In late February or early March of this year (who can be sure what month it is?) we lost one of our home-bred registered Clydesdale horses. The death of a horse is always an event when it happens, but not a particularly rare one. Horses need no real excuse to drop dead, they are infamously good at it. Their internal design recommends it, even. As one writer put it, to paraphrase, the horse is an animal that got released from the factory before the design went though proper trials.
Squirrel-Eating Jon called the vet when he found her down subsequent to her not coming in for hay with her herd, and the vet arrived shortly, but there was nothing she could do. Very often, a firm diagnosis is not even possible in such a case without an autopsy. Odds are some colic is involved, some torsion of the guts, but the textbook indications were not all there in this case. Jon was going to fetch the rifle to end the misery but only made it fifty feet when the vet called him back – she’s dying now. So we watched her go.
Not a happy event by any means, but very good news for scavengers. There would be no wastage here as occurs when a horse or other large animal is euthanized by lethal injection, the chemicals necessitating it be kept away from all other animals. Or at least, aboveground ones of any consequence. Because she had died naturally, and the same would be true of having her suffering ended by gunshot, there was now from one moment to the next an 1800 pound mountain of meat on the scene to be made ready for general consumption, or “natural disposal” as it is called in our county. Some windfall in a season of general scarcity. And so we were happy that if the horse had to die as it had, it chose that point in the season to do so. We were still a good month away from the spectre of grizzly bears. By the time they made their first appearance of the season, much of horse was apt to have been consumed by smaller creatures, including our own dogs. Not that we have anything against grizzlies consuming horses, our horses even, once they are dead. The problem lay in having such a hazardous animal laying claim to such a terrific bounty of meat that it would be likely to simply sleep overtop of and guard with its life. All fine and well miles back in the hills. Not so great at the edge of your hayfield a half mile from the house. At any rate, such a jealous claim was not likely to result once the carcass was down to bones and hide when the first bears came on the scene. While still likely a draw to the great bruins, it would not create a situation of menace to life and limb.
Most of the meat scavenged from large carcasses on this place is scavenged by flocks of ravens, bald eagles, and our own dogs. Coyotes take some as do foxes, but not much, cos the livestock guardian dogs we run have them firmly in their crosshairs and hanging around here is treacherous for them. We like to haul a carcass, outside of bear-season, to a knoll in the pasture from where we can see it from the kitchen window. We open it at multiple locations with a large hunting knife for ease of access for the birds. This is the same function wolves provide for ravens, for instance. When the accessible side is done, we flip the carcass and open what couldn’t be reached on the other side – now frozen – with an axe. All of this we did, and recorded the results on a motion-triggered camera.
We thought some of the resulting pictures were compelling, even beautiful. Apocalyptic/befitting the times. Here are some highlights from the knoll, and from where we later moved the remains to at the back of the hayfield.
Trail CameraTrail CameraTrail CameraTrail CameraTrail CameraTrail CameraTrail Camera
Like many deer hunters who wish to be successful at their game, Squirrel-Eating Jon likes to do scouting pre and during season. And afterwards as well, to see who made it through. Locally, this entails repurposing a couple of the cameras he had in use keeping tabs on the neighborhood grizzly bears for use at deer scrapes.
The goal was to get a nice buck and a doe or two according under the conditions of the licenses held. Holding out for a nice buck of course decreases the odds of success. It is certainly “trophy hunting” but keep that in mind when passing judgement. That the odds of pulling the trigger decrease markedly, whitetail bucks being tough to hunt. Also important to keep in mind is that being a trophy hunter does not preclude one from being a meat hunter at the same time. Indeed, the most celebrated whitetail hunters on the continent hunted the big bucks not for the racks, but rather because they carried the most meat. Meat that was important to the household economy to some degree, as it is to Eating’s. You’ve heard of the saying more bang for your buck, well early trophy hunting was all about getting more buck for your bang.
Here are some of the pre-and-during season photo highlights the Squirrel Eater got in 2021. And a brief rundown of how the season went.
This fella back of the hayfield had uneven tines in velvet. This can happen on account of an injury, and tends to be expressed in succeeding years:
Trail Camera
This fella had a nice even rack, fairly high, not heavy, and neither seems the deer itself. Never laid eyes on this one:
Trail Camera
This young buck had a distinctive high rack. Jon managed to still-hunt his way into this individual’s path earlier on in the season without the deer being aware of him. It was an easy shot, but he passed it up. He didn’t want to end the season so early and he wanted to hold out for something larger:
Trail Camera
This below was the premier buck of Eating’s home territory in 2021, that is, the lands surrounding the farm where the trail cam pictures were collected. An old boy with an impressive slightly off-kilter rack and bullish body size both. Jon put some considerable time into bagging this boy but it was not to be.
Trail Camera
Here indeed are a coupla pictures of the ol’ boy post-season. The first real snow arriving in the territory of the farm the day after season ended, December 1st. It’s always nice to see when they make it through, even when it was oneself endeavoring to be the agent of their ultimate demise:
Trail CameraTrail Camera
As it turned out Jon did not kill any deer on his home territory. Rather, he spent much time in the big woods of the public lands to the west where a hunter can get on a track and just go. Tracking conditions were not good this season as November was very mild and there was very little snow. On the one day when conditions were decent, Jon cut the track of a big buck crossing a logging road after passing a number of tracks up, parked the truck and took off in pursuit. Covering a number of miles, he jumped the deer twice from daybeds on account of it was so dead-still in the woods that day sneaking-up was nigh impossible. Eventually he got into an area of fresh deer sign that was so thick – tracks, rubs, scrapes unlike anything he had seen before – he lost the track of the deer he was following. Additionally, the day was wearing on, as was the season itself. On account of the abundance of sign, he reckoned he was virtually surrounded by deer just out of sight in the dense woods. He decided to do a bit of calling on the grunt tube before he tried to figure out where he was and how to find his truck. Within perhaps five minutes he caught a flicker of movement as a buck came in to his calling. It turned out to be a decent 8-pointer with a heavy, compact and aesthetic rack. One shot from the ol’ Remington 760 in .300 Savage brought it cleanly down. He field dressed this deer and spent the rest of the day dragging this windfall, as heavy as himself, in the the general direction of the road. It was beginning to get dusky when after a mile and more he made it to the edge of a forestry cutblock. It was clear he was not going to make it out with the buck that night. He laid his vest over it and hiked the rest of the way out, a long trip at that hour. At one point on a disused logging trail he came upon very fresh sign of three mountain lions traveling and gamboling together:
Watching his back now (in the ’90’s he was by expert assessment very close to becoming Alberta’s first cougar-killed human, but that’s another story) he made it out to the truck after dark, after making it to the main road and hitching a ride with some nice younger hunters.
He returned next day with the calf-sled belonging to he and A.D.’s partners in all things yak – the Clydes – and completed the mile and some drag out to the truck.
He also bagged a large doe out in the big woods this season, on a hunt that lasted less than a half-hour and entailing an easy drag of only a couple hundred yards. Tracking conditions returned to poor until the very day after the end of hunting season and he did not fill his second doe-tag.
We could write a book examining machine versus horse and the effect of each on the human psyche. And body for that matter. Maybe someone has.
There is this big ol store in Calgary from back when called “Stallion Boot & Jean Company.” You walk in the centre doors and on the right it’s all biker stuff and on the left all cowboy stuff. Years ago Squirrel Eating Jon, in there looking for a new set of chaps, commented to the owner on the nature of the contrast and the owner said, oh no – it’s the same thing, two versions of the same thing, the same people. Jon thought a lot about that, being by then both a biker and a horseman. He concluded the owner was right, they are same sort of person. Except that the biker is the consolation prize version, the two dimensional cutout of that three-dimensional being that requires the horse to make it complete. Â
We can absolutely attest from personal experience with both horses and motorcycles, bikers and cowboys, that even on those days you feel like the last thing you want to do is work with a horse, you force yourself out there and within minutes you are feeling fantastic.  You don’t get that from a machine, not anywhere near on the same level even on a really good day and with a machine you actually enjoy. There is something magical about the equation of human and horse. Hence the ol saw, the best thing for the inside of a person is the outside of a horse. We have speculated that the fortunes of man and horse have been so intertwined for so long that it’s something encoded in the human DNA. Like the smell of a campfire. Ever notice the instantaneous rush of well being that scent evokes? Not a coincidence that were it not for the campfire we would not have survived outside the tropics. It’s in our genes, the positive response to that smell. Same with horses we believe, the positive response to their singular, exquisite smell alone, let alone the rest of the experience to be had with them. We have contemplated that we would personally be less human were it not for experience with horses, we’d have been stunted in their absence from our lives, not just in life experience but in the intrinsic feeling of what it is to be fully human.
And here’s something we’ve noticed being around both types of people, horsefolk and bikers. They share many of the same attributes including a propensity for wearing leather, for violence at times, the susceptibility to the irresistible pull to be hanging out there in the wind navigating the curvature of the earth. The difference is, the bikers are brittle and overt, on edge, whereas the cowboys have a zen-like quality, a peace we believe comes from the horse. The cowboy is lean and the biker is fat, often as not, cos whilst there is skill involved in riding a motorcycle well, any chimp can sit on a Harley or comensurate roadwhale cruiser and point it down the road in a basic fashion. At the basic level, you don’t really ride a motorcycle at all, you just sit on one. Much harder to do this with a horse, beyond anything but a slow walk. There is a requisite athleticism that enters into the other gaits, or you’re not apt to be up there for long. You don’t “sit a horse.”
A biker is a wasp perhaps to the cowboy’s honeybee. Both engage in risky pursuits, are apt to be adrenaline junkies, prefer to be left alone amongst their kind, and both can and will deliver a painful sting and in extreme cases even kill you. But their aura is very different. One carries the aura of chaos, of a clumsy groping for identity, the other of poised serenity and comfort in the skin. They may both be ready for anything, but the cowboy is more ready. The biker only thinks he is, and only when surrounded by other bikers. It’s the difference between machine culture and horse culture in a nutshell right there, is our take. The cowboy has time on his side. A horse can take you anywhere. A machine can only take you certain places and only until the tank is empty. The horse will endure long after all the machines are inert relics of this brief interlude in time that is even now on the road to being impossible to maintain. That the machine is inferior to the animal as a steed can be witnessed by many a biker’s insistence on making his damn thing as infernally, obnoxiously loud as possible. This is nothing more nor less of course than an example of the ape beating his chest, with whomever does it convincingly enough getting mating rights, or so the underlying premise goes. (It all boils down to mating rights in the end. And usually before that.) The cowboy needn’t beat his chest at all. He is, after-all, on a horse, and that is enough. He will make a better entrance silently than the biker ever will making all the noise and bluster he and modern technology are capable of.
We are positive – having reflected on this plenty – that the entire experience of being human, of human life, has been cheapened by abandoning the horse in favor of the machine. We have no idea how much we lost in that deal, but it was certainly epic. We would go so far as to speculate we would never have become the disaster we are today, all in a crisis with us now, all of the time, intrinsic and ex-, in the absence of the internal combustion engine. How many extant get this? Shifting baseline syndrome takes over in a single generation or less, the onset of cultural amnesia and people focus only on the short-term gains anyways. So the knowledge of what we’ve lost is knowledge that was mostly lost itself once those who actually witnessed the transition years died off. But some still know. The cowboys still know, the few of them out there. As do the blooded elite classes in our homelands, the leisure classes. The ones who get to do more than less what they want with their days, days which are to a considerable degree at best living an exercise in preserving those human traits, ideals and pursuits most worth preserving. No big riddle then why hunting and hunting dogs, manners, maintaining grace under pressure, being able to handle yourself in conflict, and of course horses figure so largely here still. Things that simultaneously reflect and maintain us at our best. They may have fleets of fine cars these people, but where have you ever seen it demonstrated as credo with the upper classes the cultivation of the ability to repair one’s car? A big “meh” to those of discernment there. Let someone else repair the car, and suffer the resultant spiritual flattening. Â
When Squirrel Eating Jon began succeeding in his work with the heavy horses, not just in the training of them but in his working relationship with them, it was a profound awakening for him on a great many levels. One of the things it awakened being a great sadness. He had long speculated given his leanings and nature on the magnitude of what we had lost with the advent of the machine age, but when he began succeeding a in a working relationship with horses it was no longer speculation. It became absolute knowledge, and it came with a heaviness of heart. He now knew what mankind had given up. For awhile there he tried to spread the gospel but his efforts fell almost entirely on deaf ears. We were and are just too far gone for that particular message to sound with any resonance. Not even the typical modern back-to-the-lander he knew could be reached with the message of the horse. The receptors having wilted off generations ago in their bloodlines.
On August 14 Squirrel Eating Jon plied hiswares at the local farm market and the music was so bad it had him wondering if there wasn’t some merit after-all in Old Testament punishments for sin. The sin of getting up on stage before your time, for instance. At least 50% of the fiddler’s notes were “brown” as they say, dark brown. The oppressive effect on the market atmosphere was crushing and it went on for an hour. One of the cruel traits of amateurs in the field being that aside from not knowing how to play, neither do they know when to quit.
People shambled about in the heat and smoke of Western desertification in their predominantly XL fleshsuits and didn’t even mutter to one another, nor to Squirrel. He found it interesting that so many people who so obviously loved to eat were buying no food. Such was the brainstem-level impact of the music. What was really interesting though was how suddenly animated and friendly it all became literally the moment the instruments were put away. A study in the power of music on mood, and the essential role of competence with regards to the human spirit. Eating too felt a sudden lightness of being. A big ol’ splotchy-grey gal reminiscent of an end-season Coho selling women’s handbags across from him remarked, “I thought i was gonna puke.”
The market, advertised as the biggest yet, was a fizzle. No-one wanted to be out in the withering, record-breaking heat and apocalyptic smokefog. Mrs. Coho had some pretty interesting bags meanwhile, some with moose on them, and others with Canadian themes for those from outside Alberta, as well as one with what seemed to be a giant hyaena head coming down from above with mouth spread wide on a seated child. That one had Jon wishing he were a woman for a moment before realizing, how did he know for sure he wasn’t, it being 2021 and all?
A fella selling tea from Himalaya lit some incense then in the booth beside him. It smelled like it didn’t smell good ten years ago when it was fresh and still smelled good. Jon was thinking now of that guy in Leviticus whom God ordered stoned just for working on Sunday and felt vindicated for being the only one in his community never to have ventured to Kathmandu.
Another vendor whose kids sell coffee approached Eating with his palms supplicated, eyes shunting side to side about the sparse attendance, and then gesturing out the big open doors into the hamhouse doomscape announced How is it that it has all been going on for a billion years on this planet to arrive at a point like THIS?!
So it was that Eating was hungry for something pure to warsh away the residue of the combined sensory smirch. Being avid festivalgoers, he and his woman A.D. were happy to discover that their local town was the new home to Alberta’s largest bluegrass festival. Bluegrass music being lonesome as a whippoorwill and pure as a driven snow (to quote Ricky Skaggs) it might just do the job if anything could. On August 16th they dropped by for a bit. They heard some pretty good music. Personal favorites were “I Hate That Lil’ Mountain Gal” and “Soon I Am Going to Die.” An act they wanted to see couldn’t get into Alberta from British Columbia as it turned out, so to hell with it they left. Their pictures were taken as they went by, to be captioned later “Couple most likely to eat roadkill.” When they got home Jon passed-out.
He returned to market on August 28. It was a good one, the music was really good for a change, resulting in a lusty attendance wolfish for meat and eager to purge their wallets. The tone was one of cultural inclusivity as evidenced by an Englishman gifting Squirrel a Scotch egg uponst learning he was one-third Irish.
Last fall Squirrel-Eating Jon collected 24 hair samples of grizzly bear from the area immediately adjacent the farm. These were sent to a lab for DNA analysis. The first results of the analysis are in.
Eating reckoned from the evidence he gleaned tracking the bears as well as trail camera shots garnered by himself and a neighbor that there were five or six individual grizzlies frequenting the area. DNA results have borne this out. Four different bears – two females and two males – were represented by the DNA and none of these bears were yet in the state database. Several samples yielded no usable DNA, and some of these ones based on tracking were samples that were not duplicated in the collection. Given this and the fact that a mother bear and two cubs makes three bears alone, it seems safe to say there are five or six, and more likely six individual grizzly bears prowling the area. Of course, there may be more. This is considered a minimum. This post includes two photos of the bears gleaned from this season. From out back of Squirrel’s hayfield.
The samples are being analyzed now to reveal any lineage to bears known in the existing database.
Meanwhile, unfortunately, the neighborhood continues to attract new human beings. Eating stopped to talk to a survey crew on his road who were marking out a spot where a new house would be built about 75 metres from one of the better used griz trails. He suggested that a bear was just back in the bush adjacent at that very moment, as he had deducted from the morning’s tracking. The woman who is to live there admitted she loved bears.
Hopefully they will love her, but we doubt it. She will represent just one more impediment to their attempts to go unnoticed.
Two people have been killed by grizzlies in the general area this active season so far. A university professor who was knocked off an embankment by a bear and died in the fall and a biologist’s wife out for a walk on her property, buried for possible consumption later by an aged sow.
Squirrel Eating Jon would like to move somewhere more remote at this point. Like a wolverine would. Retreat yet again before the horrid onslaught, the gruesome arrival. From the ones with their golfclubs in tow who would make a cocker spaniel-kennel of any and all wolf-range and deem it good. The ones who would starve out the Blackfeet and slaughter the great herds all over again in order to all over again plant rapeseed and shamble soft fat and emasculate about some obscene and sterile country club watering shrubs.
Still, there are folks more like wolverines out there today, and more men are like wolverines than women. Were it left up to men, the hinterlands would be full of men living quite contentedly like beasts. But they would be doing so in the absence of women, far fewer of whom seem to find such a condition acceptable, let alone desirable.
And if you are one of the few fortunate men who enjoys life with a really fine and compatible woman partner, who would give that up? There is no such thing as a life devoid of compromise, we suspect.
Live long enough and you too will have that thousand-yard stare.
European starling, summer plumage.Squirrel-Eating Jon is 825 times the size of this bird.
It’s the third of March and we’ve just seen the first spring bird. This whilst looking out the morning window sipping coffee, grounds in the bottom of the cup, water poured-over. The guardian dogs have been located on the computer via the GPS transmitter on the one’s collar. Ravens are circling low over the farmyard as they are most of the time, as though it were some remote bird rookery, which it is. Three starlings are perched on the large henhouse.
Arne Arnesson, the Norwegian homesteader of the place who came from Minnesota with a team of oxen pulling a cart, would not have seen this first bird here, the starlings. He would not have seen the starling at all. This is because of the 160 that had been introduced to Central Park from the Old World in 1890/91 by fans of all birds mentioned by Shakespeare, none had spread further at the time of Arnesson’s arrival than Philedelphia. They were still about 3900 kilometres away.
They’re here now and we find them fascinating. Other than being exotic in the sense of having been introduced, they are doubly so in the sense that they are in the mynah bird family, they are a mynah bird. Beautiful and famous mimics. Indeed the starling is quite the mimic itself, is beautiful when seen up close as well as in flight, and can make a very good pet. We know where the starlings here have been wintering, we suppose, by listening to the calls of other birds in the repertoire. The calls of California quail they render authentically suggest to us that some of our birds cross over into the British Columbia southern interior for the winter months, whilst the call of the western meadowlark is either something they picked up east of here during the summer or on winter ranges further south in the great interior of the continent.
Starling, winter plumage.
Starlings get a bad rap for imperiling other birds, but studies by Cornell conclusively showed only the sapsucker being impacted. Indeed we have sapsuckers on our farm and and indeed we have seen starlings using their nestholes. Yet we still have sapsuckers, and there’s nothing we can do about the starlings anyway except make lemonade. Other people malign them for their sheer numbers, about 200 million strong on the continent now. This complaint from an explosively consumptive primate some 350 million strong over the same North American territory. A species not only far more abundant than the bird, but exponentially more destructive, and individually much larger to boot. Squirrel-Eating Jon for instance is 825 times the size of a starling. The putty-coloured ape is not so hot at perspective with regards to itself.
Starling in the pretty grey-headed plumage it sports only once in its life.
The murmurations of starlings – giant synchronized flocks in flight – are a mindblowing wonder to behold, a true wonder of nature. We used to see these murmurations in the east. We would be excited to find out if a given display was in response to a merlin perhaps, a rare and coveted raptor in south Ontario that Squirrel-Eating enjoyed as a falconry bird… for use in hunting starlings.
A young Squirrel-Eating Jon under the homeyard dogwood tree with a female Columbian merlin he hunted starlings with. The dogwood tree is the first to turn in fall.
A note now about invasives in general here on this farm. When Jon and A.D. showed up on the place, it had not been active as a farm for a span of decades. All the species present were native. The invasives didn’t start moving in until the vigorous pair began bringing in feedstuffs for the great rookery of chickens and swine they encouraged. This was certainly true of the other invasive bird that lived here for a spell, the English sparrow. It’s numbers took off about three years into the tenure of the couple, but then dropped off after a few years of notable presence, until they were gone again. We don’t know what happened to them, but we don’t miss them. Unlike the starling, they are not particularly interesting and their incessant charmless chirp is a nuisance. The males are handsome in their breeding plumage, mind-you.
The other notable invasive here is the house mouse. When the couple arrived, the only mice here were the beautiful and gentle native deer mice with their great liquid nighteyes. And of course the voles, meadow and red-backed and etcetera, which are “mice” to some folk. A year or two after arrival, the house mice began to proliferate, feeding on stores of grain the couple kept on hand. Soon they were everywhere, including in the house, running over sleeping faces in the night. Not a favorite thing. The deer mice got rarer as the house mice got more common. To the point where Squirrel-Eating now releases any deer mice caught very infrequently now in live traps. Not so the house mice. They are summarily executed. They infest even the vehicles at times. A baited live trap set one night on the bench seat of Jon’s Stinky Old Ford pickup the next morning contained 24 house mice. That’s 24 too many. They were crammed in there the likes of commuters on a Monday morning subway in some famous shithole or other.
Native deer mouse.
We would still like to raise a starling or two as pet one day. We would like to feed them fruit and other goodies and see what they learn to imitate (see second clip below.) Watch their fascinating and ornate plumage changes from season-to-season. One of the prettiest of which occurs only once in their life: the transition from the pearl grey of the juvenile days to the star-spangled winter garb, grey head of youth remaining.
Least weasels (one with a lemming, one without a lemming.) Louis Agassiz Fuertes art.
One year on our original farm out on the wastes of the high Alberta plains we had two explosions. Nothing detonated nor combusted, rather they were explosions of the numerical kind. The first was of meadow voles, and the second was on account of this. It was an explosion of least weasels, the earth’s smallest carnivore.
The original farm out on the wastes of the Alberta high plains. That wall tent housed the European overflow. Days after this photo was taken by someone a plough-wind sucked it up and dropped it in the pond.
We had indeed noticed a lot of voles around sometime during the summer, they seemed everywhere in the mixed plains grasses, the native patches and non. Winter came mild and with a decent snow pack for insulating small creatures. (Even at minus forty ambient, if you dig down and slip a thermometer into the little gap at ground level beneath a generous snow-pack – the “sub-nivean” – it will come up reading just a few degrees below freezing. The worst thing for small earth-level critters being a very cold winter with no snow.) This many voles can cause big problems for horticulturists as they girdle young trees, but there are many pluses to having this many around, too. One of the most delightful pluses of all made itself known when a least weasel showed up in the garage in a live-trap set for mice.
Least weasel. Their short tail lacks the black tip of larger weasels.
Long familiar with the stoat (short-tailed weasel) and the big long-tailed weasel both in the east and here out west, this was our first experiences with the tiny least weasel, a species we had long wanted to witness. Knowing their average lifespan to be but ten months in one study, and that winter is the toughest season to make it through, we decided to give this fella a hand wintering by customizing a double-decker hamster cage for him and bringing him in to holiday the winter away on the kitchen table. Outside, many other least weasels were braving the season as well, as evidenced by their tracks all over the snow. Many more than usual. Least weasels are the only weasel that can raise multiple litters a season in response to spikes in prey-abundance by the way, which is why this carnivore, rare in typical years, can on occasion suddenly seem to be everywhere. Just like the populations of their prey.
The wire frame of the enclosure was set over a stout custom-made box, which included a snug nest-box extended out beyond the dimensions of the bars at one end. A latched lid offering outside access. We emptied out a sardine-can for the tubular fellow to use as a litter-box, which he took to readily. He was fed a diet of crumbled dry kitten food and plentiful live-trapped mice. The cage was outfitted with a rock and a climbing “tree” to get to the upper levels. Also a stout length of climbing rope hung from the ceiling of the cage. A deep layer of dried leaves as substrate. Other enrichment came in the form of the live mice Lothar (as we named him) was given and also sitting on the rock and watching us putty-apes plying our strange diets at mealtimes. Lothar settled in nicely and never seemed to want to be out of the enclosure. This was very important to us – had he displayed any signs of distress he would have been released to chance-out the winter. As it was, he wintered according to plan and was released onto the bushy hillside above the pond in June the following year once nature’s bounty was in full-swing.
A couple of summers on, Squirrel-Eating Jon and A.D. and some assorted Europeans were headed southwest into Calgary for who knows what. Much of the trip was on the #9 Highway, a broad blacktop that is the main artery connecting Calgary with Drumheller and points beyond. On an east-west stretch, Jon spotted something he first took to be a vole crossing the deadly expanse and then turning to head back across to the original side. But it didn’t move like a vole, it was bouncier and wobblier. It was a young least weasel. The vehicle lurched to a halt and Eating ran back to where the puny animal had entered the mowed grass of the right-of-way. He spotted it progressing haltingly through the thatch. The reason for its halting, wobbly motion was it was a very young animal, just around weaning age we reckon. Jon cupped it in his hands where it attempted to chew its way out and brought it back to the car. It was a little female weasel and was placed in a large plastic tub with a towel in the bottom for cover for the trip. It amazed even the jaded Europeans who had seen pretty much everything. Once in Calgary, the travelers dropped by a pet store and bought some frozen nestling mice. These thawed quickly and the little weasel knew exactly what to do with them. Lisle, as we named her, had at her dinner with gusto and then fell asleep.
Lisle the weasel.
The weasel condo was produced from storage and Lisle, whom we’d likely saved from starvation if not a summary squarshing on the highway, was installed. The plan being similar to the Lothar Project. Grow her into womanhood and get her through the winter to be released in spring.
Now, no-one would have described Lothar as being large. He was in body about the size and shape of an an average stogie, with 2″ smoked-off the end perhaps. But Lisle, being a girl, was smaller yet. Tiny, graceful and delightful, at maturity her head was smaller than the heads of the adult deer mouse prey we frequently offered her live, to hone her predatory skills and keep them honed. Lothar had not been much for play, but Lisle was. She would attack her rope and feathers and other odds and sods we would hang from string in there with her. She mostly played when we were in the other room, and you knew when she was cos she made this wonderful vocalization as she did, a soft musical trilling sound, perhaps like a bird tone crossed with a treefrog. Like the sort of sounds you hear punctuating the perfection of a quiet summer evening.
In the later fall, Lisle gradually turned pure-white, although it seems she did so more slowly than you’d imagine in nature. Her condo was near the window, which kept her in tune with the light cycles, and maybe made things cooler. Weasel coats change with the seasons in response to both duration of daylight and temperature. In other words, a weasel will only turn white in response to decreasing daylight if the temperature begin to average below freezing. So we don’t entirely know how this lines-up with Lisle turning white indoors. It was a cool house, but not a frigid one. There must be some additional mechanisms. Maybe they also inherit the genes for colour change according to what generations of weasels had experienced at that locale. (In southernmost Ontario, some weasels turn white in winter while many just get a thicker brown coat the colour of their summer one.) One thing we reflected on was how perhaps the prettiest of weasel coats was the one in mid-transition from brown to white. An “eclipse” coat as we’ve seen it called.
When live mice were placed in the enclosure with Lisle, her predatory response was so swift the eye could literally not follow. One moment she spotted the mouse, and there was this blur, and in the next split second she was there with the back of its neck in her jaws and it was dead. One of those things that needs to be witnessed to be believed. What’s more, we don’t recall her ever being clumsy at this. The programming of this superb little athlete was perfect from the outset.
Lisle.
Least weasels are found throughout the northern hemisphere. In the United Kingdom they are called simply “weasel” whereas the one other species they have (the short-tailed weasel) is known as “stoat.” In some places in the old country where there are no stoats to compete with, the least weasels are much larger than they are in North America or in the U.K., being the size of the smaller of the stoats, which also vary in size depending on where in their range we are considering them.
Lisle was amongst the livestock that moved with us in the spring to our new farm in the foothills. Her enclosure was placed on a shelf in one of the sheds with plans to move her into the house for a little while longer before release. But one day we were accessing her litter-box and distracted by all the tasks of moving an entire farm forgot to latch the lid to her nest box through which it was accessed. She escaped. It was as good a place as any to be liberated. Lots of shelter and lots of mice. We hope she had a good little life. She certainly enriched ours.
Least weasel in Randy Fehr art. “Low Brush Hunter.” What a fabulous rendition! We would like this one for our wall. Prints are to be had.
Ozzy the least weasel. He is a bit bigger than Lothar was. European we reckon.
Squirrel-Eating Jon is 1431.6 times the the size of these Brewer’s, or hairy-tailed moles. Depicted here posing for the artist Audubon in tandem for reasons of personal safety. Remember, always go outside in pairs. Or better yet as a group. In the days before the White Man, these moles lived and self-actualized on the surface as depicted.
Everyone has an opinion on shrews and moles. Not all of those opinions come from a place of trust. There may be some justification for this. Evidence presented here included.
One day long ago Squirrel-Eating Jon was up on the limestone ridge above his squirrel-woods. It was a fine temperate spring day after leafout. He had climbed up off the deeply incised plateau of black oak and come upon the old Attawandiron footpath that is in modern times known as the Bruce Trail, after its peninsula of destination. He entered onto the path overhung with giant basswood and very soon came upon a very strange situation.
There lying perpendicular in the deep dark middle of the packed-earthen path were two pointy plump insectivores of similar aspect and hue yet different type, the pointy parts almost but not quite touching. Nose to nose, completely intact, no evidence of corruption (fresh as a daisy), no sign of foul play, stone-dead.
Short-tailed shrew. The bull-terrier of the shrew world and one of the few venomous mammals out there.
Before we go any further in this tale, keep in mind of the short-tailed shrew the presence of BLTX, a multifunctional tissue kallikrein-like protease in their saliva consisting of a prosequence active form of 253 aa with a presumed catalytic triad of serine proteases and amino acid sequence bearing the highest identity of 53.4% with human tissue kallikrein 1 and identities of 45.1%, 33.6%, 32.4%, 30.4%, and 28.1% with, respectively, mouse tissue kallikrein 1 and gila toxin (a lethal venom from the Mexican beaded lizard.)
Not feeling so confident now, ourselves. Can we just agree that lethally venomous mammals like the short-tailed shrew are rare? Indeed, in not necessarily necessary backyard warshtub experiments conducted in the long ago by Squirrel-Eating Jon and Skunk-Roper Ron, it was neatly shown that a specimen of this bull-terrier of the shrew world placed in the galvanized arena of the tub with multiple angry meadow voles would dispatch each and every one of them with a single bite and a couple minutes wait time. (The voles, twice the size of the shrew, might have fared better could they have organized their mob into a cohesive military unit. Anger clouds the vision. Witness Occupy Wall Street, a more recent lesson in the pitfalls of incohesion.)
Could any of this have had anything to do with the scene confounding Squirrel-Eating Jon on the sylvan path that day? Had something gone terribly wrong or was this just another day in the life of the underworld? How did these critters come to be arrayed so in death, no signs of a struggle? Keeping in mind that the Brewer’s mole involved here, while being only 1/1431.6th the size of Jon himself, was nonetheless almost twice the weight of the big shrew of which it was not dissimilar in aspect.
Was this a crime-scene? Or did these two small folk in coming face-to-face in the path and already infamous for their acute social anxiety frighten each other so, perhaps in being one-another’s worst nightmare image of where they may end up in life if they made the wrong decisions, put so much social pressure on one-another that their hearts gave out? After all, a similar scene involving mountain lions was come upon once by a colleague of Jon’s in these hills, and this was his conclusion.
What Rough Beast 