the Walnut Diary

The morel is the only North American relative of the European truffle, and mushroom hunters and lovers of fine food alike greatly revere this early-season treat. I stumbled upon a wonderful patch of them this week.

A few came off their stems easily with a pinch (mustn’t hurt the root or it will kill the plant) and I rushed home with a hat-full, fidgeted my way through dinner, and then returned to the patch equipped to harvest. Wow! Were there ever a lot of them!

Of course we ate the first few dozen, but then we had to figure out how to dry the rest. Plenty of advice was available on the Internet, but my electric fish smoker was impossible to control, and Bet’s fancy new gas stove doesn’t have the recommended pilot light. Nevertheless, the lamp and convection fan turned out to do a very good job dehydrating morels. Mom’s oven stayed full for two days, as well. We had a lot of morels to dry.

The trouble on the second day of the hunt was the letdown after the first. The return trip with an empty basket raised the question: do I move on to fresh turf or keep looking here?

The longer I hesitate and pick around the corners of yesterday’s harvest, the harder it is to move on to the unfamiliar. Then in my mind every crunch underfoot becomes, not a rotting twig, but a precious morel crushed under the leaf cover. What to do but look? Once this starts, almost inevitably I will spend the remainder of the day crawling around in the mud, looking under fallen leaves and brush.

I remember once reading that the way you tell a mushroom hunter from a brush pile is that if you wait long enough, you’ll see the hunter move. It’s not the tidiest of hobbies, but the joy of picking a morel out of the visual confusion of the forest floor is a lot like that moment when, as a child, I first found the cartoon dog in that complex drawing, Where’s Waldo?

There was one area containing at least three dozen morels I literally couldn’t get to. The undergrowth was too thick. It would take a chainsaw to get in there, and that would probably destroy the patch, or at least announce its presence to other hunters. I did manage to reach in with a digital camera and shoot some great pictures, though.

The next day It took me an hour and many scratches to crawl in and out, but yesterday’s fugitives made it into my basket. I also found a few in the long grass around the patch, but who knows how many more there are just over the next hill?

For the rest of the week, nothing. The morel season had suddenly burst upon me. They were everywhere, so abundant and fresh that I wondered if we could handle the sheer quantity of the harvest. We picked, we split and dried, sautéed and froze in a magnificent and aromatic frenzy, and then all of the sudden they were gone, and it’s as if they never were.

Like a bewildered man searching through fragments of memory to try and understand where it all went, I have worn a path back to the place of this magical bounty, but like the unearned beauty of youth, it’s gone.

Indian Lake Marina lies in a rough, wooded area, well away from most development. This adds to ILM’s charm — try having to wait for a doe and her fawn to get off the dock before you can unload your car — but sometimes we’d see more of the local wildlife than we wished.

The cocker spaniel next door had been a model of decorum during his first few weekends on the dock. Then he tried to defend his family from a skunk taking a shortcut across the stern of their houseboat. Newt and that skunk argued and tussled all the way up the hill from the dock, across the lots of two trailers, and into the woods.

His duty done, Newt sought assistance from his owner, whom he encountered just as Roy opened the washroom door. The enterprising dog dashed between his legs, ducked under the door into the shower enclosure, and sat down above the drain to wait for a bath. He had a long wait. Nobody, his master included, could stand to enter the room, much less wash the dog.

Poor Newt. The pup had such a gentle disposition that total strangers were often found hugging him like a teddy bear. Now he had to endure the “skunk treatment.” The supply of tomato juice on the dock ran out after one bath, but in the bilge of Jack’s boat there rusted several large cans of clamato juice. Allowed to dry on Newt’s blonde tresses, this concoction actually killed the skunk odour. Newt acquired a slightly fishy aroma and an auburn tint to his hair for a few days, but otherwise seemed unscathed by the encounter with the striped intruder.

Skunks may cause sporadic upsets, but for sheer, grinding annoyance, no animal can match the racoon. These bandits are seasonal feeders, but they insist that human leftovers are the best seasonal food available.

For years Wayne devoted considerable ingenuity to keeping the racoons at bay. At the time he had built a dumpster onto the chassis of an old Ford pickup, with a system of ropes and pulleys suspended from the shed roof to raise and lower the cover. This lid was too heavy for racoons to lift, so when it was in proper operation the coons felt free to shop elsewhere. This usually meant a raid on the one of the docks.

On a farm the .22 calibre solution to varmint problems is simple and effective, but you can’t shoot around a marina. Boaters are by and large peaceable creatures who have no desire to do violence to a warm-blooded animal who shares their tastes in food, drink, and accommodation. So the racoons thrive.

Our son woke us one evening by pounding on the cabin roof. He claimed that just as he had reached the scariest part in the novel he was reading by flashlight, he noticed the face of a racoon peeking down through the forward hatch at him. By the time we got the stern cover unzipped the intruder was long gone, of course. Our big worry was that our dog would go through an expensive screen in pursuit of the varmint. So we waited, one eye open, for the next two nights.

Then the raid finally occurred. After all that waiting the only thing I managed to do was shatter a stout mahogany boat hook on the overhead railing of our stern cover. It got in the way of my swing and created an amazingly loud “BONNNGG” which woke half the marina. The racoon was undamaged, though it prudently hopped overboard and avoided our boat from then on.

Racoons are funny on film, but they make even worse guests than human non-boaters.

Kind-hearted Andrea could not believe that any creature that cute could be so reviled by the people on the dock. That was before she brought a large bowl of shrimp salad to the boat for the pot-luck supper the following night. She put the bowl into her refrigerator and went visiting without a further care.

They must have had a sentry by the loading ramp. They raided as soon as the mosquitoes had driven everyone inside. Three of them came down the dock. They must specialize, because one unsnapped the convertible top, another opened the latch on the refrigerator, and the other, presumably less skilled vandal, spread uneaten food all over the interior of the boat. These coons did everything but spray-paint the walls.

When a neighbouring boater saw the commotion and tried to chase the burglars out, they were none too eager to leave. Freeway, a yappy schnauser, found himself unceremoniously turfed into the drink by the largest racoon. Then the victor waddled down the dock and climbed a tree. The other two used the distraction to slip overboard and swim ashore.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, for the rest of the summer the racoons kept returning, often twice a night, in search of further treats. A sleepy boater with a boat hook is no match for a marauding raccoon.

The problem abated considerably the year a local building contractor set up his trailer between the woods and the garbage depot. He didn’t say anything, and we knew better than to ask. All we knew is that for as long as he was at the marina, no screens were destroyed, and occasional food left on tables in boat cabins was likely to be there in the morning.

I’ve always thought of the male American robin as a drab, persistent and boringly family-oriented bird, but it turns out that a great deal of his compulsive activity may be the result of pretty orange plumage and that distinctive egg colour.

Saturday I helped Philina English disassemble a net she had used to trap the robin who had laid her eggs in our barn. She disconnected the hair-thin web, spun it into a rope, and then stuffed it into a bag, lightweight poles still attached.

The robin had found herself cached in a soft, dark bag in the back of a van full of lab equipment while Philina examined each egg with a spectrometer attached to a laptop to determine its colour, and then entered a wide range of data pertaining to the egg’s age, mass, and fertility. Undergraduate student Fraser Cameron dutifully wrote down each item muttered to him by the pair of Queen’s graduate students.

While we worked on the net Lori Parker collected blood samples and breast feathers from the bird for the plumage study and D.N.A. tests. Then they tagged her and let her go.

A graduate student from Portland, Susie Crowe originally located the nests on the farm for the study and will assist with the sampling. The crew plans to gather data on about a hundred robins over the summer, establishing family trees through D.N.A. testing and seeking to develop information on the relationship between egg and plumage colour and breeding success.

Family trees of robin chicks show that the males from neighboring nests routinely father one or two of the hatchlings. Robins mate socially, sharing chick-rearing duties, but apparently aren’t adverse to occasional casts outside the gene pool. English refused to see this as a sensational bit of gossip from the hedgerows. From her point of view, it’s just another evolutionary device the species has developed.

Lori told me that only the female robins incubate the eggs. Apart from fertilization duties, after building the nest the male partner doesn’t go to work again until the feeding stage, and the bulk of the team’s research deals with attempts to quantify the signals which bond the male parent to the clutch of eggs so that he will put a significant effort into rearing the young. Once the chicks hatch, the crew will film two-hour blocks during feeding times to determine the male parent’s involvement and attempt to correlate this investment with egg colour and the brilliance of the mother’s plumage.

Philina even showed me some fake eggs, both strongly-coloured and faded, which they plan to secrete into selected nests. She hopes the variations in the colour of the eggs will enable them to determine the extent to which the male’s memory of the nest picture drives him to provide for the chicks.

I noticed that when the crew had removed the eggs for study they were careful to cover the empty nest. Lori explained that under no conditions could they allow the male to see an empty nest, because then he would abandon the whole project.

A day later the mother robin was back on her nest, still making a ruckus loud enough to startle the resident skunk every time anyone went near her nest. She seems no worse from her session with the crew yesterday.

The second test subject was a little less co-operative. Nesting in a stunted apple tree in the horse pasture, this bird carefully avoided their nets in early afternoon Saturday, then wandered off to feed and play with the other robins until the crew had moved elsewhere. Sunday morning when Lori and Fraser returned, she waited until they had the nets set up, then flew between them and away. Their respect for this “clever girl” grows with each capture attempt.

All of this activity seeks to answer the question: “Why is a robin’s egg blue?” English suggested that this study might at first seem frivolous insofar as it has no immediate conservation benefit, but ultimately it’s human to wonder about subjects like this, and graduate students strive to provide answers.

The advent of the inexpensive spectrometer has opened new doors for research on colour, suggested Roslyn Dakin, another member of the Montgomerie Research Group at Queen’s.

This study will continue throughout the summer at the Croskery farm, Chaffey’s Locks and Newboro, as well as at locations nearer to Kingston.

If you’d like to offer access to robin’s nests on your property to this very amiable crew, drop an email to Lori Parker at the address below.

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Email 6pae1@queensu.ca or call 613-547-9096 along with:

1) your name and contact information

2) name and contact information for property owner (if known)

3) directions based on street/road addresses OR GPS coordinates of the nest

4) description of nesting stage (under construction, eggs seen etc.)

5) if available, photographs of nest location (not necessarily the nest itself)

Visitors to the farm have often encountered the nervous skunk who denned last summer in a pile of rails near the barn. This unseen critter must have been an emotional wreck by fall, because every time anyone went by it let go with a scent-bomb.

Fortunately I rather like a hint of skunk on a spring breeze. There are lots of worse smells: diesel fuel, for example. With the amount of mowing I had to do around the little trees last summer, the two frequently combined.

Having a resident skunk has not been without its compensations. For one, it provided a useful landmark. Last August the Northern Nut Growers Association paid a visit to the Woodlot as part of their annual conference field trip. The elegant tour bus arrived in our barnyard, trailed by a fleet of a dozen Toyotas of various descriptions. It seems a couple of years ago the auto maker donated a new Prius to the NNGA, and the members appreciated the gesture.

As soon as the bus door opened the passengers scattered like a herd of cats. Turns out that after two days of lectures at Carleton and a wild-goose chase through Hull traffic, the members were ready to look at just about anything, as long as it was real and they were free to walk around.

Organizer Neil Thomas strapped a loud-hailer to my shoulder and left it to me to round up the straying visitors. It was easy to give directions: all I had to do was tell them to walk past the barn until they smelled skunk, then turn left and head for the tall walnut tree.

Everyone made the turn at first whiff except for one dignified, barefoot gentleman, who had to investigate further. By the time I caught up to him he was peering under a large rail at the base of the pile, looking for the source of the fumes. At my urging he joined me for the remainder of the tour and the skunk was able to retain its dignity.

Mr. Tucker Hill proved a most engaging and informed companion. A later look at one of their annual reports revealed that Tucker for several decades has been one of the key members of the Northern Nut Growers Association and is currently in charge of the foundation which controls their research endowment.

You can find the Northern Nut Growers Association at http://www.icserv.com/nnga/.

The members followed me on a tour through the walnut grove. Ernie Grimo, a walnut and heartnut grower from Niagara-on-the-Lake, approved of one southward-facing area as a potential site for more walnut plantings. He told me that a drumlin is the ideal location for a nut grove. His plantation in Southern Ontario is on a similar structure, though the land is a little rockier near the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Ernie actually hugged one of the trees, a particularly fine specimen.

As we neared the end of the tour we disturbed a large flight of monarch butterflies. Individually the orange critters don’t look all that impressive, but when the air is full of them all the way up to the top of the canopy a hundred feet above you, it produces a feeling of awe: it’s impossible not to be happy when looking up at a rabble of monarchs.

I couldn’t resist a quip into the microphone: “Sorry, I ordered horseflies, and this is what they sent.”

Neil’s truck brought lunch, and seventy of us feasted at the corner of the walnut grove. I don’t recall a bit of litter on the ground at any time during the picnic. These people certainly knew how to act in a woodlot. In response to my questions, a couple of members politely offered advice on the new plantings. Three weeks later I was still watering…

Back to the skunk:

Anyway, since the thaw has begun the barn has been full of this character’s perfume. At first I suspected that he had come into contact with the larger of the coyotes, who seems to have taught himself to pick roosting pigeons off the main beam in the stable. The snow around their den is littered with pigeon wings.

Then I realized that likely the pigeons themselves were the culprits. They make a lot of noise when coming in and leaving, and this is one easily-startled critter.

The funny thing is that I’ve never met this fellow. The only skunk I have encountered in recent years was a beautiful, placid creature who breakfasted on a can of sardines in a box trap two summers ago. Since we carefully parted company I haven’t seen him again.

Now with the bee guy bringing hives to the property the skunk has become a potential nuisance, rather than just an amusing mouser. Paul Wainick told me that skunks do far more damage than bears because they eat enormous quantities of worker bees as they leave the hives. He didn’t explain how a skunk could do that and yet never be seen during daylight, so I’ll hold off a bit on the live trap.

This inconspicuous little gray bird zoomed down and killed a male cardinal on the back deck at noon today. I looked out the kitchen window and he stared up at me from about six feet away, then grabbed the cardinal and flew under the railing with it to a fence row just down from the house. Two hours later, he landed in the white mulberry tree and fluffed up all contented, wiping the remains of the cardinal from his beak. According to Sibley’s field guide it’s a Loggerhead, but this may be an oversimplification. Logic would insist that it’s a Northern Shrike which only looks like a Loggerhead, because the smaller Loggerheads are down south now, not raiding bird feeders in Eastern Ontario. Still, the beak is short, the mask is wide, and the breast is an even, pale gray. The bird’s a bit smaller than a Blue Jay, and didn’t look much larger than the cardinal. It was quite a stunt slinging the victim underneath and flying off like that.

I think I’ll name him Macbeth.

When I called Leed’s Stewardship Council Member Rhonda Elliot to report the sighting, she was out of the office and I left a message. Apparently they don’t get a lot of birding communications at Leed’s Transit. The receptionist was a bit wide-eyed when she reported to Rhonda: “Rod called and said a sheik killed a cardinal and took off with the body!”

Feathers at 11:00.

News Flash:

Check out the Science News article (June 7) in which Roz explains some of her research.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/32451/title/How_they_shine

UPDATE: Check the photo of Penelope in action at

Penelope rolls out

penelope-small.jpg

One of the simple joys of life is to watch the things the younger generation can get up to. My son and his friend Roslyn brought the device in the photo to the farm this weekend for a few modifications before Roz packs it into her suitcase and takes it to Los Angeles with her. Roz is a graduate student in ornithology at Queen’s, and her field of study is the mating habits of peafowl, specifically the males’ use of iridescence in their feathers to attract the female eye. The Los Angeles Arboretum has the largest collection of free-range peafowl on the continent, so it became a good location for a month of field studies. The problem, as Roz explained it, is that mating season is still several months away. How could she observe male display behaviour when the females aren’t in the mood?

Turns out a fellow grad student is an accomplished taxidermist, and he offered to make up a stuffed peahen for Roz if she could find one. A weekend in New York ended with the purchase of a frozen bird from a farm in Ithaca.

Roz’s research has to do with how peacocks control the iridescence of their feathers, primarily by turning to catch the light from the sun. For the decoy to work to maximum advantage, they’d have to move it around a bit in the presence of the males to enable their best displays.

That’s when the remote control truck came in. Charlie looked back to his boyhood days and turned a Radio Shack RC truck chassis into a parade float for the stuffed bird. The main engineering problem had to do with finding a fastening system for the parts which could be taken on an airliner (no wrenches or screwdrivers) and assembled easily on demand at customs and in the field. In the end he hit upon a roll of duct tape. You can’t beat the stuff sometimes.

Roz had her first lessons at RC peahen-driving in our kitchen. A series of empty paint cans became pylons, and the poor bird held grimly to the platform as she zoomed around.

The creature needed a name, but earlier this week both Charlie and Roz had expressed their disapproval of my calling the local red-tailed hawk by a dumb name like Zeke. Apparently to someone of their generation Zeke has connotations “of a creepy shotgun-loving redneck from the deep South.” Gee, I just thought it sounded like his call, but what do I know? Understandably I was hesitant to offer a name for the new toy, but I made an earnest request for one to personalize the thing for this article.

Then on the way home I thought of that Ryan Gosling movie with the mannequin. Wikipedia had its/her name: Bianca. Perfect. I caught them in the car on the way back to Kingston, but Charlie blurted out before I could speak: “Penelope! Her name is Penelope. Roz and Rob had a phone conference on it, and that’s her name.”

Somewhat taken aback, I tried anyway. “Did you consider Bianca?”

A blank-sounding “no.” He obviously hasn’t seen the movie or read about it.

“Could you at least mention the name to Roz?”

“O.K.” Hoots of laughter from the car. A long pause, more hoots, and then, “It’s still Penelope.”

Scratching my head about how Zeke is too “old” a name for their generation, but Penelope isn’t, I signed off. Then I started to think: in Homer’s The Odyssey Penelope was a magnet for every available man for many years while her husband Odysseus was away sacking Troy. She managed to maintain her dignity and integrity throughout, but there was no doubting that males found her attractive. And their home island/farm was, of course, Ithaca. What’s more, Odysseus was best known for his clever invention, a statue of a horse mounted on wheels, designed to deceive the Trojans into letting down their guard.

If the rest of the research is as clever as the decoy’s name, Roz and her crew should have an interesting month in LA.

The things kids get up to these days.

I drove in the lane yesterday morning and just as I stopped in front of the house a large bird swooped over the truck and jerked to a halt on top of the nearby hydro pole. Zeke’s back.

Zeke is a young red-tailed hawk, one of a pair who grew up in the woodlot last year.

I was a bit taken aback at first by Zeke’s antics last September. It seemed whenever I was driving around the property this large gray bird would fly up behind me and then crash to a stop on a low tree branch and stare at me as I passed.

A check in a field guide soon identified the new character as a juvenile red-tail. This was a large specimen, but quite clumsy, to judge by his landings.

At the time I was doing a lot of mowing with the bush hog to get the fields ready for IPM parking and demonstrations, and I guess Zeke must have been learning how to hunt on his own at about the same time. Somehow he hit upon shadowing the tractor as a good way to find mice. I soon realized that Zeke’s apparent aggression was just adolescent clumsiness, and my new pal could be counted upon to try his swoop-tactic regularly enough to impress visitors.

One day he and a sibling practiced aerobatics above my head while I tried to mow straight rows. The lesson of the day seemed to be the hover. They took turns riding the slight updraft until they stalled, fell into a spin, pulled out with a sideslip, and then watched the other try the same trick. It’s hard to mow around little pine trees when this is going on above one’s head.

Another day we were driving up the lane in the golf cart when I glimpsed what looked like a newspaper blowing across the gate, but it was moving quickly, and against the wind. Zeke was after the cottontail who had avoided the coyotes all summer by sleeping under farm machinery in the barnyard. We carefully nosed through the gate only to spot Zeke perched on the steering wheel of my old Massey, staring intently at the mower. He flapped off in disgust when we disturbed him, and from then on chose the more private hydro pole as his perch.

Anyway, yesterday morning Zeke had returned to his pole. He stared at me for some time as I sat in my truck and watched him. He looks bigger than ever, and magnificent in his new adult plumage. When he realized that I wasn’t about to roll out any mice, he glided through a maple tree, over the bird feeder (ignored by the junkos and goldfinches), and landed at the top of one of the tall maples overlooking the road.

Mom grabbed the binoculars and quickly noticed that Zeke had his eye on the flock of turkeys in the field across the road. Would a red-tail attack a fully-grown turkey?

It took a couple of minutes but the flock caught on to his presence. Then they did a remarkable thing, and my mother recounted this to me, wide-eyed: “They all sort of hunched down and blended together into a long, narrow line of turkeys. Then they walked quickly off into the woods. You couldn’t tell one from the next, they were so close together.”

I don’t know where he’s been, or even if red-tails migrate, but it’s good to see Zeke crashing into the odd tree branch around the house again.