Buttoning Up for the Winter

Since I got a deer, deer season is over and so are the majority of my outdoor activities for the year. Elk season is in full swing but I don’t hunt elk. In years gone by, I spent a lot of time in the mountains in the late fall and winter as well. There is always an urge in me to get out and about and I hope to be able to do this again some day but that is not my current situation. Nowadays I use the winter and spring months to try to catch up on the things that I let slide all summer long while I was in the mountains. Many of these things, like cleaning out our old house and getting storage areas organized require a lot of thought and strategy and enough time to pursue an idea through to the finish which is very hard for me to do in the summer. Things go at a slower pace at this time of year but demands on time still seem relentless.

The new season requires shifting gears and routines and involves some confusion as to where to start. Winterization is usually the first priority and is a rather monotonous, uninteresting list of things to do. This winter’s firewood was cut last spring and has been drying all summer. The cows have already been moved back to the home pasture which is one of the first steps. The pump is pulled from the Stump Farm pump house so it doesn’t have to be heated all winter long. The hose for watering the cows at the home pasture is stored in the basement when not in use. The insulation around the pump and pressure tank is checked and sealed. Weeds and the cover crop for the garden/orchard are mowed one last time. Gas powered equipment like weed eaters, lawn mowers and power saws are emptied of fuel (I put it in the gas tank of my car) and run until there is no more fuel in the carburetor. Generators are checked. And we start feeding the cows hay.

Most of the canning and preserving for the year has been done. Sacha handles that and puts a lot of time and effort into it. At some point, we will make sausage from the venison this year. Other things that need attending this time of year are archiving the photos and field notes from the summer hiking season. I scan my field notes and send them to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife for entry into a database. I also try to get my field notes over to curatorial at the Park Service where they will be copied and archived.

So my season in the mountains is pretty much over. It's funny, I'm already looking at maps and Google Earth, planning trips for next year and already, I know, I'm looking at places to go and greatly overestimating how much ground I can cover. This is a function of sitting comfortably while looking at a map and imagining it will be easy to cover ground that will be a lot harder to go over in real life when I am tired and scratched and bruised and sweating and lugging a pack on my back while navigating obstacles that don't appear on the map. Even though I am itching to get out again, it will be nice to go by a little slower pace for a while and get a breather. 

Feeding the cows. Every day now until sometime in April, the cows will have to be fed, sun, rain or snow. This really ties a person down. If I need to go somewhere for a few days, I will have to get someone else to feed the cows for me.  

If there isn't a lot of snow on the ground, I like to use a wheelbarrow modified to carry hay and wood to take the hay out into the pasture. The cows have spotted me and are angling to intercept me and the hay. 

Feeding out the hay is an interesting contrast to the way it was put in the barn. For feeding, only a few bales are taken out at a time at a fairly leisurely pace. While haying, it is put in the barn in huge amounts, by the truck and trailer load and at a hurried, sometimes even frantic pace. 

I cut the strings that hold the bales together and break the bales into smaller parts called leaves or leafs and spread them out. This keeps the cows from wasting a lot of hay by trampling and defecating on it. 

As I spread the hay, I have to be careful not to throw it on any cowpies. This helps prevent the spread of diseases and harmful organisms like tapeworms. Some people prefer to feed their stock from feeders or mangers which in theory keeps the hay off the ground and out of the cowpies. We don't have that setup at this time and, I have seen cows pull hay out of feeders and finish eating it where they dropped it on the ground. I don't think any system is foolproof and I also know a lot of people who feed their stock on the ground like I do with no large scale detrimental effects. 

I let the cows have the run of the pasture all winter and feed out over the whole pasture. One problem with this way of doing things is that the weight of the cows walking on the saturated pasture can compact the soil, decreasing its fertility. The solution for this is to create a sacrifice pasture or area where the cows are kept during the wet months but I haven't been able to figure out where to put one yet. 

Giving the cows the right amount of feed can be a little tricky. They won't die if you feed out too much, they will just waste the hay that they don't eat. There are formulas concerning how much to feed a given number of cows of a given size but I usually go by the way my dad taught me. You feed what you think is right, in this case, based on experience, I fed three fifty pound bales. If the cows clean up almost every little scrap of hay, then you need to feed more next time. If they leave a lot of hay on the ground then you fed too much and should feed less next time. If they leave just a little, then you have it about right. This helps to take into account factors such as the grass that is still growing, albeit slowly, on the pasture which the cows will eat and so not need as much hay or later in the year when the pasture grass is less nutritious or buried under a lot of snow, in which case, the cows will eat more hay. 

Another chore of the early autumn is scanning my field notes from the summer's season in the mountains. I have been sending these to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife where the observations will be put into a database that is linked to a map. I think this is still done through GIS (Geographical Information System) though there might be other means to do this these days. 

The writing in this notebook is probably mostly gibberish to many readers. The strange words that are underlined are the first three letters of the genus and the first three letters of the species of the organism observed. This shorthand allows me to capture a lot of information quickly. If I don't know the genus and species of an organism then I write out the common name of the organism. I prefer to use the term rock rabbit for pikas (Ochotona princips) because that is the name my dad taught me and because I think this colloquialism is quite insightful in recognizing that these animals are lagomorphs and so are actually related to rabbits. Likewise, I prefer to use whistle pig or whistling pig to refer to hoary marmots (Marmota caligata). For amphibians and most plants, I use the abbreviated genus and species system.

The numbers followed by the letters SVL refer to the size of amphibians. Snout/Vent Length or SVL is a standard way to measure the size of adult amphibians. 

Along with the animals I observe, I usually try to record what type of habitat is present in the immediate vicinity, including tree species, forest type and plant species. Date, time, temperature and weather conditions are standard for almost every observation.