Monthly Archives: January 2019

Moon over the maple

Posted on by

Thursday night the moon was just past full. There were a few clouds in the sky. This is what it looked like when I took the dogs out for their last evening walk.

I put my camera on a tripod and took a time exposure for this shot. I don’t know exactly how long the exposure was, but I think it was around one or two seconds. The tree is our misshapen but photogenic maple.

You may or may not be able to see a kind of spider web effect around the image of the moon. This is caused by reflection from the branches of the tree. Any part of the branch that is perpendicular to a line to the center of the moon will give a nice reflection. The parts of the branches at other angles don’t reflect much, so it leaves a kind of broken wreath around the moon.

There is also some iridescence in the clouds below the moon. I didn’t notice it until I saw the photo.

Big cedar

Posted on by

Cedar trees are not common on the mountain, but they once were. They exist today mostly, but not entirely, as fallen, dead trees. I have scavenged a few downed cedars in the past for firewood. My miscalculation on how much firewood I would need this winter sent me out in the yard on Tuesday to cut up another one.

This tree is about 30 feet from our driveway in the most overgrown part of our property. A small part of the property on the north end has fairly mature hardwoods. The eastern and southern parts of the yard were apparently clear cut, or almost clear cut, and have grown back in a thicket of densely-packed, small pines with a few larger pines and maples.

I have not seen one live cedar on the property, but this dead one must have been a giant among cedars. Here is my chainsaw for scale.

It’s hard to see the size of the trunk at its base. I counted about 50 rings in the branched trunk next to the saw. The main part of the trunk is a minimum of a yard in diameter. Here it is from a different angle.

My chainsaw is just visible on the left. Note that the bar on my chainsaw is 20 inches.

This tree was a monster of a cedar, or, more properly, a juniper. This is from the Wikipedia entry on the eastern red cedar:

Juniperus virginiana is a dense slow-growing coniferous evergreen tree that may never become more than a bush on poor soil, but is ordinarily from 5–20 m or 16–66 ft tall, with a short trunk 30–100 cm or 12–39 inches in diameter (rarely to 27 m or 89 ft in height, and 170 cm or 67 inches in diameter.

 This tree is certainly at the upper end of the usual trunk diameters.

Another web site calls the eastern red cedar a “moderate to long-lived evergreen,” and says that some specimens have been known to live more than 500 years.

Our specimen fell to the ground a long, long time ago. This type of cedar is resistant to rot and insects, so they can lie on the ground for years without rotting into mulch like most trees in our area. This tree has certainly been on the ground for longer than the almost 14 years we have lived on the mountain. It probably fell a good bit before I started building our first house, and that was 20 years ago. Given the rot-resistance and the condition of some of the tree, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it fell 30 or 40, or even 50 years ago. And, given its size, it might well have been growing on the mountain during the civil war.

There has been some rot. Some of the ends of the branches have dried out and have begun to simply disintegrate. But some of the wood is still firm, and it still produces that characteristic cedar smell when it is cut. Once the moisture from the recent rain has dried, I expect it will produce a decent, aromatic fire.

 

A patchy fog

Posted on by

According to our local TV weather people, 2018 had the second highest precipitation on record for Atlanta, and, according to our local newspaper, Rome had the third highest on record. I have no reason to doubt that. We have had rain, and then more rain.Topsoil and grass seed washed away, trees fell across the road, and cats and dogs got muddy feet. I took this picture on the night of January 1, just as one period of rain stopped.

The fog rose in patches across town, lit from below by the city lights.

After that night, we had some sunny days, but today, Thursday, is not one of them. It started raining lightly just as I went outside to walk the dogs, and it has been raining lightly ever since. We have only accumulated a quarter of an inch, but at 3 pm it was still only 38 degrees outside. Zeke is drying himself in front of the fire after a quick turn outside. Tomorrow is supposed to be better.

A note on the photo: I used a zoom lens on my Olympus camera on a tripod and let the camera decide what the exposure should be. It was probably about a second or two. There were a lot of blurred images; this was the least blurred. It’s possible to see one of the water towers visible from our from porch, around a third of the way from the right side of the image. I think the blurry, bright object just to the left and above the water tower is the City Clock, which stands on a hill overlooking downtown. There is a little red speck of an antenna marker light sitting almost on the tower’s shoulder. If I knew my camera a little better I might have been able to get a better shot.

Our dog for a day

Posted on by

Sometime around a month ago we started seeing a black dog on Fouche Gap Road. It seemed to be a German Shepherd, but it was hard to get a good look because the dog was so skittish. It was another abandoned dog, just the latest in a long line of abandoned dogs.

In the past we have taken these abandoned dogs in and found them new homes. This time we couldn’t because the dog would not come close enough to touch, much less take in. We saw him (or her) here and there around the mountain, often in front of a particular house, sometimes far down the road, and occasionally passing through our yard. It spent a lot of time at that particular house, so one day when I saw the owner outside as I walked Zeke and Sam, I asked him about the dog. It turns out they didn’t want it and were trying to get animal control to pick it up.

We expected the dog to disappear soon, but still we kept seeing it.

The dogs and I saw it fairly often in the yard of the house where it seemed to be staying. I always spoke to the dog, but it only stared. Usually it ran down the driveway barking at us after we passed. I didn’t take it seriously.

A couple of people spoke to me about it. They had tried to approach the dog without much success. As the weeks passed and the dog didn’t seem to be losing weight, I assumed the people in the house where it was staying had decided to keep it. I didn’t think they were being very responsible by letting it run loose, but, I thought, maybe they would bring it inside eventually.

I wanted to meet the dog. I thought that it might be a little more trusting since it saw me with our two dogs, but it never approached us.

I had given up on ever touching the dog until Monday. Monday afternoon Leah and I were outside when the dog came up the driveway. It was very wary, but obviously wanted to come closer — to Leah, not me. I sat down facing to the side and avoided looking at the dog. The dog carefully approached Leah until she could pet its head. After a minute or so, the dog was close enough to lick Leah’s face, and we decided to give it some food. I went in and brought out a bowl of Sam and Zeke’s food and put it down halfway down the drive. The dog stood in the woods and barked, showing some nice, white teeth. It sounded pretty aggressive, but it wasn’t. It was more like the line from the Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor movie “Stir Crazy” as they walked into a jail holding cell filled with big, rough-looking criminals: “We bad, that’s right.” It was pure bluff.

But eventually the dog came up and started eating slowly. I sat down not looking at it, and it approached me. After a few minutes, it was licking my face.

And that was it. The dog, which was a female, came to me and Leah readily. She wriggled and pawed at us and licked our faces. It was obvious this dog had been looking for someone to save it.

Here she is with Leah.

She’s a beautiful dog, obviously with a lot of German Shepherd, but not full-blooded.

Her head looks the most like a Shepherd.

She disappeared Monday night, but by Tuesday afternoon was back in the driveway. I fed her again and let the dogs meet her. After a little meet-and-greet, she started running big laps into the road, up the driveway and into the woods. She had more energy than she knew what to do with. I let Sam off the leash and they chased each other around the front yard.

I had found a number for the people where she had been staying and found that they did not intend to keep her and were, in fact, not feeding her. They had called animal control multiple times but no one had ever come. So, we thought, she must be starving.

Leah and I both said we would love to have her. She looked to be settled in, hanging around the garage door when we went inside, and coming up to us excitedly when we went back out. But with two dogs and five cats, it was just impossible. So I posted on a local Facebook group, looking for her owner or someone who might want to adopt her. I seldom use Facebook, so I was surprised to find an earlier post where people from the area were talking about the dog. At least three other people had been feeding her, but no one had been able to get close enough to her to do anything.

Within a few minutes after my post, someone in the area said he wanted her as company for his current German Shepherd. We arranged to have him come up and meet the dog, and they seemed to hit it off. After a half an hour or so, we loaded her up (unwilling as she was) into his car and they drove off. Once in the car she seemed to be okay. I gave her a dog biscuit and she took it, which means she wasn’t too upset to eat. A little while later Tuesday afternoon he texted us a photo of the dog inside his house, eating with his other Shepherd.

All in all, it was about as good an outcome as anyone could have asked for. She went to a good home with a guy who seemed to be a good dog person. We couldn’t keep her, could we? How could anyone get attached to a dog within 24 hours of meeting it?

And so, you might ask, why am I feeling so rotten?

Added Wednesday night.

Well, no one asked, but I’ll go ahead and answer anyway. I was feeling sorry for myself. I was picturing us with this dog and thinking no one else could possibly provide the kind of home we could. But, of course, that’s not true. The new owner has texted us several photos of the dog in her new home, and Leah and I are feeling greatly relieved. In one short video clip, the dog is lying on the sofa next to the new owner (shot from the owner’s point of view). He scratches her head, and puts her head down and relaxes. In another she’s lying on her side on the floor, completely at ease. I think she’s going to be good there.

 

 

Great horn, dog

Posted on by

I saw this prize at the edge of the road when I was walking the dogs Thursday morning and couldn’t figure out what it was for a while.

Eventually it dawned on me that it was a goat horn. It was confirmed when I saw the partial goat leg nearby.

Sam was fascinated. He picked it up and walked the rest of the way down to our turnaround, and then most of the way back up. He eventually dropped it and Zeke picked it for a while. Then he dropped it and Sam picked it up again. I let him keep it until we reached the house, then I made him drop it (good dog, Sam!).

I was going to leave it in the driveway, thinking maybe it would eventually turn into a good chew toy, but the dogs were obsessed with it and tried to get to it every time we went outside. I had to put it in the trash.

Goats are not native to this area, but there are two that have been roaming for a while. A neighbor got them to try to keep the kudzu at bay at his house. He tied them with a rope and, of course, they chewed through their ropes and escaped. People on the Facebook group around here post occasionally about seeing them. The last I heard they were living on Rocky Mountain, which divides Big Texas Valley from Little Texas Valley, and upon the peak of which is an artificial lake impounded as part of a pump-storage electrical power generating plant. It’s probably a good place for them.

That leaves only the question of where the deceased goat whose partial remains we found came from. And what happened to the rest of the body?

Here’s a quick note on horns that everyone probably already knows. Horns, found on members of the bovids, have a keratin sheath and remain on the animal for life unless forcefully removed. They are (generally) not branched, except for the pronghorn.  Both male and female bovids grow horns. Antlers, found on members of the deer family (cervids), have a bony structure and are grown and shed every year. They are also typically branched. It seems that reindeer are the only species in which females as well as males have antlers.