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Voles, Stories, and Owls

Voles, field mice, are among my favorite animals.

Field Mouse Skull from owl pellet. C9 Photography

My dad (Ted) used to read Beatrix Potter to my sister and me. Actually, he retold the stories in his own way and only occasionally referred to the illustrations. Somehow, Beatrix Potter’s English Lake District was transported to the fields and gardens of the Waschke Homestead. And the field mice, Dad never called them voles, were prominent characters. Dad did not have anything to say about house mice; they were pests in the barn, and he was happy to see the cats catch and eat them.

In Dad’s stories, field mice had names, characters, families, and adventures. He told gentle stories. Brave little field mice narrowly escaping marauding owls, rescued by their mouse parents. Field mice falling into holes and struggling to escape. Field mice outwitting a clever red fox crouching in hiding next to a succulent cache of tender roots. Field mice going out in the snow and catching a chill that had to be treated with hot foot baths and chamomile tea. Field mice meeting wise old chickens. Where my father ever got the idea that a chicken might be wise, I don’t know.

Voles are a separate species from house and wood mice with different diets and habits. The variety that lives on the Waschke Homestead is much larger than house mice—sometimes five inches long, plump, with longer hair, shorter tails, and never venture far from open fields. The hay and grain fields, offering cover for their labyrinthine trails and nests, teemed with them. Corn and potato fields were too open for field mice and the cows in the pastures trampled and destroyed field mouse kingdoms. But the hay and grain fields left the field mice undisturbed for months at a time and they flourished there.

The owls, foxes, barn cats, and coyotes all knew where the field mice lived. After sunset and in the early morning before sunrise, the owls fly over, and other predators nose around in the field mouse trails and dine well on field mice fattened on grass and other plants that grew in the fields.

Field mice skulls appear in owl pellets in the barn. The owls swallow the mice bones and all, then cough up the indigestible parts as pellets when they roost in the barn. The pellets litter the floor of the hay barn and the silo now. The contents of the pellets are fascinating. Jake and Monica captured the harsh beauty of a field mouse skull from an owl pellet in the photo above.

Field mice are terrifyingly prolific. A fertile female produces four or five offspring a month, who mature in a few weeks. Without the predators the field mouse population would soon run out of food. Relying on the natural curbs on their proliferation, Dad never worried about field mice affecting his crops and I don’t believe they ever did.

Hay cutting and grain harvesting was a terror for field mice. When we cut hay with a sickle cutter bar mower, in areas where the field mouse population was high, the cutting bar laid their nests and trails open to the sky and the sickle would drip with deep red field mouse blood. The disk mowers that are generally used now disperse the blood in an invisible blur.

The field mouse slaughter was also a dangerous time for cats. They liked to hunt close to the mowing, waiting to catch mice fleeing from the cutter. A cat’s instincts are not tuned to mowers cutting hay and sometimes they dive into the path of the mower instead of away. Every year or so, we’d lose a good cat to the mower.

As the field was cut, mice would run to the tall grass remaining in the center of the field, a patch that got smaller with each round of the mower. During the last few passes, the patch of tall grass in the center would rustle with fleeing field mice.

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Social Infrastructure

This week, I went to the Mid-Winter Meeting of the American Library Association in Seattle. I went to a talk about “social infrastructure” by Eric Klinenberg. He is a sociologist from the University of Chicago, where I went to college and graduate school. He teaches at New York University.

Klinenberg believes that a strong social infrastructure makes people happier, lengthens life spans, and increases the chances that people will live through a natural disaster.

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, we don’t hear of neighbors dying in hurricanes, wild fires, or tornadoes. The last big earthquake only caused one death in the entire Puget Sound area. The Big One is predicted to be much more severe, but it’s hard to get worked up about it in comparison to the deadly heat and cold waves that kill the elderly in the big cities of the Midwest and Northeast like Chicago and New York every few years. We have our forest fires, but the threat of fire on the rain soaked west side of the Cascade is not the terror of dry eastern Washington, Oregon, and California.

But I was still interested by Klinenberg’s talk. His social infrastructure is the set of institutions that bring neighbors together and foster a sense of caring for the other members of the community.

In my own community of Ferndale, an example of social infrastructure of the past was three-hand pinochle in the back room of the old Cedars Tavern on the corner of Main and Second (Now Outlaws Saloon). Farmers, construction workers, and other folks played cards and gossiped on rainy afternoons. I don’t know if back-room card games are still around, but while they went on, they brought together the community, cutting across social and cultural boundaries in ways that some closer-knit organizations, like churches, or civic organizations like Rotary or Kiwanis, do not. Of course, churches and civic organizations have an important place in social infrastructure, but they are not the same as broader based institutions.

The Ferndale Public Library is also an example. Folks of all ages and economic position mix together in a new and airy building. Kids attend story-times. There’s a LEGO club. Teens have Whatcomics and a readers theater. Adults have their book clubs, computer sessions, English practice sessions, and stress management classes. All ages read and check out books and magazines, borrow music and videos, and use free wi-fi and internet terminals. A librarian will help you find instructions for rebuilding the smoke lift on a 1954 Farmall B. Most importantly, folks see and interact with each other. Go into the library. Getting a smile and nod from a complete stranger there is the easiest thing in the world.

Another example is the Ferndale public school system. Kids are educated in schools, but schools do more than educate. When I entered the first grade, the first refinery, then Mobil, was completed at Cherry Point. I went to school with kids who had just arrived from Olean, an oil refining center in western New York State. Their parents were transferred to Ferndale to run the new plant. I remember going to PTA potlucks and other school events during which my parents met these new and different neighbors. Later, with the opening of another refinery and an aluminum plant, the population of Ferndale expanded and diversified. The schools, especially the high school, where the entire district turns out regularly for football and basket ball games, was an important force in welding the community together.

Social infrastructure brings people together who would not ordinarily mix in their work and home life. The school brings together parents and children, causes them to get to know one another at ball games, school concerts, plays and other events. Ferndale has always needed this, we still need it now. The Whatcom County Health Department reported this month that two Whatcom County communities with healthy social infrastructures (Bellingham and Lynden) stand out with lower rates of death from heart issues and cancer.

The social fabric of Ferndale has changed in the last 60 years. Back room card rooms have been replaced by a gleaming casino. The high school of a few hundred students that I graduated from is now the largest in the county. The high school building, which was dated in 1967, is still in use. In a few days, Ferndale will vote on a school bond to rebuild the high school and performing arts center. If the bond succeeds, Ferndale will carry on a tradition of a healthy social infrastructure that has kept the community going for over a century.

Disclaimer: I’m chairman of the board of trustees of the Whatcom County Library System and I use the Ferndale Public Library at least once a week. I haven’t been enrolled in high school for over fifty years.

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Geese and Travelers

The Waschke Homestead is no stranger to long-distance travelers. My grandparents and great-grandparents were immigrants. Grandma Waschke was born in Pomerania, Germany. Grandpa Schuyleman was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My great grandparents were all born in Northern Europe. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they all travelled to Whatcom County. I went to college and graduate school in Chicago. When I was in the computer industry, I had customers all over North America and the globe whom I visited occasionally. Most of my career, my office was on the Seattle Eastside and my boss was in New York.

Canada Geese and assorted ducks on Gardiner Pond, 20 Jan 2019.

But the human inhabitants of the Homestead are as sessile as oysters compared to the geese grazing in the cornfields this time of year. Most of the geese that graze on the farm now are Canada Geese. Fifty years ago, I remember more white Snow Geese than gray Canada Geese. At my Schuyleman grandparents’ farm in Lynden on the Nooksack River, I often saw Trumpeter Swans in their fields.

Before I retired, I flew to New York at least once a month, sometimes more often, around 70,000 miles a year. Canada Geese, Snow Geese, and Trumpeter Swans travel from the arctic of Alaska and northern Canada to the southern U.S. and Mexico each year. Each goose probably flies 5,000 miles a year, so I had each goose beat for distance. But if you consider the number of geese, they win. I have often counted flocks of four dozen geese in the cornfield. Collectively, each of those flocks flies 240,000 miles a year. In my most traveled years I had a gold frequent flier card. The birds would be a step above platinum.

I understand that both Canada and Snow Geese are more populous now than they used to be. I haven’t seen many Snow Geese on the Waschke Homestead lately; they are around but I see them closer to the Nooksack. Canada Geese certainly are more common now on the Waschke Homestead than they were in the 1960s. According to the ornithologists and wildlife experts, the goose population, especially Canada Geese, has increased in the last decade or so for several reasons, including a decline in predators and hunting.

Canada Geese prosper among humans. One summer, fifteen years ago or so, I found myself eating lunch regularly in the executive dining room of the Allstate Insurance data center and office complex in a northern suburb of Chicago. That summer, a pair of Canada Geese hatched and raised a handful of goslings on a rooftop patio next to the dining room. They appeared to thrive on a diet of executive table scraps tossed out by the lunching actuaries.

Last summer, on the pond close to our new house in Ferndale, another pair of Canada Geese raised five goslings. My border collie, Albert, and I watched them parade to the water and paddle gracefully around the pond. When fall came and the goslings were nearly indistinguishable from the parents, they disappeared, presumably flown off to feeding grounds to the south. Obviously, these geese know how to live in small towns.

The flocks of Canada Geese on the Waschke Homestead arrive after fall harvest and graze in the fields until spring. I assume they fly north to their arctic breeding grounds. I imagine the geese on the pond follow the same pattern, but their northern breeding ground is the southern wintering territory of the Waschke Homestead geese. The southern wintering ground of the summer pond dwellers may be Mexico.

There were ten geese on the pond this morning. They’ve been paddling around for three days now. The morning they arrived, Albert and I visited them a few minutes after sunrise. All but one of the geese were resting in a cluster on the pond with their heads tucked under their wings. One goose was awake and watching, either an insomniac or designated sentry. Albert and I only visit the pond twice a day, so those wily geese could be switching places on us, but we expect this group will be gone in a few days, to be replaced by another clutch after another few days.