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Hunting Owls

My Lynden grandpa, John Schuyleman, shot a big white winter owl, probably a snowy owl, and gave it to the Lynden druggist, Edward Edson, who had the owl stuffed and placed it in his collection of stuffed owls in his drug store. Eventually, Grandpa’s owl ended up it the Whatcom Museum. I remember visiting the museum when I was small. My mother pointed out Grandpa’s owl, but I don’t know if they still display it.

Now, barn owls occupy the old barn. The photo here of an owl perching at the peak of the barn was taken recently by Jake Knapp (C9 Photography) and Monica Mercier who are staying on the homestead while we wait for it to sell. Notice that this is a barn owl, not a barred owl, which I have heard are displacing barn owls in some areas.

While Dad (Ted) was still milking cows, the barn owls stayed away. Dad always liked to keep several cats around the barn to keep the rodent population down. Between no rodents and continuous commotion in the barn, the owls were shy, but every few weeks one would swoop in and check up on the barn. The barn owls roosted in the woods. We watched them hunt in the evening, gliding low over the fields. My mother liked to pick up their shed feathers and display them as bouquets in flower vases in the house. Owl roosts were easy to find in the woods because the tree trunks where they rested, usually cedars, were blazed with white droppings, called “mutes.”

After Dad quit milking and the barn quieted down, the barn owls moved in, roosting on the hay fork track and at the top of the silo. They made their presence known by splashes of white like the ones in the woods and the litter of owl pellets—lumps of regurgitated fur, feathers, and bones.

When I was a kid, late summer was owl hunting season. I think Dad may have invented our method of owl hunting. I’m not sure if we hunted screech owls or saw-whet owls. Dad called them screech owls, but from what I have read, the owls we used to catch acted like saw-whets.

In late summer, small owls roosted low in the vine maple grove that grew behind the barn. After milking, when it began to get dark, Dad would lead my cousins and I out to the vine maple grove with flashlights and heavy gloves. We would keep the flashlights off until we saw the silhouette of an owl on a branch low enough to reach. Then we would turn on the flashlights aimed at the eyes of the owl. If we were lucky, or the owl was unlucky, it would be blinded and freeze long enough for one of us to circle behind the poor animal and grab it in heavy gloved hands and stuff it in a burlap sack.

I understand that freezing when approached is characteristic of the saw-whet owl, so I suspect these were saw-whets, not screech owls. However, I recall that the owl we caught had ear tufts and was a little larger than a typical saw-whet, so it may have been a screech owl. The hoot of the western screech owl is heard frequently around the farm, but I’ve seen and heard saw-whets also. I once saw a row of several tiny saw-whets lined up on a cedar bough.

We only succeeded in catching an owl once. My older cousin, Steve, did the catching as I remember. The owl put up a fight with its lethally sharp beak and talons. Blood flowed from several of us kids before we got the owl in the sack. Thinking back, I would say that we were lucky not to have been seriously wounded.

We took the owl to my uncle’s house. At the time, he raised rabbits and had a row rabbit hutches next to his garden. A hutch was empty and we let the owl crawl out of the sack in the hutch. My memory is a bit hazy, but I think the owl escaped the next day. Or maybe one of the adults showed some sense and let the terrified bird go.

After the success, no matter how much we begged, Dad never had time for another owl hunt.

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Advent and Silage

Today, December 1st, is the first day of Advent in many traditions. The Advent season has the darkest and shortest days of the year in the northern hemisphere. Each day during Advent is shorter than the previous day and sun is slightly lower as it traces its way across the southern sky. When the sun stops sinking, it is the winter solstice, December 21. The traditional end of Advent is Christmas Day, December 25th.

Many theories and stories explain why Christmas is celebrated on the 25th and not on the solstice a few days earlier. I doubt them all. When Emperor Constantine converted and declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, December 25th was declared an official celebration in 336 C.E., but whether the tradition started then, or had already been practiced is not clear. Still, I am happy to celebrate on the 25th and I am glad Christmas doesn’t float around like Easter.

I can’t separate Advent from silage. By the start of Advent on the farm, Dad (Ted) had begun feeding silage from the silo. The exact date Dad opened the silo depended on the weather. As long as there was pasture enough to keep up milk production, Dad would feed grain, mostly oats supplemented with sugar beet pulp and brewer’s grain and a little hay for roughage but leave the silo untapped. Pasture could hold up as late as Thanksgiving. But by Advent, the pasture was bare, the cows were no longer interested in grazing in the rain and cold, and Dad would open the silo.

Opening the silo took a day or two and I often helped. There was always a layer of dry and spoiled silage on the top of the silo where the chopped fodder, either corn or grass, was exposed to the air. The spoiled silage had to be shoveled out with forks and thrown to the ground into the silage cart or a wheel barrow, then wheeled out to the manure spreader, and forked again into the manure spreader. When the spreader was full, we hauled the spoiled silage into the fields and spread it to fertilize next year’s crops. As I remember there was always three or four loads of spoiled silage to put out on the fields.

Silage was hard work. Silo filling was hard, opening the silo was hard, and throwing down silage to feed the cows morning and night was work through the winter and into spring. The silage was packed hard in the silo and loosening it up was a chore in itself, but there was no getting out of throwing down silage; feeding the herd came first.

Nevertheless, I liked silage. The silo was lit by a single low wattage light bulb at the top of the silo. By the time the silo was opened, the silage had sunk at least twenty feet below the rim. In the dark days of winter, in the dim yellow light from that single bulb, throwing down silage was eerie. The single melancholy bulb overhead peered down, but there was not enough light to see clearly. The chamber was muffled in silence, the only sounds coming from the shifting of the cattle in the barn, unless the wind blew just right, and the silo would resonate in a deep sigh like a giant pipe organ. I suppose you have to grow up with it, but the sharp fermented smell of ripe silage is pleasant. In the silo, I occasionally chewed a pinch of silage. The plant cellulose fibers were coarse and too rough to swallow, but the silage had a pleasant tang and enough sugars were left be palatable.

In the farm house my mother and grandmother generated the smells of Advent, baking anise Christmas cookies, pfeffernusse, lebkuchen, apple cake, fruit cake, and mince pie, but out in the barn, which was the center of a different part of life on the homestead, Advent meant silage.

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Thanksgiving On The Farm

We ate our last Thanksgiving dinner on the homestead in 2017. This year, we had family in at our new Ferndale house. Thanksgiving is an American holiday, not German, but Germans never pass up an opportunity to celebrate a holiday. Thanksgiving was nothing compared to Christmas on the Waschke Homestead, but it was an event nonetheless.

I remember celebrating Thanksgiving on the homestead while Grandpa and Grandma still lived in the downstairs part of the house. After Grandpa retired and they moved across the road, Mom, Dad, my sister, and I began going to Lynden for Thanksgiving with my Lynden grandparents. My cousin Denny and I could never stop ourselves from roughhousing on the floor. Someone would have to break us up. I don’t remember that we ever hurt each other, but we rolled around on the floor, each trying to get the upper hand. That must have caused some heartburn among the parents, but there was no real aggression involved. I could not tell you why we wrestled, but we did until we became self-conscious adolescents, had little to say to each other, and replaced wrestling with the awkward silence.

My Waschke Road grandmother’s Thanksgiving dinner was, as I remember, a version of Christmas dinner in which the Christmas goose was replaced with a turkey. My Waschke cousins may correct me on this, but as I remember the menu was turkey with sweet cinnamon bread, apple, and raisin stuffing, sweet and sour red cabbage with apples, and mashed potatoes with turkey pan gravy. The crisp turkey skin was like candy.

The Lynden menu was more in the American tradition: turkey with a savory sage stuffing, boiled sweet and white potatoes, green beans, and pumpkin pie. The star of the day for me was sweet potatoes. I could have filled my plate with sweet potatoes.

Grandma Schuyleman was a not a bad cook, but a plain cook. She had neither time nor inclination for anything fancy. She seasoned her turkey with salt and pepper and roasted it. She peeled her sweet potatoes and boiled them with salt. Her turkey was neither over or under roasted. She took her boiling potatoes and green beans off the fire when they were done. Her table was predestined to be just what it was: plain cooking with all the nonsense reformed out, undisguised food to strengthen the body, not satisfy the senses.

How I loved her sweet potatoes. The custom was to cover them in butter on the plate and I followed the custom, but if the butter took its time getting to the kids’ end of the table, plain unbuttered sweet potatoes were good enough for me. I could finish half the sweet potatoes on my plate before the butter arrived. The turkey was fine, as is every variety of poultry when it is cooked but not dry. Green beans and white potatoes were part of practically every meal I ever ate on any farm. Since my mother learned to cook from her mother, no big meh on the Thanksgiving beans and white potatoes. But the sweet potatoes! Allow me to say, my dear wife Rebecca to the contrary, yams are okay, but they taste a lot like squash, which is good, but starchy sweet potatoes are king.

Sweet potatoes and turkey on Thanksgiving were exceptional because they were not grown on the farm, either in Lynden next to the Nooksack River or on Waschke Road.

I once asked my dad about The Depression. He graduated from high school in 1932, before Franklin Roosevelt was elected. At the graduation ceremony, the principal gave a speech in which he told the graduates that they couldn’t expect much: no jobs, no prospects, their diplomas were almost worthless. Dad said he was disappointed and disgusted.

Other than that depressing speech, Dad said the Great Depression was barely noticeable to his family because the farm was self-sufficient. They scarcely needed cash. What little cash they needed to pay the electric bill, buy gasoline and coffee grounds, they could always get by selling farm produce directly—people always eat—but he pitied the shingle and saw mill workers, loggers, and the miners that depended on jobs that disappeared when the economy went sour. The situation didn’t change on Waschke Road until the war.