While the dog and I were walking around Thurston Pond a couple days ago, we came across a blond squirrel. It seemed to be a healthy, regulation fox squirrel, except for the color of its fur. Given how visible that color made it, even in the dappled light of the woods, the blondness may well shorten its life span. There are always keen-eyed predators. Leucism can be a bummer.
The pond is exceedingly shallow these days. The whole secondary pond caused by the breach in the berm has dried up and disappeared. That means the main trail to Thurston Elementary School is once again exposed and open for business. Which is, no doubt, a good thing. But I’ll miss that bonus pond, where the wood ducks happily set up housekeeping in the spring.
A day or so ago, after a long walk, I sat for a time on one of the benches overlooking Thurston Pond. The day was sunny and warm, and the dog stretched himself out long on the ground till his whole body fit into the shadow of one of the slats of the bench. A great blue heron and an egret were working the pond, mostly still on their long legs, with the occasional careful step or two to a new spot, punctuated with lightning-fast plunges of their beaks into the water after a fish, followed by little head tosses to maneuver the fish down their throats.
Killdeer nest on an islandlike area in the pond every year, and it’s a summertime pleasure to see them darting about on their long, shorebird legs. It’s harder than usual to pick them out against the background this year, as the weather’s been so dry their nesting area has become grassy and vastly larger than usual. As far as I could tell, there were still babies out there, feeding with their parents.
The dog and I walked along Plymouth Road this week. The land that’s been allowed to revert to wildflowers is especially pretty now, with the sunny yellows of black-eyed Susans and goldenrod predominating. A goldfinch perched with his back to us on top of a black-eyed Susan, the striking yellows and darks of its feathers coordinating perfectly with the yellows and darks of the surrounding flowers. As we approached, the goldfinch lifted up off the flower and flew away, disappearing against the golden background. It was as if a flower had taken flight and vanished.
I went to another draft horse pull this morning, this time at the Saline Community Fair. It differed in nearly all aspects from the pull last week. The teams of Belgian horses pulled against a truck equipped with a dynamometer, so they were pulling against resistance instead of pulling a sled with weights. That alone changed the feel of the event. The other dramatic difference between the Saline event and the Chelsea one was the dramatic near-accidents.
The harness of each individual horse attaches to an evener. When two horses are pulling together, the eveners attach to either end of a doubletree. So the doubletree basically holds the horses together in back. Today, while a team was pulling hard, the doubletree broke in such a way that one horse remained in place while the other one was no longer attached to the truck. That left one horse doing what he’d been doing before, but unaided by his teammate. And the momentum of his teammate, who’d been pulling with all his might (and mane?) carried that horse surging forward with nothing to pull against—but still attached to the other horse at the head end via the reins, which were still in the driver’s hands. After a moment of shock, a quick thinker unhooked the remaining horse from the truck. Once both horses could move comparatively freely, order was quickly restored.
The team that had the mishap was one of two teams from the same place. For the rest of the contest, those two teams shared their undamaged doubletree, swapping it back and forth between the teams each round. The other mishap was one horse in a team losing his balance just after a tough pull. Suddenly, that horse was tilted hard along his length and leaning into his teammate. Again, there was a collective holding of breath among the spectators and, I suspect, the human competitors as we pictured possible outcomes. Fortunately, the horse succeeded in righting himself, and the humans breathed again. The competition ended with no drivers or animals being hurt, for which we were heartily glad.
The rest of the fair was great. I talked with an eleven-year-old cattleman and petted me some goats.
2 September 2022