COMMENTARY: Cutting Hay with a Menagerie
When it's time to cut the hay, keep the eyes peeled for wildlife. In the country, it abounds.
By Donnie Johnston
COMMENTATOR
The summer heat has finally arrived. The next three days are supposed to feature high temperatures of about 90 degrees – if you believe the weatherman, of course.
I’m tired of changing clothes three times a day – long sleeves in the morning, short sleeves in the early afternoon and long sleeves again when the sun goes down.
May was definitely a cool month. The night of the 30th the temperature got down into the upper 30s and one of my squash plants got burned. Almost every other night last week we were in the low-to-mid 40s. Forty-degree nights the first of June is almost unheard of in these parts.
This was also one of the wettest Mays on record, with just over eight inches of precipitation falling at my house. Checking back, however, I found that this May’s rainfall was almost a mirror image of last May’s precipitation.
This is the point in time when you find out whether you’re a real gardener or just a wannabe. We’ve had plenty of rain and now the heat is coming. That means weeds will spring up almost overnight and a garden can get away from you in a heartbeat.
This is also vacation time and if you don’t have that garden clean when you leave, you might have a jungle when you get back in a week or 10 days. Just saying.
There is going to be a lot of hay on the ground this week. The weather finally seems to be cooperating. I don’t make my hay anymore; a neighbor does, but cutting hay was one aspect of farming that I really enjoyed – if the equipment was working well.
You see a lot of wildlife when you’re on a mower. You flush rabbits, field mice and an occasional black snake from the high grass, and predators have learned that there are easy meals in the wake of a hay mower. In one field there was a red fox that followed me (at about 25 yards) on every round, picking off dead, injured or displaced field mice as he went.
Hawks and buzzards also get in on the hunt, and several times I have seen red-tailed hawks (that nest in the neighborhood) lifting off with a wriggling and bleeding snake.
The saddest part is when you come upon a young fawn bedded down in the high grass. Instinct keeps them still until the last instant and they stand up just as the mower gets to them. I always watched carefully, but sometimes hitting a fawn was simply unavoidable. That ruined my day.
Then there are the turkey nests that you disturb.
I love the sweet smell of new-mown hay. Funny, but new-mown hay and the grass in a newly mown yard smell differently. I’m not sure why; they’re both grass, but they do.
Speaking of smelling, there is an old skunk living in a groundhog hole down by the barn and he occasionally comes up around the house at night looking for scraps or sniffing the trashcan under the back deck.
Usually, he just checks things out and goes on his merry way, but the other night something apparently irritated him and he sprayed, the aroma rising up over the deck and permeating the most minute cracks in the kitchen door.
A friend was visiting at the time and she was a bit perturbed by the smell. As far as I was concerned, however, the spray was therapeutic. With all the wet weather, my sinuses were a bit clogged and that smell opened them right up. I felt like a new man.
Another night last week I was just about to fall asleep when I heard a strange sound outside, almost like a baby crying. After a few moments I realized that it was a grey fox. I had thrown some chicken bones out back and a red fox and a grey fox had found them at the same time. They were quarreling over the spoils.
A red fox barks almost like a dog, but a grey fox makes an eerie sound that is almost other-worldly. If you don’t know what it is, it can make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
Living in the country is sometimes like living in a zoo.
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