It’s June, and I’m still unhooking hoses after each use to ensure we don’t end up with frozen pipes. I’m sure this seems like an exaggeration and it would to me, too, had I not consulted Lynn’s weather in May to get a projected overnight low of 37F, only to go out the next morning to find the hose filled with a tube of ice.
They’re still projecting overnight lows of 37, so I’m uncoupling every day after watering, which I’m doing more of than I expected to, given that our weather has been rather August. Not august — we have not been having grand weather — but August the month of monsoons, when we get a picture-perfect morning that beclouds as the day rumbles along, resulting in mid-afternoon to early-evening showers.
Except. Except that these showers, which land with monsoonal regularity within the city limits of Gunnison, for some reason cannot make it two miles up the road to where my little trees await precipitation.
We spent much of the winter watching it snow to the north of us (although it was a big snow year for us, even if back in the day it would have been called “middlin'” — at least Cranor Ski Hill opened for a few weeks), then in April when no one wanted it and all nearby ski areas were closed, it snowed and snowed and the skies were cloudy all day.
They remained cloudy through early May before the sun started coming out enough mornings to fool some of us into thinking we’re having nice days, but it’s now June and we’re still hovering near freezing overnight.
This has not stopped everything from turning green, more green than Lynn and I have seen in our five-year experience with Riverwalk, and with the green we’ve had a front-row seat to the natural world. It turns out, it’s not all good-natured.
As a f’r instance, the spring after we bought our lot but before a house was here, the two of us and Oz would come out and wander around, taking in the sights, which included at least two flocks of baby geeses, all fuzzy and downy and cute. Since then, despite an abundance of geese, Lynn’s seen nothing and I last year got one fleeting glimpse of a no-longer-adorable adolescent running across our yard with its mother.
So imagine my excitement when I looked out one morning in May to see a flotilla of two adults bookending four little yellow bobbers. I grabbed my binoculars, which since moving out here reside not in their case in the box in the bottom desk drawer, but on top of the desk, but the geeses floated out of sight almost immediately.
And that was the last I saw of the babies. More adults, yes, plenty of those, but as my neighbor reminded me, we have a lot of foxes out here. And raccoons, if that’s what Marrakesh and I saw one pre-dawn morning ambling along Riverwalk Drive while Bear rooted around in the grass, thankfully unaware.
Otherwise he would have chased it, much like he tried to do with a deer in our yard. To Bear’s immense consternation, however, the doe only looked at him and kept on eating. Bear, flummoxed, stood there, debating what to do. I tried to solve his dilemma for him by calling him over, but within a minute he’d returned to trying to chase something that wasn’t running.
Then came the moose. I had only ever seen one moose, nowhere near Gunnison County, and so when I looked up from emptying my rain barrel (which is really a trash can, and since there was water in it I guess it has rained some out here at Riverwalk, just not as much as in town), I tried to make it all kinds of other animals (deer? horse? I even considered camel) before I settled on moose.
She was just ambling along the banks of our very full pond as I dashed inside for binoculars and Lynn. Then I saw our neighbor Lisa with her dog, so I went to warn her. A few hours later she texted me a picture of the moose in her tree-filled backyard. [A picture that I was going to post for you here, but it has crashed my computer twice already. Sorry.]
Not being a moose professional (I thought she might be a camel, remember?), I thought I was seeing the real thing, but when Bear and I went for our evening walk and saw numerous other neighbors looking toward Lisa’s backyard, all these moose experts told me she was a young one. Maybe not a baby moose, but no more than an adolescent who ought to still be in the company of her mother — a mother that might have been the moose my neighbor Paul took a picture of last summer hanging around the southernmost of Riverwalk’s three ponds.
It may have turned out that her mother was killed on a highway and that the moose has set up camp on the north end of the Van Tuyl ranch, which is just southwest of Riverwalk. I heard that Colorado Parks and Wildlife is keeping an eye on her. Probably not the same as having your own mom nearby, but at least it’s something.
We haven’t seen her return, and no one is sure how she made it to property that while right next door is blocked by fences and a rushing river (maybe not too rushing for even a baby moose).
In her absence, we’ve had all kinds of fowl activity at the pond. Thanks to the bird book I found at my shop, and my binoculars, I identified the snowy egret that landed one day. I also used the book to determine that I was watching not a sandhill crane but a great blue heron as it fished its way along the pond, only its head visible before it popped into full view and came up with a fish easily big enough to be dinner for both me and Lynn.
Even though our pond is supposed to be “catch and release,” the heron willfully ignored the rules, and I watched in Mutual of Omaha fascination as it speared the fish and then, with a bloody bill, swallowed the entire fish head first. Much like I do after I’ve eaten too much, the great bird sat around in kind of a stupor for awhile before rousing itself to flight.
But my biggest prize to date — although my first Gunnison County moose, and right in my own backyard, was super exciting — have been the mergansers. Even though the internet tells me they’re “common” mergansers, they didn’t make it into my bird book. The red-breasted merganser did, and for a brief moment I thought that’s what this pair were. She has a tufted red head, but neither has a red breast.
In fact, he is super, super white, maybe even more white than the snowy egret, except for his striking black head. He is so shiny white that his body is iridescent, which is why I’ve named him Idris. She (I’m calling her Hannah in honor of a Ted Lasso actress) has little tiny flashes of this iridescence under her brown feathers, but she is so well camouflaged it’s often hard to find her, even with the binoculars.
Every day I’m afraid I won’t see them, but then his body flashes in the sun. Since I don’t often see her I’m daring to hope they’re nesting. Nesting in a top-secret place that no foxes, raccoons or herons will find and that some day I can tell you all about the baby ducks out on the pond. As we’ve learned, though, nature, while exciting, is not always kind.
Garbanzo Beans for Breakfast 