ENHS Nature Trails November 2004 Article 2

Mysteries
by Reida Kimmel

剙奚ur pond looks so blue this morning in the cool bright sunshine. It is filling quickly after the frequent rains, and the hated elodea that obscures its surface all summer is nowhere to be seen. Below the surface, the water weeds rest, awaiting another season of the rampant growth and decay that will one day turn our pond to swamp and then to dry land. The remaining clumps of water lilies floating far from shore are golden. The ones near shore, stranded during the low water months, look brown and leafless. The turkeys have been spending the past weeks wading in the shallows amongst the water lilies, presumably eating the aphids that cover the leaf surfaces. Now, after yesterday's heavy rain, they will have to find new amusements, because even their long legs won't carry them into deep water. Except for a few squashes and peppers, the harvest is in and it is time to rake leaves and build compost. What a harvest it has been! Every fruit and vine surpassed old production levels. Our cherry trees, usually the exclusive domain of the blackbirds, gave us dozens of quarts of cherries to can, dry and eat fresh for weeks. We don't love ladders, so the blackbirds kept the tops of the trees for their own feasting. That was just the beginning. Berries, grapes, pears, and apples, both summer and winter varieties, all kept me far too busy canning, juicing and preserving. Two weeks ago we pressed twenty-nine gallons of juice and called it quits with fruit for the year. Which brings me to the first mystery of the story. Why in the fourth year of drought did we experience such a bounteous harvest? This gift was not just ours. Friends and neighbors from all over the area report the same great harvests. Last year we made only two gallons of juice and a few quarts of applesauce. We did not taste a single cherry, and the four pear trees produced a total of one pear. Perhaps fruit set was heavy because this spring was warmer and dryer at blossom time than in previous years. Yet, though the spring of 2003 was rather cool and wet, the springs of 2000, 2001 and 2002 were warm and rather dry, weather conducive to good pollination, and yet harvests were not exceptional. This June and early July were mild and wetter than usual, which would have helped to reduce premature fruit dropping and to encourage berry production, but such weather has been the norm in past decades, without the same bounteous results. I simply cannot build a coherent theory to explain which combination of variables worked to cause so many different species of plants to bear such heavy crops this year.

My second mystery involves the turkeys. This year, as always, we purchased four newly hatched baby turkeys, called poults. They prospered, and by June were able to spend their days outdoors in a little pasture bordering the woods beside Fox Hollow Creek and the road. Only one of the poults was a female, and she suddenly became lame in late June. We found that she had cut the tissue between two toes and was pecking at her own flesh. The wound was very clean, and while Chuck held her, I applied Betadine ointment and a dressing of cotton wool and tape. Immediately the little turkey stopped bothering her foot and was bouncy and active, though a bit lame. We called her Bandaid. In three weeks I tried to remove the worn dressing, but she started pecking herself and had to be bandaged again. She grew, but being female, was much smaller than her brothers. Then in mid August, when I went to shut the turkeys in for the night, I noticed that they were in some distress, making whimpering peeps and pacing the fence. Bandaid was nowhere to be seen. Instead there were piles of feathers and down, a trail leading into the woods, and nothing more. Some predator had grabbed Bandaid and carried her away in broad daylight. What could have done that? We have rarely even heard coyotes in recent years. Rumor has it that someone had the local pack trapped in revenge for the death of a Pomeranian. There have been few raccoons about this year, not even enough to threaten our grapes, and raccoons do not usually bother big birds. We have never seen a cougar in the area, but we do have a resident bobcat, which we see up the road often enough. It is active during the day. There are lots of wild turkeys about, so it could have become accustomed to hunting them. The way the prey was carried away and not torn up on the spot of the kill is catlike. We placed the blame on the bobcat, shut the other turkeys in the pen for two weeks to discourage second helpings, and then pastured them with the horses by the pond, which they like very much. If ever I harbored any resentment against the bobcat, which I did not, it would have been ended when, about a month after Bandaid's death, a small juvenile bobcat, almost a baby, bounced across the road in front of me and disappeared into the bushes. I've never seen a baby bobcat before. I was thrilled. Perhaps Bandaid went to grace another family's table, a family that will be welcomed and treasured in this neighborhood.

This fall's mushroom bonanza is no surprise or mystery at all. The first heavy rains came in August, and both September and October saw normal rainfall with no really hot weather or cold nights. Fungi, or at least the ones I am familiar with, love the wet but hate frost. Until the last week of October, even here at a thousand feet, the nighttime temperatures did not even fall into the thirties. Consequent to the wonderful weather, the price of chanterelles and matsutakes (Tricholoma matsutake) fell to record lows in the supermarkets. But here is the mystery. Chuck and I have lived in our house for thirty-five years. In a normal week we will walk or ride the horses in the neighboring hills six or seven times. We are always looking for mushrooms in the fall. We love the wonderful shapes and colors, and the patterns of growth. We know where we will find the prettiest Russullas, the bouquets of tiny yellow toadstools, the biggest weird Helvellas and the occasional cauliflower mushroom (almost always too wormy to collect). But we never find chanterelles. We have explained this by the fact that we are in woods that have been logged three times in a century and served as cow pastures for part of the intervals between loggings. Our forests are part of a habitat known as "Willamette Valley dry sites," where chinquapin and ponderosa pine flourish alongside the firs and incense cedars. It is not the lush habitat one finds in the Western Cascades or the Coast Range. This year, to our amazement, the chanterelles are everywhere. They are popping up right next to recent clearcuts, at the edge of logging roads, beneath trees that line heavily used driveways, and even in grassy banks. Whenever we go out into the woods, we find new patches of small chanterelles. We do not harvest them, although we know it would do no harm. We let them be because we see them as little messengers of hope, that brutalized as our neighboring forests may be, all sorts of diversity still exists. There is still a chance that our forests can be healed. We need to hang on to hope.

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