Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: nature

  • October, And No Frost

    When I moved to Trinidad, Colorado to begin teaching, I was surprised that the annual precipitation was about the same as it was in Trego. Trinidad was 6,000 feet elevation – downtown Trego is a little over 3,000. Trego is definitely timber – predominately Doug Fir, and in Trinidad you still have to go up the mountain to get to the timber.

    We moved to Trinidad along with the final episode of MASH – it took years for me to see that epic program – and we moved into a very arid climate. The record frosts (from Climate and Man) recorded for Fortine were May 29 and September 8. Annual precipitation was 17.43 inches. At Trinidad, the record frosts were May 2 and October 16. Annual precipitation was 16.2 inches. Trinidad showed 167 days of growing season, while Fortine showed only102 days of growing season.

    Back in the late seventies, one of the foresters I listened to spoke of ‘climax species’ – essentially the trees that will remain in a location until fire wipes them out, and a succession begins. So I knew that in Trego, with 17 inches of rain and 100 days between f8rosts, Doug Fur would remain. Now, fifty-odd years later, and with the experience of Trinidad’s arid, near desert environment, I’m looking at a longer growing season. I kind of prefer the term global warming to climate change. Can’t say for sure – when Climate and Man was published, they had less than 40 years record for Fortine and Trinidad. But one thing is sure – if you spread the same amount of precipitation over more growing days, it’s a good idea to look for plants that are more drought tolerant.

    I need to do more thinning – Dad like the forest unmanaged, and that was OK for his lifetime – but a longer growing season demands more space between trees, and probably a change in species – so when I can, I’m leaving Western Larch and Ponderosa Pine. They seem to be a bit more drought tolerant and fire resistant.

    The hayfield, despite being partially sub-irrigated, becomes drier with a longer growing season. On the other hand, when I was a kid, raising sweet corn was a challenge. No longer.

    The longer growing season may indicate a change in climate, or it may just be an anomaly. I don’t know – but I’m placing my bet on plants that are a bit more drought tolerant.

  • No Resident Pack Anymore

    When we first built the house by the pond, we moved in with a pair of coyotes for neighbors.  He was a beefy built coyote – deep chested, and occasionally reported as a small wolf.  He wasn’t – just happened to have a blockier, larger size body than the typical coyote.  It was only after Renata got the game cameras set up for a year or so that we realized his consort was missing her left eye – and their hunting patterns always included him on her blind side.

    Our old pair of coyotes are gone now – and they were good neighbors.  Don’t know if someone shot the old coyote, or if it was just old age and decrepitude that took the two from their home on the hill – but we no longer have local coyotes.  The pair  have been replaced by packs that come in from 3 directions – west, north and southeast.  The blessing of modern technology – trail cameras can provide a lot of information about where predators are coming from.

    We’ve had a feral cat population close by for years – living by the trailer court and north aways, and wandering from there to our field and to the school.  The trail cameras show that the three new packs are cat hunters.  Not a surprise – we lost one young house cat last year, but the trail camera leaves no doubt.  

    Before the feral cat population grew so large, the rodent population in the hayfield was fairly well controlled by resident weasels.  I suspect that the resident weasels were taken by the feral cats – for whatever reason, with the weasels gone, the vole population exploded.  The voles did enough damage to the fruit trees in the garden that I responded with bait stations to poison the voles.  

    I’m not real sure what the change in coyote population will bring – but 3 packs coming in to hunt cats is starting to make a big dent in the feral cat population.

  • Trego – The Years of Change

    1960 is the time when I can start to describe details of Trego’s history – the people and the technology. Off and on, from 1960, I was there to see it. On our trip moving up, I was expected to direct Mom to the place – but what is now Ant Flat Road was new, and the exit had changed. We drove to Dickey Lake and then followed that road (still the same).

    The Peters family moved to Trego around 1955 – and Mary Louise still lives on their ranch 70 years later. She’s been here for most of Trego’s history. In 1960, Trego was basically a strip, running up Fortine Creek, with places running up other creeks.

    Technology was changing. While Jack Cheevers drove a 4×4 Jeep pickup, and Edgar Nelson had a 1953 Dodge Power W2agon, Frank Davidow drove the community’s first modern four-wheel drive – a pale blue Ford pickup Virgil Newton and Alfred McCully opted for Volkswagen Beetles. Electricity had arrived in time for the fifties – and television, in the form of a repeater on the mountainside, brought 2 channels to Trego. It was some sort of cooperative venture. Then the early sixties brought in telephones – first in party lines, followed quickly by single lines.

    A glimpse of the people that affected the community in the mid-sixties – the school board members who brought in the new school were Yolanda Nordahl, O.V. McCurry and Earl Meier – Yolanda Vizzutti’s marriage to Paul Nordahl was arranged by her father. Earl Meier was, so far as I know, the last Trego Valedictorian at LCHS. O.V. McCurry, like Jack Peters, Jack Price and Robert Openshaw were World War II veterans looking for their farms. Jack Cheevers, a few miles up the creek, ran sheep and was the community’s sole socialist (maintaining a connection with the early IWW unionists. Leona Ritter, the school clerk, was married to Walt Ritter, stepson of Octav Fortin, the last link to the original rancher. Again, relatively typical people dealing with social change to keep it from overwhelming their community.

    Again, outside forces brought change to Trego and most of Lincoln County. Libby Dam removed forever the Kootenai River communities. Trego grew, practically overnight, with over 200 trailer homes added to house the folks working on the tunnel.

    The railroad relocation changed Trego utterly – most of the small ranches were cut by the new rails, and reduced cattle numbers left what were once marginal commercial ranches down to a handful of cattle. The entire strip of land along Fortine Creek now hears the sound of the freights, the whistles at each crossing – and new, smaller places across the tracks provided more places to live. Fortine Creek Road went from gravel to paved. The school board, anticipating the population impact got another acre from the Opelt family and saw a new, federally funded school go in. Kenny Gwynn built a service station, and Howard Mee operated it. Keith Calvert went for a tavern at the Westwood Acres trailer court. The post office went from being a small, contract post office in the Trego Mercantile to getting it’s own postmaster. The Ranger Station moved to Murphy Lake, and Ant Flat, after 60 years, took a secondary Forest Service role. The mid-sixties changed Trego.

    Unlike the rest of the county Trego became closer to the county seat – a paved road over Elk Mountain, following the new railroad down Wolf Creek, then through the lower stretches of Fisher River brought Libby 8closer. Filling Lake Koocanusa, eliminating the small towns along the Kootenai, effectively left Eureka more isolated from the county seat. That change would affect how the county operates over the next half-century.

    Next: The Hippy Years

  • Watching Predators and Prey

    Off and on, I’ve been watching the interplay between predator and prey on this place for 65 year. In 1960, and through the mid-seventies, the hay field had a serious gopher (Columbia Ground Squirrel) population. A lot of the farm activities fell in my realm as I entered the teenage years – I recall poisoning the critters, first with strychnine, then with compound 1080. My most memorable year was the year when I caught a badger in a gopher trap. I saw she was a lactating female, worked the trap loose, cleaned all the traps from the field, and was surprised as hell the next day when she showed up to hunt gophers with me. The partnership lasted maybe six weeks – but is a memory to revisit – she had decided that gopher hunting could be a lot more successful when I assisted with the 22.

    Thirty years later – around 2000 – the gopher population dropped. With less grazing on the field, natural predators – a few weasels – were driving the gophers out. Apparently the gophers were more vulnerable to weasel predation than the voles were. Sam and I shot few ground squirrels in 2004 and 2005 when we visited my parents – the weasels controlled the population well over about 15 acres.

    By 2008, a feral cat population began growing in the trailer court a quarte-mile away. By 2017, I saw my last little weasel – feral cats were now the predator, controlling weasels, ground squirrels, and voles.

    So now, cats – whether feral or housecat – have became the prey species. When we built the house, we had a resident pair of coyotes that caused us no problems. They’re gone now – hopefully painlessly after living lives that caused us no problems. With the resident coyotes gone, three packs are edging into our place – the game cameras show one pack from the west, one from the north, and a third from the southeast. One pack has coyotes that specialize in hunting cats – the game cameras have shown coyotes walking down the trail with a cat in the mouth.

    Over time predators and prey roles can change. But you have to live quite a long life attached to the same piece of ground to notice it.

  • Climate Change and Screwworms

    The United States eradicated the New World Screwworm back when I was in high school. I’m reading about a guy in Maryland diagnosed with screwworm infection – but he had been in Honduras before the diagnosis. According to Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flesh-eating-screwworm-parasites-are-headed-to-the-u-s/ “The pest is marching northward at an alarming rate and has now moved some 1,400 miles from southern Panama to southern Mexico in about two years. Screwworms are disastrous for ranchers, whose cattle can become infected when the flies lay eggs in cuts or wounds, after which their resulting larvae burrow, or screw, into that flesh. The northernmost sighting is currently about 700 miles south of the U.S. border. ” For years, the NW Screwworm has been controlled by releasing batches of sterile male flies into the Darien Gap region – but that technique and location is no longer adequate. “That invisible wall holding the screwworm back has crumbled, however. “I don’t know how it got away so quickly,” says Maxwell Scott, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, who studies genetic methods to control populations of the fly. “There had to be some movement of infested livestock, particularly through the middle [of Central America]…. It just moved too fast,” Scott says about the swift speed of the screwworm spread. “

    I’m not particularly concerned about screwworms, since I live just below the 49th Parallel – but this old map does a fairly nice job of showing where the damned things could overwinter in 1952 – and the line correlates with a combination of altitude and latitude. In other words, our dates of first and last frosts may also show where the screwworm can overwinter.

    Pesky Little Critters https://peskylittlecritters.com/how-climate-change-influences-the-distribution-of-screwworm-flies/ concludes their article with “Climate change is reshaping ecosystems worldwide—including those influencing pest species like screwworm flies. Through rising temperatures, shifting humidity patterns, altered host distributions, and more frequent extreme weather events, the range and population dynamics of screwworms are changing.”

    It’s not a huge drama – but it is interesting that the actual effects of global warming may first be measurable in insect ranges.

  • Mowing Hay

    I stopped mowing when a young hound decided to come close and check out the operation. A comment from Renata made me realize that most folks haven’t mowed hay, and haven’t seen, first hand, the danger a mower is to small animals. Then I thought of the differences in mowers, and what makes the old sickle bar mower more dangerous to small animals.

    Add the tall grass and alfalfa to this photograph, and it becomes obvious how the cutting blade is hidden from small animals – and many of us who have used one have had the experience of hitting a fawn with it. It’s less common to get a dog’s foot – but it can happen.

    I’m using a drum mower – and I suspect it’s a bit safer than the old sickle bar mower, but I’m not sure, and I’d much prefer to stop and waste a few moments than hurt a dog. Here’s what a drum mower looks like:

    The cutting takes place by 3 small blades that rotate quickly with the drum. It’s probably as dangerous to small animals – but the drums rotate quickly and are loud. The sound, added to the height of the mower, makes it a lot easier to see. Mine, has 2 drums, and covers only 4 feet to the right of my tractor – sickle bar mowers usually run 7 feet, and I’ve used 9 foot mowers – far harder to see into the tall grass and alfalfa we mow.

    I think it’s a good year when all the fawns get away. As an old man, I now watch for turkeys – small animals that weren’t there when I first mowed hay. So I got to meet a nice little hound as I mowed hay, and took a break to minimize the danger. I think the noise and the profile of the machine already minimize the risk – but coming to a complete stop until the little dog found something more interesting was in her best interest, and mine.