Avian ethnic cleansing takes a blue life

Tonight after our prairie walk we checked on our most advanced bluebird nest and had a sad discovery. The male was dead at the foot of the pole with the eggs scattered and broken around him. No, it wasn't a cat or even a snake. It was bird on bird violence. Ethnic cleansing in the avian world. He was pecked to death on the head and neck. Not a bite eaten. Nor any of the eggs eaten. Just destroyed and thrown out of the nest. 

There's green grass in our pasture and the horses are mighty pleased. But the prairie is dry and brown both on the hillsides and on the blufftops. If you were a horse or a bison back in the prairie days you wouldn't be here now. You'd be down in southern Illinois munching on the first shoots of prairie grass that won't appear around here until June or July. You can say what you want about prairie grass holding more nutrients over the winter or surviving the drought. Undoubtedly true. But if you're a horse or a cow and you live inside a fence and don't migrate, you will get very lean and hungry waiting for the bluestem to become green. We love prairie and we love horses and we don't mind living with some contradictions in our lives. The problem always comes from people who have to have things all one way or the other, whether that means religion or economy or politics. Contradictions might make you think you're going crazy, but too much uniformity and consistently is crazy.

The retreat of the Wisconsin glacier

Today the last snowdrift has finally disappeared from the tree line of our neighboring field.  Probably the result of yesterday's steady, cold rain, some of which is standing in our basement now. Puts me in mind of the argument between Louis Agassiz and the biblicists about whether erratic boulders were left by glaciers or Noah's flood.  It's all water. E. C. Pielou tells us that glaciers are the result of cold summers, not snowy winters. That's a good thing; I was getting worried. Of course, now they're predicting snow for tonight so we can never be sure.

Burning the prairie 3

The thing about a blog is you write something and then afterward you think about what you wrote in a different way.  Yesterday I wrote about burning prairies in the snow or cold.  Why would anyone do that?  They weren't good burns - patchy and slow burning.  And today I realized they weren't my burns. They were burns where I was helping someone else who had to burn, even if the conditions were awful.  Why? Because they had signed up for a government program and taken the money for seeding or clearing brush and now these back country Drs. Faustus had to pay the devil his due, or at least the appearance of his due, by burning when the agency said they must.  I've never done that.  I have burned when I wanted to or not. But I haven't taken the money.  So I've never had help in seeding or clearing and maybe I haven't gotten as much done as I might have otherwise.  Maybe there's prairie or savannah that I could have cleared and saved if I'd been willing to sign the paper. But that didn't seem like the prairie spirit to me, or maybe I'm just too much of a natural rebel to do it like someone else told me.

But I also realize that the prairie isn't really mine to save or lose.  Walking in the dry, brown bluestem and gramma tonight and looking at the relentless assault of the honeysuckle and cherry, I realized that I'm part of a holding pattern, or maybe even just a pause in a long, slow retreat.  The next person, if there is a next person, may take up where I've left off and the prairie will be the better for it.  But if not, then at least I have had the pleasure of saving what I could in a way that I have enjoyed.

A prairie like life is a process, not a goal to be reached. There is no end state.

Burning the prairie 2

Sunday was windy again, but the weather report predicted rain in the afternoon, so we thought we might extend our burn to a strip along the north edge of the pasture where the little bluestem is still hanging on and a few nice burr oaks are starting. Bruce would rather burn than eat so that was also a factor.

When we started walking back to where we had left the truck, it was apparent right away that something was amiss. There was equipment scattered about where we hadn't left it and it soon became apparent that Maya, Susan's 2-year-old quarter horse had been at work. Maya wishes she had thumbs, and there's no telling what she might accomplish if she did, but uses her mouth and hooves to great advantage anyway. Plus she's more curious than any cat. She had to check out the burn equipment. One of the water jugs had been taken out of the truck bed and stomped. The drinking water bottles had all been chewed. Fortunately, the packs, drip torch and fuel cans were only tipped over, not destroyed.

We didn't miss the shovel at the time. Susan found it later near the horses' run-in shed about 200 yards from the truck. Maya must have picked it out of the truck bed and carried it all the way to her shed. Who knows what she might have done with it. Maybe dug a tunnel.

Fortunately she was so fascinated by the fire that she didn't miss the shovel. I thought horses were supposed to be afraid of fire, but we had a hard time keeping Maya off the fire line. She wanted to stand six feet away and sniff it. We were concerned that she and Odetta might get themselves inside the fire line and get trapped, but found that a quick squirt from the water pack was enough to keep them away.

Anyway, the weather report was wrong; there was no rain until night, but we quit burning anyway because we didn't have a large enough crew to safely burn in the woods. Maybe next year.

Burning the prairie

Saturday was an almost perfect day to burn a prairie if you didn't mind that the wind was 15-20, Ordinarily we would have scrubbed the burn in that wind, but the humidity was rather high and we waited until late in the day when the humidity would be rising, and we hoped the wind might drop. Plus the burn we had in mind was well contained - the steep, south-facing hillside on the north side of our pasture.

This prairie is virginal, but not pure, so to speak. It's a much-degraded community of four or five grasses - little bluestem, big bluestem, side oats gramma, indian grass and a couple of smaller varieties, plus a very limited number of forbs. It's too steep and rocky to pasture, so I can only think it has just been neglect that has reduced it to such a paltry number of species, interspersed with the usual invaders - prickly ash, Japanese honeysuckle, black cherry, red cedar and some escaped pasture grasses.

Almost perfect until we loaded the truck with all the burn equipage and tried to drive out to the burn site. I should have known when I skidded through the first gate with mud flying that this was a bad idea; by the time we approached the second gate, the truck was axle deep and going nowhere. We had moved about 25 yards. I wasn't looking forward to humping the water packs and 40 gallons of extra water all the way to the other side of the pasture, so I got the little tractor out and tried to pull the truck out. Nothing. 8 wheels spinning. Finally I went around and pulled from the front. Somehow it started moving and with Bruce spitting mud 20 feet high from all four wheels, we skidded the truck through the mud and into the waterlogged pasture. If his friends at the Sierra Club could see him now! Good thing I had just washed the truck.

That's what we should expect I suppose when we still have glaciers six inches deep along the north-facing hillsides slowly releasing their gallons of meltwater into the low part of the pasture. It's 600 feel of squish. I've burned prairie when it has been below freezing (Don't do it; the water freezes in your nozzles) and in a snowstorm, but never with snowbanks still on the ground. But this was the year of 102 inches of snow, so of course it wasn't gone by April.

Once we made it to the site the burn went off without a hitch, even burning through the woods where we cleared two years ago in hopes of coaxing the savannah back into bloom. That's the same area where the fire got into a hollow oak about three or four years ago and Dan and I had to cut it down while burning embers rained down on us from above. Now it's pretty clear of those dangers. So far it's blooming in prickly ash and black cherry, but they're both pretty vulnerable to fire, so maybe this will help. Last year we couldn't burn - a big disappointment - because the weather was always too wet or too windy. This year we lucked out.

In any case, there's nothing like the smell of a prairie fire to make you thrill to the elemental joy of the primordial land. This land has been on fire for thousands of years since the big glaciers left and Saturday we once again reenacted a spiritual rite that's older than any religion.

If you're wondering, we just left the truck in the pasture. That's a story for the next post - the fire horse.

Why we separate church & state

Steven Waldeman, founder of BeliefNet and author of Founding Faith, has a lot of interesting stuff to say about the separation of church and state (which he supports) and the place of religion in public life (which he also supports). In a recent interview in National Review Online, he says:

Modern evangelicals often argue for more religion in the public square and often argue that separation of church and state is a myth concocted by liberal 20th-century judges. Actually, it was the 18th century evangelicals, mostly Baptists, who led the charge for religious freedom and separation of church and state. They rallied against Patrick Henry’s proposal to have tax dollars help religion in general, arguing that the idea was “founded neither in Scripture, on Reason, on Sound Policy; but is repugnant to each of them,” as one petition declared. The 18th-century evangelicals might be puzzled how their theological descendents ended up wanting more government entanglement with religion.

So when we hear people arguing that we need Christian Sharia in this country - a conformity in action and belief to their (usually) narrow interpretation of religion, we should pause to thank God that we have had freedom OF religion and freedom FROM religion all these years. It easily could have been different, but perhaps they were close enough to Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil Wars to realize that entanglement of religion with the state was bad for the state, bad for religion, and most importantly, bad for people.

Can you learn altruism?

BusinessWeek reported this study from the UW-Madison in the current (March 27) issue:

Meditation Can Wish You Well, Study Says tests suggest compassion and empathy can be learned traits
By Amanda Gardner

THURSDAY, March 27 (HealthDay News) -- New research suggests that qualities the world desperately needs more of -- love, kindness and compassion -- are indeed teachable. Imaging technology shows that people who practice meditation that focuses on kindness and compassion actually undergo changes in areas of the brain that make them more in tune to what others are feeling. "Potentially one can train oneself to behave in a way which is more benevolent and altruistic," said study co-author Antoine Lutz, an associate scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Unfortunately, that's contrary to my meditation experience back when I was practicing zen sitting. It made me jumpy and irritable (OK more irritable than normal), which is why I ultimately gave up zen. But there's good news. Puppy training has changed my life. We have just started taking Neesa to puppy class and it reminds me that positive thinking leads to positive feeling.

Puppy class is all about positive feedback. Catching your dog doing the right thing and praising her. Isn't that what we all want? Isn't that really the way to raise happy and responsible dogs, horses or children? And it makes you feel good instead of jumpy and irritable (OK less irritable than normal).

You can train your brain to be happy, to see things positively and to expect the best, even when the worst happens. The first step: turn off the radio.