Saturday, February 04, 2006, 21:28
Marten? Fisher?
I cannot say for certain because we did not see the animal itself, but Randy and I think we might have seen marten tracks in the snow when we took the dogs for a walk this morning.
We started out going up the dirt road and saw the tracks cross the road. We walked farther up and then cut up into the woods on a deer trail, and on the way back around the "loop" to the road, through a grove of pine trees, we saw the tracks in the snow again.
At first I wondered if they were the tracks of a very large kitty cat, perhaps one of the neighbor's cats. The tracks had five toes, like a cat, but you could see a circle of fur around the tracks. I have seen enough kitty cat tracks in the snow around the house to know that you cannot see a circle of fur around a cat's tracks -- or at least, not like that, anyway.
We really did not have any idea of what might have made the tracks until we got back to the house and consulted our "track book." It's a little paperback -- almost like a pamphlet -- that has tracks depicted in their actual sizes for a variety of wildlife that we might see around here.
Weasels were immediately eliminated because weasels make a much smaller track than this one. A fox was a possibility as to the size, except that fox have four toes and not five.
The more we looked at the book, the more we concluded that by process of elimination, that left the marten as a possibility. According to the Wisconsin DNR website, martens are rare -- and people often confuse martens with fishers. I tried to find fisher tracks online but did not have any luck. What I read about fishers, however, is that they are much larger than martens. Whereas a marten might weigh a couple of pounds, the fisher weighs up to 12 pounds.
The tracks we saw were not overly large. So was it a marten? Or was it a fisher?
Either way, it was kind of interesting, and of course, the dogs enjoyed their romp through the woods. The road is treacherous to walk because of all the ice. We don't have much snow, and what snow there is on the ground in the woods is fairly hard, so it is easy to walk on top of the snow. We cut through the woods and followed a deer trail part of the way up a ridge and then back down to the grove of pine trees where we saw the "marten/fisher" tracks.
Another advantage to walking in the woods, rather than walking along the road, is that walking in the woods got us out of the wind for a while. The thermometer says it is 20 degrees this afternoon, but with a stiff wind out of the west/northwest, it feels more like 0 or 5 degrees. Winter is coming back in full force. The weather forecast is now saying that the temperature will be below zero next weekend, with a high during the day in the single digits.
Ho-hum. I might have known we wouldn't get off *that* easy!
LeAnn R. Ralph
Friday, February 03, 2006, 20:07
It's A. . .Tablecloth!
My red chicken-and-rooster fabric is now hemmed so that I can use it for a tablecloth when I go to craft sales with books!
I drove the fabric 40 miles down to my sister's place on Thursday afternoon. She hemmed it for me.
And I managed to keep my mouth shut long enough so that Loretta didn't sew her finger to the tablecloth! Well, not really. My niece, Karn, and I yakked non-stop while Loretta sewed and listened in.
To tell you the truth, for a while there, it was doubtful I was even going to make it to Loretta's.
First of all, once I got into the truck and put the key into the ignition, I realized that I had not yet given my cat Winifred her thyroid medicine. So I had to go back into the house, put the medicine in a syringe, find Winifred and then convince her to swallow the meds.
Then, after I started the truck, I decided maybe I ought to stop in town and get gas at the local Farmer's Union. That was another ten minutes.
But, the real problem occurred once I got out on the highway. I was almost to the next town when I reached the railroad crossing. And sure enough, a train was coming down the tracks -- going verrrrrry slooooooooowly. I hunched over the steering wheel and craned my neck to try to see around the bend to find out how long the train was. I couldn't see much.
I sat there waiting for the train for a few minutes, when all at once, it seemed to me that the train was going slower.
In a minute, my suspicions were confirmed. The train *was* going more slowly. Then it stopped. Right over the crossing. In my rearview mirror, I kept watching cars pull up behind me, sit for a minute, and then turn around and leave. After 10 minutes, I figured the train wasn't moving at any time soon. But how was I going to get around the train? Across the field from the railroad crossing, I could see the town where I would turn off on the next road toward Loretta's. Unfortunately, I couldn't just drive across a 40-acre field. Well, I could *try* I suppose -- but I probably wouldn't make it.
I put the truck into reverse, inched my way around in the middle of the road (after all, it wasn't like there would be a problem with traffic from the *other* direction), missed the first exit that would take me where I wanted to go, had to go up farther yet and turn around again. In another ten minutes, I was back on track, so to speak.
And I was only a half an hour late.
I took the digital camera with me and was going to take some shots of Loretta sewing my tablecloth.
I completely forgot all about the camera.
Which was probably just as well. My sister does not like having her picture taken, in much the same way that I do not enjoy having my picture taken. If I had remembered the digital camera, my sister might have been so distracted that she would have sewn her finger to the tablecloth. And that, of course, would never do.
LeAnn R. Ralph