Author Archives: Mark P

The fox and the hound

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Something has been eating the outside cats’ food. We suspected that it was a new stray dog that showed up several weeks ago. The dog is so skittish that it runs at the mere hint of a human’s presence. This picture looks like a spy shot, but it was the best I could do through the kitchen window screen.

stray_winter15

The dog looks like a cross between a basset hound and some kind of Australian shepherd dog. It has a fairly large body and head, but short legs.

We have been feeding it for about two weeks. We started partly to protect the cat food, but also because the dog was outside and exposed to some pretty harsh weather. I put an old dog house at the end of the driveway, hoping it would get in during the coldest nights, but it didn’t. Neighbor Deb says it seems to be sleeping near or in one of their out buildings.

It turns out that the dog isn’t the cat food eater anyway. The real culprit is a fox. Unlike the stray dog, this fox is not at all skittish. Here he is in the driveway after scouting for food. He, or she, is a real beauty, and healthy looking.

foxindrive

I know the fox has also been eating the dog food we leave for the stray, because he left his calling card one day — poop in the dog food bowl. I have noted that kind of behavior before.

On Saturday the dogs were on the deck making a racket. I went out and saw the fox. He walked casually around in the back yard and then sat down to look at me, Zeke and Lucy.

foxsittinginback

Zeke was barking, of course, but the fox ignored him. I shouted and waved my arms, but he only stared. Crazy human. I went down off the deck to get a couple of rocks. I threw one in his general direction. He was not impressed. I threw another, trying to land it closer to him. He jumped and ran back about six feet and then stopped to watch again.

I have written about our foxes and my ambiguous feelings about having them so close to the house. I have decided that it’s best for everyone if they stay away, but they seem not to take me seriously.

But the fox is a problem for another day. Our real problem is the stray dog. With us feeding him and Deb providing unintentional shelter, he’s probably OK for the short term. I want to get him to a rescue group so they can find a good home for him, but he is absolutely unapproachable. He sometimes watches from the woods as I pass with the dogs, but if I look at him or otherwise acknowledge him, he immediately retreats.

A trap seems to be the only option. We have live traps but nothing big enough for him. We have been told that we can borrow one from the local humane society or the county animal control. We will eventually set a trap and hope he calms down once he’s restrained. Dogs will sometimes do that.

A local rescue group saves a lot of animals at our pound, so if we can get him there, he stands a chance of finding a home.

Changing weather

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Wednesday we had the warmest day so far this year, but there’s a cold front on the way. The front is moving from the west, but after a short shower, the eastern sky gave a hint of change to come.

rainbow_4mar15

There was a complete rainbow, but I couldn’t get the entire bow in the frame. The other side was behind some trees, so it was hard to see anyway. There was still a little of it left when I took the dogs out later.

sky_4mar15

Despite our high up here of around 67 on Wednesday, we are under a winter weather advisory for Thursday. We are at the southern edge of the advisory area, so I doubt that we will see much frozen precipitation.

Gate birds

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Leah and I were at the Tractor Supply store near Rome a couple of days ago, looking for a possible new cat house, when it kind of gradually dawned on us that there were a lot of birds chirping nearby.

littlebirdsCan you see them on top of the stack of fence gates? A whole flock of little brown birds, either wrens or sparrows (I can’t tell the difference). I’m not sure why they were sitting there. It was a gray and slightly misty day, but it’s possible the stack of gates might have collected enough solar heat to give them a little extra warmth.

I listened to the songs of the wren and sparrow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, but I can’t tell which sounds more like what I remember of these birds’ song.

It was odd to see them there, but the funny thing was that they sang as long as we didn’t look at them. When we looked at them, they fell completely silent. It we looked away, they began to sing again. Shy little birds.

 

Snow days

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We had a nice snowfall Wednesday evening and night. We had seven inches by the time it stopped.

deck table snow

Chloe apparently has some insulation on her rear end.

chloe snow walkI like it when it snows here. We get snow so infrequently that it doesn’t really get too inconvenient. That makes it possible to appreciate the beauty. It also opens a new world where the passage of wild animals is no longer secret. I took Zeke for a short walk Wednesday afternoon when there was less than an inch of snow on the ground. Here’s what I think is a set of rabbit tracks.

rabbit tracks

These are what I know for sure are fox tracks, because I saw the fox dart across the road.

fox tracksThe tracks led straight up the driveway into our new property.

Thursday morning I took Zeke out again; I left Lucy at home because her belly would have dragged in the snow the whole way. There was a fox set of tracks that started at the point where Fouche Gap Road crosses the top of the mountain. We followed them most of the way down to the bottom of the mountain. The tracks stayed mostly in the half-buried tracks left by a truck late Wednesday afternoon. Occasionally they took off up the slope of the road cut, and then turned around and came back down to the road.

snow tracks

The zigzag tracks are Zeke’s. I’m not sure whether another animal joined the fox occasionally.

It’s hard to capture what the eye sees because our visual system is so good at image processing. I tried to get a hint of it with this panorama.

snow panorama

There was significant melting Thursday, but there was a lot of slush and water left on the road that refroze, so it was tricky to walk on it Friday morning. I took both dogs, but turned around after a short distance. I think the rough ice was too much for Lucy’s delicate, little feet. It should be all clear by Saturday morning, despite another hard freeze Friday night.

Buick Man

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My father was a Buick man.

Here he is standing near the front of the first car I can remember.

Grady V Paris

Buick men were natty dressers.

This is a better picture of the car.

buick men_edited-1

It’s a 1949 Buick with 1950 and 1947 model Paris boys. I’m the one with ears sticking out. Leah says I’m the cutest one I think I can remember riding in the car, and I can definitely remember fiddling with the knob over the rear view mirror that rotated the radio antenna. It was probably a Super. It was a straight eight cylinder engine. If you look carefully you can see the reflection of my father in the windshield.

Our ’49 was a four-door sedan, but Buick made a two-door fastback coupe around that time. I would love to have one of these.

buick super from rear

buick super from front

Somewhere in the deep, mostly inaccessible recesses of my memory, I think a famous author (Hemingway?) mentioned that the Buicks of roughly that vintage had huge fenders. I tried unsuccessfully to find some reference to that online. I did find that Ernest Hemingway owned a 1947 Roadmaster convertible. It was royal blue with a red leather interior. He also bought a 1950 Buick station wagon in Key West.

The next car was a 1955 hardtop coupe Buick, maybe a Super or possibly a Century. My father was proud of how fast it was. This was the year model that Broderick Crawford drove in the late ‘50’s TV show Highway Patrol. I don’t have any pictures of that car, but here is one from the Internet.

buick 1955

Ours was also blue and white, although I remember the color as somewhat different.

The next Buick was a 1957, again, probably a Super. Here’s another Internet picture. Ours was a two-tone with cream and metallic bronze.

buick 1957

And then there was the 1964 Buick LeSabre, the first new car our family every bought. Again, no pictures of it, but here’s a very similar model from the Internet.

lesabre 1964This one is very similar to the one we had. It was a hardtop coupe with a roof styled to look like a convertible top.

Next came the 1966 Wildcat coupe. About the time my parents bought this car they got interested in recreational vehicles. They bought an Airstream trailer and towed it with the Buick. Here is my father with both of them.

buick with bd

This picture was scanned from a very dark slide, so the quality is not great.

The Wildcat was definitely the sportiest and coolest of the Buicks my parents bought. I drove it a lot, since I turned 16 in 1966.

After that, RVing became more important to my parents, so their next car was not a Buick. It was a Jeep Wagnoneer, which was more suitable for towing a trailer. But they kept the Buick for a long time afterwards.

I’m not a Buick man, but I have a soft spot in my heart for Buicks of a certain vintage. I can recognize Buicks and guess the year model from around 1949 to around 1967, which corresponds to just before my birth to around my 17th birthday. After 1966, Buicks and cars in general started meaning a lot less to me. I suppose for me it must be something like music; it seems that a person’s favorite kind of must is fixed sometime during their youth. That’s why I like rock and roll from the ‘60s and ‘70s, and that’s why I like cars from around the same time. If you gave me a choice between a new Corvette and a perfectly restored 1959 Corvette, it would be no contest.

My parents bought another Buick sometime in the 1980s (or so). I think it means something that I can’t remember what year model it was. After my father died, I urged my mother to trade it for a safer car; it had no airbags and the seatbelt was one of the type that was attached to the door so you had to slide in and close the door to have a seatbelt. She considered a 2000 Ford Taurus and a 2000 Buick. She bought the Buick.

Buick went through a bad spot for a few years before and after that model. To this day any time Leah sees a Buick of that vintage, she calls it a “Doris car.” It’s usually the same beige color of my mother’s. Apparently Buick recovered, since it survived General Motors’ near death, unlike Pontiac and Oldsmobile.

I’m not a Buick man today. If we had a pickup truck full of hundred dollar bills, I would probably buy some Buicks, but the newest would be at least 50 years old.