-10 F. at the tree farm when I got up about 7 this morning. Hardly
newsworthy, at this time of year, in this part of the world, but
always noteworthy. It doesn't take long outside, even warmly dressed,
to be reminded that life is a precarious business.....even the weather
can kill you. Well, you do keep it in mind (one can scarcely forget
it), but you work around it. When it gets really bad, which is to say
when the cold gets unbearable, like when the wind is howling, which is
most of the time at these temperatures (though, oddly, not so much
today), you can always step back inside and warm up next to the not
quite glowing stove. If you don't get the dampers and the fuel load
set just right (a fairly tricky business), the indoor temperature can
shoot up to over 85 in the half hour spent outside taking care of
whatever chore or dalliance prompted you to go out. Today, it was
lighting a fire in the barn to warm up the machinery for hauling more
wood, splitting red pine kindling, and making little 'uns out of big
'uns from a windthrown hickory that Larry cut up and hauled down out
of the woods a couple of months ago. The hickory, we theorized, might
have come down early enough that the wood might be well enough
seasoned to burn.....at least in an already hot fire (it did and it
is).

Larry is a tree "farmer", not a sentimentalist greenie tree "hugger"
like some (actually, very few) of his guests. He has invested
hundreds of thousands of dollars in land, buildings, seed, labor,
tools and equipment in an effort to build an operation that will
eventually result in veneer quality timber to be sold at a
profit.....albeit a profit that he will probably never personally
see. This means that the barn, in addition to holding the expected
array of tools and equipment, a tractor, a gator, a brushhog, mowers,
plows, snow blowers, chainsaws, dump bucket, chipper, rope, chain,
mechanics tools, shovels, pry bars, stakes, axes, log splitter, etc.,
ad infinitum, is also a repository for an impressive array of toxic
chemicals used to poison just about anything and everything that could
possibly subvert, delay, impede or otherwise hinder the attainment of
the objective. Oh, and the barn is also a desultory repository for
some of the byproducts of a veneer growing operation concentrated on
nut producing species. There are milk crates, cartons, buckets and
other containers strewn about, all containing hazelnuts, walnuts,
butternuts and chestnuts.....very few of the latter two since they are
too valuable to leave lying about, but some invariably get left in a
corner somewhere and forgotten.

Well, not quite completely forgotten. The rodents never forget. And
they will seize any opportunity, however slim, of obtaining these
magnificent prizes. The worst of the thieves, where nuts are
concerned (tender young seedlings are another matter) are the gray
squirrels and the chipmunks (red squirrels, abundant further north,
are not at all common in the immediate area). But they are thwarted
by the aluminum sheathing on the barn......there are as yet no holes
through which they can enter. Except when the doors are left open.
Nevertheless, even in this case their depredations are
trivial.....especially as compared to the damage they do out in the
open. No, in the barn the mice are the chief nemesis. But they can
be controlled. There are poison baits (the one used here operates by
causing internal hemorrhaging upon ingestion) that the mice find even
more irresistible than the nuts. These days, there are very few mouse
droppings to be found inside the barn. Even when the doors are left
open overnight.....as they were a couple of days ago. No big deal.
The poison takes care of the nocturnal mice, and the gray squirrels
and chipmunks are diurnal. Who'da thunk there was
another.....nocturnal.....enemy? Yeah, there's raccoons, skunks,
possums.....we know about them, but none of them appear to like
working that hard for a skimpy nut kernel.

But Glaucomys volans and G. sabrinus, respectively the southern and
northern flying squirrels, though little thought of because little
seen (well, at least by me) are common enough and will certainly take
advantage of free nuts, given the opportunity. And one or the other
is precisely what we found frozen solid on a crusty snow pile outside
the barn door this morning. As already stated, flying squirrels will
eat nuts, but they will also eat just about anything else they can
find. Odds are this one was lured in by the smell of the poison bait,
or at least attracted to it after entering the barn while foraging.
In either case, the grizzly outcome was pretty much inevitable.

Not much of a drama as compared to so much that goes on around us
every day, I guess. But some trifling incidents are, inexplicably
perhaps, sadder than others. Even grotesquely contorted and frozen
solid, there was some faint remaining cuteness about this little guy.

giles.
and bullwinkle weeps.