad. The pink ruler stands out, and there are both front and back tracks in the picture. Can you tell which is which?

Jackson was a 40 pound mixed breed - my vet though Shar Pei and Jack Russell among other things...Don't ever do that on purpose! He was healthy, except that he was born with a shallow right hip socket, which caused muscle loss and pain in that hip. He limped badly when tired.

I think it will be fun to see how many dog and dog track photos we can collect in one place...we might even learn something. If your dog has any type of foot, leg, hip or shoulder injury or disease, please mention it, as we might see it in the tracks!

To be included in the experiment, send photos as a jpeg attachment in an e-mail to me at possum59@yahoo.com ...

I'll start putting them up as they come in.

The Domestic Dog Tracking Project

I've been wondering if anyone would like to play along with my Tracking Intensive project...Here's what I have in mind.

What if I invited you to take a photo of your dog and a photo of your dog's track?Would you e-mail them to me so that I could put them in a photo album on our new school "Village" web site? It might be fun to see a bunch of dogs and their tracks all in one spot.

Tomorrow, I'll have an example of what I'd like to see you send. I'm thinking a full body shot of the dog (no people - I'm not tracking people) and a good close up of the dog's tracks, preferably with something for scale - a penny works great if you don't have a ruler in your camera bag.

Is anyone interested? Let me know!

Substrate Happens

I bet you never thought you'd

be looking at a photo of cow

poop on my blog...

In tracker lingo, it's scat, not poop. In this

case, it's the only trackable substrate I found in Arkansas last week. Apparently the rainy season here in the Seattle area is not the rainy season 3 hours northeast of Little Rock.

My sister promised the opportunity to track armadillos (Dasypus novemcinctus) while visiting...I was excited because they are unlike any other North American mammal, and are the only living member of their family Cingulata. They are native to Central America, but have moved up through the Southern states. The order Xenarthra also contains anteaters and sloths...none of which I'll get to track in the Pacific Northwest.

This is not the track of an armadillo...I didn't see anything that I could identify as such...the red clay, rocky soil was too dry for me to see anything resembling armadillo tracks. I did find this nice front and back track of another Midwest mammal. Can you guess what it is? I believe a fat groundhog, or woodchuck (Marmota monax),passed through this nice round bit of "substrate" before it was completely dry. The closest thing I'll see here in Washington is a Marmot (yellowbellied or hoary), so it's still a cool track photo to have in my collection.

Travels of a Tracker

So here's the story I've been wanting to
tell for a couple of weeks, but couldn't.

My old Missouri friends sent me a surprise for my
birthday, and I couldn't blog about it because I didn't
know if my Mom reads my blog or not....and my sister and I have been planning a surprise 70th birthday party for her for months. She thought it was a party for Andrew, my great-nephew who turned 6 on the 5th!

My hospital co-workers sent me a banner that nearly 50 people had signed with good wishes and kind thoughts...They also collected $110 in one and five dollar bills to help me get to Arksansas for the party! I'm not the "msuhy" type, but their kindness nearly made me cry. I had been a bit worried about how I would eat on the trip...the tickets were bought, but I would be short on traveling money. You could say that it really met a need!

I flew out of Seattle just ahead of a storm that would cause record flooding in my part of the state, and which would have kept me from going at all if my flight had been 24 hours later. It was a bumpy ride out of SeaTac, and my seatmate was a twitchy fellow who wanted to talk all the way to Dallas/Ft.Worth. I hoped to sleep on that part of the trip because we left just after midnight, and I had worked most of Tuesday and was tired.

There was a 2 hour delay while our pilot to Little Rock found a plane that he liked - I'm not complaining...if the pilot doesn't trust it, I don't want to be in it. I was really gald to see my sister Susan at the gate.

It's still a 3 hour drive to Violet Hill, where she and Mom live, so we stopped to have a bit of dinner on the way. Out here in Washington, they call it lunch, but I always had breakfast, dinner and supper, so that's what we had. It's been a while since I enjoyed steak and loaded smashed potatoes with sweet tea...I have to say that Pacific Northwest cooking doesn't come close to Southern meals...I miss the food more than I realized.

Mom was truly surprised...and happy. We had a big combined birthday party for the two of us and the 6 year old. I bet that Andrew still has blue lips from the frosting on the cupcakes!

On Thursday, Mom followed me around for a couple of hours while I tracked 4 more dogs, and found groundhog tracks in a cow pie in the pasture. We spooked a whitetail doe from the old slave cemetary . No armadillos or tracks were found, much to my dismay. Susan had promised I'd see and/or track them, but the ground was dry, hard and rocky, and we didn't even see any road-killed ones to check out.

Since Tracking Intensive class was this weekend, I flew home on Friday. About 130 miles out from Seattle, the pilot noted that we could see Mounts Rainier, Adams, St. Hellens and Hood all lined up against the horizon! What a beautiful welcome home it was.

Saturday we learned about bird feathers, and on Sunday we played in silt under bridges at Fall City and Carnation...one thing about floods is that the tracking is really good when the water goes down. Look for more photos soon!

"Happy Birthday" as sung by the coyote choir

January 3rd was my 50th birthday. I celebrated by taking a long walk in McCormick Park. The path was still quite icy and I walked really slowly, enjoying the bird activity. Only the Stellar's Jays had been active in my neighborhood, and the robins I'd seen earlier in the week looked so stressed by the cold and snow that I worried about their survival.

I saw several small flocks of Trumpeter Swans, and was able to get one quick photo before they flew out of range. The Chickadees were busy and entertaining. I spooked a flock of Mallards off the water, and watched a noisy Kingfisher fly past.

The highlight of the walk came when the fire department sirens went off. A coyote howled from the brush on the hillside to my left! More than one, but probably fewer than 5 answered from my right...it sounded as if I was surrounded by coyotes! It was the best verse of "Happy Birthday" I've ever been privileged to hear.

I walked a bit further and saw coyote # 10, the lone voice on my left. He was limping, but still actively hunting the hillside. I wondered if he'd hurt himself on the ice...I was limping a bit myself, having slipped (again) on an icy patch. He lives close to the highway, with cars always a danger, and at least one frequent dog walker braggs about letting her labs chase the coyotes in that stretch of park. Whatever the reason for his injury, he looked in good condition...I hope to see him again soon.

It Can Stop Snowing Now...

I got out for a walk this morning for the first time in a couple of days...except for a short hike to the Post Office on Christmas Eve, I haven't left my apartment since Monday.
I've heard on the Seattle area newscasts that this is only the 10th white Christmas in this area since 1891...seems like we got ALL the snow that was allotted to us in the past 12 days or so. Looking out my window onto the roof line below, there's easily 12-14 inches of powdery white stuff piled up there.

At first I was excited, because the dog tracking project seemed to take off...but then the neighbors stopped walking their dogs down the street. I've been there...when it's too cold or the snow is just too deep to be fun, the dog walks stay pretty close to the front door. And I've found it to be unsafe to be crawling around in the snow at the edge of the road trying to measure tracks as cars slide by.

I've just called in to Ben Franklin at Monroe, and found that I'm not on the schedule for this weekend! I missed working Sunday because I can't find a safe way to get down to highway 203. As much as I hated to call in, I was afraid to try to make it down the hill to the highway. 25 years of working at a hospital where calling in was not an option makes you want to try no matter how stupid, but I'm glad I've learned this: It's not worth risking your life or your car for a few dollars more in the paycheck at the end of the week. I don't think I could have said that before my Residential Program year....funny how the most important lessons you learn are the ones you don't even realize you were enrolled in.

Yikes!

This is a short but sadly funny comment...As I will be turning 50 on January 3rd, I suppose it should not have been a surprise to get a letter from AARP. Somehow, it just seems wrong to wind up on this mailing list. I don't know if I should be mad or sad. I don't feel older than, say 47 or 48. And what makes them think I'll be able to retire, anyway? Probably the smartest thing I've ever done was to cash in my retirement fund and come to the Residential Program. Given the current ecomomic news, it seems smarter than ever...but I'm wondering, will anyone of my generation and ecomomic status ever really be able to retire? Right now it does not look likely. But I'm so thankful that I took the money and ran when I did...I wouldn't have the option now.

Almost Missouri Cold!

Wow! This is the first time since I got here in Sept. 2006 that we've had anything approaching Missouri cold...It's really beautiful, and I walked to work today in a foot of snow! It just snowed like crazy yesterday, and I took a snow day...I tracked dogs #2 and # 3 in my driveway. It was really funny to see the neighbors come along. At first they thought I'd fallen, and would start over to see if I was OK. But then, they realized that I'm down measuring things in the snow...that's when they would veer away and look around as if my keeper must have let me out of sight. Once I explained my project, everyone thougt it was kind of cool. I'm off tomorrow, too. I should have lots of tracks by the end of next week, as the office is closed and I can track every day but Sunday...if I'm able to get down to the highway and get into Monroe...now there's a high wind warning. In 06, it looked like Christmas had exploded! Trees were down and power out for a couple of weeks in some places...I have plenty of food, so no worries there, but it could be scary if it's as windy as they say it might be.

Holiday Greetings!

Those of you who know me well will be surprised to hear that I invited a friend over last night for stew and Christmas movies. You might not be so surprised to hear that the movies were "Die Hard" and "Lethal Weapon".
With luck, that will be the end of my holiday celebrations. With family half way across the country, I won't have to go "visit" and I won't be sad about that either.

I'm looking forward to a quiet holiday, hot tea, good book and contented cat by my side. Likely, I'll have to turn down a few invitations, and most people don't get that I'm happy to stay home on the holidays. I want to work on some crafty type projecst, and perhaps do some dog tracking at the park on Christmas morning.

With a bit more luck, I'll be able to pay my car off a couple of months early and then look at quiting the weekend job! That will give me time and energy to work on the dog tracking project for my Tracking Intensive class. I can't wait to get going on that...the Basset Hound really got me excited about what I might learn about dog tracks.

Dog #1

This is Beba, a lovely and exuberant Basset Hound. She's 2 years old, and weighs 44 pounds. You could say that she "volunteered" for my project. She saw me coming from about 200 yards, and began wagging her entire body, hoping I'd come and talk to her! Once I'd explained my project, her owner readily agreed to come to the sandy beach and lay down some tracks for me...I'll bet no one ever mistakes these for coyote tracks!

Dog Tracking Update to Come...and Another Coyote

I forgot to bring in my photos to share...will get them up tomorrow, along with a story about tracking a Basset Hound!

I've about lost track of the coyote count...is it # 9 I saw today? I had to run into Monroe for Ben Franklin's Christmas breakfast early today...We shared a nice breakfast at Ixtapa, and I won a prize! On the way back in the fog, I saw another coyote standing at the edge of the highway just north of Duvall. Pretty cool! I'm astounded by my good luck today.

The Domestic Dog Tracking Project

Today I'm going to McCormick Park to start my Tracking Intensive project. If you hear news reports of a crazy woman accosting dog walkers in Duvall, it will probably be me.

I've been busy creating a plan, a worksheet, and a letter explaining who I am and why I want to take photos of dogs and measure their tracks. Today, I'll find out if it works.

My goal is to record measurements on 100 dogs before the project is due in May. If I could do it without taking any measurements at all, I would. But, as my friend Jonathan pointed out, it would be impossible to re-create the project later, so I may as well take all the measurements anyone will ever want to know.

Jim Halfpenny has set the standard for tracking dogs, and so I'm going to be taking 15 measurements on each set of tracks...times 3, and then getting an average value for each of the 15 measurements. And I'll be using the metric system instead of the more comfortable inches...

That's assuming I can actually talk people into going to the sandy beach area along the river. I'm not sure I'd have fallen for the "school project" story when I was walking my dog. It should be interesting to see what happens.

Hunters after the Flood

I had an unexpected day off on Saturday, and so took a walk along the path at McCormick park. I couldn't go far, as water was still up to the 2nd highest strand of wire at the low spot where the farm road crosses just north of the Safeway lot.

I didn't have to go any further - there was a fair bit of wildlife out enjoying the sunshine and mellow fall temperatures. I saw this pair of hunting coyotes - numbers 7 and 8 - on the backside of the open field just about 6 city blocks below my apartment. They knew I was on the bridge, and moved out of sight, but not before I got a dozen pictures! What a cool sight...even though there were a number of people and dogs out on the path, no one else noticed them.

The coyotes (Canis latrans) looked fat and in good conditon, probably since the small mammal population had been disrupted by the flooding. The vole was just a few hundred yards down the path. I still have to look up the species...I'm not so confident of my vole ID.

I saw several of them along the path. They would come out of the piles of dry leaves after someone had passed by. But, as soon as I moved in to get a photo, back in the leaf piles they would go. My shadow spooked a couple of them, and I only got photos of the spot where one had been just seconds before. Then, I got smart. I waited in one spot with camera ready as a jogger passed by. As soon as she was gone, this little critter came out into the sunshine and I got several pics of it as well. I expect that jumpiness pays off with the coyotes so near.

As I was leaving the park, one of the coyotes had retuned to the place I'd first seen them. I took a few more photos, then, one hunter to another, I wished it well and moved on.

What a Place to Work!

Monday is an all-day Staff Dirt Time day. I'm required to leave the office, go up to our land, and spend the morning working on - whatever. Not a skill they think I need to learn - just whatever nature skill I feel called to practice. It can be one I'm good at - basket-making, perhaps, or one I struggle with. My choice. How cool is that?

It cracks me up to think of the hospital telling me that I have to take a day off to play, with pay. The entire staff will be there. No one left at the office to answer the phone. No one going to the bank or the post office. Since nature mentoring is such an important part of the job here, they build time into the schedule to practice the skills and to mentor each other. Even those of us with office jobs are expected and encouraged to learn and share the skills of the naturalist.

I will be pulling out my bow-drill kit and working on fire. I haven't tried to get a coal since the Residential Program. I might go over to our new parcel of land and explore for a while, or I might do a bit of flintknapping. I might take a walk in the Enchanted Forest and look for this guy. We saw him Sunday during Tracking Intensive. Perhaps I'll see another coyote.

Since a number of us are interested, we will be carpooling into Seattle in the afternoon to listen to a cougar predation presentation at the University of Washington. I love this job! And I realize how truly blessed I am to be able to say that.

Trailing Elk

We had a guest instructor at Tracking Intensive this past weekend. Brian McConnel joined Dave Moskowitz in leading us through a day of trailing elk in the mountains just east of Snoqaulmie Pass.

There had been some lowland flooding on Friday, and more rain on the way, so starting out in the dark was a little scary. The Carnation to Fall City area seems to flood quicker than Duvall, and the web site to check King County road conditons was down. Although the rivers were up, we didn't find any road closures and crossed the pass without incident.

The Ponderosa Pine (Pinus ponderosa) forest lacked the dense ground cover of ferns that I've become acustomed to here in our Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and Western Hemlock (Tsuga heterophyll) forest of the western slopes of the Cascades. I thought finding elk (Cervus canadensis) would be easy. Of course with 8 students and 2 instructors, we were not going to sneak up on anything.

We were successful in finding fresh elk tracks, and each of us had a turn in the lead as we trailed them through the woods. Along the way we found many varieties of mushrooms and fungi, including a deadly Amanitas variety that Brian pointed out to us. Some of them were beautiful, others just slimy and weird-looking.

We got close enough to elk to spook a couple of them, which some of us heard crashing through the brush, then we found the muddy tracks and scattered leaves they left to entice us! Go to my WebShots page to see more photos.

An Early Morning Gift

I stopped at the intersection before stepping out onto the road and looked to the left for traffic, then to the ...wait a minute...what's that? My head swiveled back to the left and there it was! Coyote number 6 was trotting up the hill about a block from my apartment. Given the location, it's likely the same animal as Coyote number 4, and the one who leaves scat on the sidewalks around the wooded area where a dry stream bed wonders down the hill toward Highway 203.

I reached for my camera, but before I could get it out of the bag and turned on, the coyote had disappeared into the blackberry bramble. It stopped to look at me first, and without any apparent fear or distress, it vanished. Cool!

I crossed the street and started to trail it...and found a bit of fresh animal skin that looked a lot like what was left of someone's black cat. Then I realized I'd be late for work if I didn't turn around.

Now, Wilderness Awareness School is one of the few workplaces where you can get away with being late because you were trailing an animal. However, I knew I had payroll and taxes to deal with, so I went on to work. But now that I've seen it I'll be out early with camera ready, and I'll get a picture of it yet.

Our Tax Dollars at Work, or As Close to a Political Rant as You'll Get From Me

I had to laugh at a political advertisement I saw on TV the other day. The message was that I should vote for the candidate because her opponent had not managed to pass a bill during his time in office. That's the guy I want...it means that he didn't raise my taxes or make any new laws that will complicate my life. Let me explain...
Some years back I was late to work because the power went out for a while, and my alarm clock failed. I bought a new clock...a fancy one that re-sets it's self when the power goes out. It also corrects for Daylight Savings Time...or at least it did. Then Congress changed the dates of the changes, and my new clock now causes more problems than it solved. Instead of having to deal with the "Spring forward, Fall back" stuff twice a year, I now have to do it four times. Here's what happens...

My clock is still on the 'before Congress complicated things' time. I can't just change the time to make it right...I have to change my time zone. And then remeber to set it back - or is it forward?

I've never understood the whole Daylight Savings Time switcheroo anyway. I've never been able to explain it to a dog, either. It just doesn't make any sense to change the clocks twice a year - or 4 times if you have a fancy clock. The only reason we do it is because Congress tried to fix something that wasn't really broken in the first place. Why can't we all just re-learn to live with nature's time? We could throw away the clocks all together if we did that.

October Tracking Intensive Class

My stupid, contrary, dumb, un-cooperative, and annoying computer rebelled, and I could not open the disk that contained my Tracking Intensive photos...I kept getting the message that "the administrator has blocked access to the CD/ROM ". I'm the administrator for my computer! Stupid computer!

We had a wonderful, sunny, and productive weekend at the Potholes and along the Columbia River near Vantage. It's so strange to cross the Cascades and suddenly be in high desert with sagebrush and sand. I love the contrast to our side of the mountains. And being able to see for miles is fun! This picture is near the river just outside of Vantage, with the high basalt rock walls opposite. Truly, I took both pictures from the same spot, just turning my body to get the shots.

Dave's group found a terrific sandy beach along the river with raccoon, coyote, beaver, and Canada goose tracks in the damp sand! We made plaster casts, and I found it really tough to decide what to cast. The coyote tracks sometimes paralleled the raccoon or beaver tracks. It would have been possible to get both critters in a large cast. I chose a nice set of beaver tracks, as my Dad made his winter money by trapping when I was a kid.

I'll be putting more Tracking Intensive pics up on my WebShots page, so go check them out!