Squirrel Tails

On Wednesdays we get a slightly different coffee drinking crowd.

One of the Wednesday guys is named Ralph. Ralph used to be a Marine. He hunted and fished. He owned one of the "big" insurance companies downtown. He was a big wheel in his church and was a city councilman for decades.  Everybody knew Ralph.

He hunted antelope and mule deer out west. His favorite place to hunt was a very large sheep operation in eastern Wyoming.

The sheep rancher's passion was fly fishing.  When he was not fishing he was tying flies. On one of his trips the rancher asked Ralph if he could bring some Fox Squirrel tails for tying flies. Apparently the big brown trout were tearing up big, bushy streamers made with squirrel tail.  He was going through a lot of those streamers and he hated paying money for something he might be able to get for free.  The big brutes would suck them in, roll over and bull their way back into brush that lined the banks.  Once in the snags there was nothing the rancher could do.  They invariably broke off taking his fly with them.

"No problem." said Ralph. "We have lots of squirrels back home in Eaton Rapids."

Upon arriving back in Eaton Rapids he threw a pair of gloves, side-cutters and an empty shoe box into the trunk of his LTD.

When you are a local businessman in a small town, the kind of car you drive is a very big deal.  Ralph could have easily afforded a new Cadillac every year but his clients would have concluded that he was gouging them on premiums.  Driving too cheap or too old of a car would cause his clients to doubt the solidity of his business. Either way, Ralph would have lost business.  Ralph found that buying a new Ford LDT every three years hit the sweet spot.  It was not too rich.  It was not too poor.  And it did everything Ralph ever asked a car to do.

Driving home from work the very first day he was back from Wyoming he saw a Fox Squirrel that was being been pounded into road pizza right on State Street. He pulled into the next driveway, donned his gloves and carried his box and side-cutters over to the road kill.

Just as he is about to lean over and use the side cutters to liberate the tail from the squirrel, he had that odd sensation of being watched. He turned around....and there was the proverbial little-old-lady, close enough to stick her hand in his pocket. A constituent.

"Whatchya doin'?" she asked.

Thinking quickly, Ralph told her, "I feel bad when I see these road killed animals. It just ain't right that people keep running over them. I am going to take this poor animal home and give him a dignified burial." and he proceeded to pick up the animal with the side-cutters and placed it into the "casket" (i.e., the shoe box)

The old lady looked at Ralph with unmitigated awe and admiration.

"You know I don't often meet a man who acts so responsible." she said, "I feed these squirrels. I am sure that this squirrel is one of mine and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate what you are doing for him."

She thought a second or two.  The traffic on State Street is pretty steady and the neighborhood was crawling with squirrels.  "You know, a lot of squirrels get hit on State Street.  I am sure this guy will not be the last....  Do you suppose I could call you whenever one of my squirrels gets run over?"  Her eyes appeared to be just a bit misty.

Ralph, with the solemnity of a preacher at a funeral said, "I think that would be a real good idea."

He had fifteen squirrel tails the next time he went to Wyoming.

Puncture resistance of high tensile, 14 gauge steel

A common, round pointed shovel with a broken handle.  I bet you have a few of these lying around in your barn or garage.

What might it be good for?

This one was in a tree, stuffed into the end of a 25' run of sewer pipe.  It was a "snake" to scare the kiddies on Halloween.  Can you see the eyes?

I was curious about the material's resistance to puncture.

Kids:  Don't try this at home.  One of the rules of shooting is to not shoot at targets that can ricochet.

124 grains of hollowpoint applied at 1100 feet per second.  Yes, it broke the handle off.

It stopped the bullet.  Caution:  This is one shovel, one round of ammo.  This tells you very little about the performance of the population of all shovels and all types of 9mm ammo.

You can judge the area of the deformation (or dent) by the clean area where the rust was knocked off.  That is one of the ways body shops judge which suspension components were damaged in an accident.

The steel of this cheap ($6 at a big-box store), made-in-Asia shovel is about 0.075, or 14 gauge (between 1.8 and 2.0mm).  I don't know what grade of steel it is made of but you would probably be pretty close (or better) if you used 780 TRIP steel or M1300 Martensitic sheet steel

To show the depth and profile of the dent

The dent is about 0.3 inches deep.

This blog is for grown-ups.  Don't read any more into this post than was written.  For example, I never suggested that a shovel could be used as a field expedient chicken plate.  I did not imply that 14 gauge 780 TRIP or Martensitic steel would be the absolute, bare minimum for making exterior doors resistant to common pistol bullets.  Nope, I never wrote anything like that.

Reading the Landscape: Apple trees

If you are addicted to reading the landscape you can easily pick out the apple trees due to their distinctive form.

But what causes that form?

The following is a short, primitive exposition on why apple trees look the way they do.  And, by extension, why apple trees must be pruned to be profitable.

Tree A is a virgin on the brink of production.  Tree B shows one branch of this tree with a fruit load.  The dashed line shows the original position of the limb before the weight of the fruit pulled it down.

Tree C is the same as Tree B but later in the season as the fruit sizes up. You can see a "sucker" starting at the point of inflection.

The current thinking is that branches and the growing tips produce growth regulators that suppress buds breaking into growth. Sunlight destroys that growth regulator and the buds are free to grow.  That is why suckers pop up at the point-of-inflection, it is the most exposed to sunlight.

Fruit sets on both branches the next year.  (F) The lower branch is shaded and produces smaller, greener apples with less sugar.  The weight of the fruit starts to pull the upper branch (formerly a sucker) down as well.

The branch looks like this after five or ten years.  It goes into alternate bearing as one year it sets way too much fruit.  Keep in mind that this is just one branch.  The tree might have twenty such branches and they are growing in three dimensions.

The buds "decide" whether they will be vegetative or fruiting based on the carbohydrate status of the branch.  Setting too much fruit results in low carbohydrates.  Fruit are carbohydrate sinks.  So the next year there is no fruit.  Then too much fruit....

Without pruning the tree produces no fruit one year followed by vast amounts of runty, sour, green apples the next.  Neither condition is rewarded in the market place.

A typical pruner would remove the outer portion of the limb just outboard of the branch with the red apples.  Then he would remove half of the length of the branch with the red apples, right at the point of inflection.

If he did that to the entire tree the shortened horizontal limbs would throw more suckers due to the higher light levels inside the canopy.

The following pruning season the pruner has the option of making the tree even skinnier as he will have more fruitful branches to choose between.

It is worth noting that apple trees that remain open even when not pruned are not producing very much fruit.  If the dense, layered look is due to the effects of many years of heavy fruit production...then thinking in reverse, uncared for trees that do not have that look are slackers.

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I tried to take photos to show this phenomena but they were always too busy.  I could see the layering and yearly accretions of branches, but that is because I could walk around the tree and see it in three dimensions.  I found it impossible to capture that in 2-D photos.

However, simple pencil sketches, even though they are primitive, can clearly illustrate the phenomena because there is absolutely no spurious detail to obscure the point.

640-by-480 and 0.3 megapixels.  Image from HERE

This point, that sometimes less is more, is completely lost on people who are in an arms race for the most megapixels on their smart phones.  A muddled thinker with a 20 megapixel photo is no clearer than if he had a clearly focused 640-by-480 photo.  And sometimes even  the 640 X 480 photo is too much.

I bet that left a mark

We had thunderstorms roll through the area last night.  Make that HEAVY on the thunder.

We picked up about four inches of rain.

Yes, that is standing water in the foreground.  I would have walked right by it if I had not been walking my dogs.

My dogs alerted me to something a bit unusual by the pasture fence.

Tufts of deer hair circled in red.  Suspected deer bed ellipsed in black.

Tufts of deer hair beneath the fence and a beaten down area about three feet from the fence.  The deer hair is not on a regular deer trail.

You may have to enlarge the picture, but the fence is stretched out and has a heck of a bend in the top wire.

Big hanks of hair.

I suspect the lightening hit just south of this deer.  The deer launched out of its bed, forgetting that there was a fence there.  The fence stretched out and then body slammed the deer back into the ground like Big Time Rasslin'

Ouch!  I looked around.  No dead deer.  Sometimes they break their neck.  You don't have to look very far to find them.

You can learn a lot when you slow down and read the physical evidence.

A thought for Ash Wednesday

Image from HERE

Ash Wednesday is hard for me.

I love to eat and "fasting" is a traditional part of Lenten preparation for some Christians

One question Christians seldom address well is, "Why fast?"

It IS all about me
They ask, "God has everything (by definition).  How does your fasting help Him?"

They are absolutely right.  It is not about helping God.  It is all about me, getting me closer to the person God designed me to be (i.e., ...made in the image and likeness of God)

If you look at this blog's header you will see a quote from First Thessalonians.  Part of that quote reads, "Pray always."  I will tell you right now.  I fail.

But what if I practiced praying every time I felt discomfort.  And what if I carefully ordered my day so that I was guaranteed I would feel that discomfort on a regular basis.  Hunger, what about hunger?  It will not incapacitate me like cutting off finger joints would.  It comes in waves so a person who is fasting will have many, many repetitions of discomfort --> Pray.

Neurons that fire together wire together.

So what?
Have you ever heard of "The dead man's ten seconds?"

A person who suffers a catastrophic loss of blood pressure (severed carotid artery or ruptured aortic aneurysm) has enough oxygen stored in his brain cells for ten seconds of lucid thought and motor activity.

If that were you, would you be praying?  Or would you be doing things that are not going to matter when you leave this room and move to the next?

In circumstances that are less dire, would you be praying (and staying calm) during that ambulance ride or would you be freaking out...and diminishing your chances of survival.

In times of stress, will you automatically pray for peace, strength and guidance or will you go catatonic or fly into a rage...neither of which are likely to increase your prospects.

Image from HERE

The team plays on game day the way they practiced all week.

How are you going to play on "game day"?

Best Use, Highest Use

It has been a while since I talked about how I decide what trees stay and which trees get culled.

It is all about having options.

Consider a hybrid poplar tree.  It grows biomass.  It does not produce "human quality" food.  It does not produce much mast or forage for domestic animals or wildlife.  It is not a very good timber tree.  It is not even a very good tree for fire wood.  It does one thing very, very well.  It grows fast.

Consider an apple or a chestnut tree.  It produces "human quality" food.  It also produces "animal quality" food.  While not very good timber trees, chestnut wood is durable and make adequate fence posts, something that cannot be said for hybrid poplar.  Regarding firewood, all trees produce wood that burns.  Orchard trees require trimming and that automatically produces firewood as a byproduct.  Apple wood is excellent for smoking meats.  It is flavoring.  Apples and chestnut trees offer me more options than hybrid poplar.

In deciding the order of what is highest use, I think about the Inuit (Eskimos).  When confronted with short supplies, they always chose to eat blubber rather than burn blubber.  So, to me, that means that trees that produce human quality food should be at the top of the list.

Trees that produce food for wild and domestic animals are next on the list.  Food is food.  Direct food is more thermodynamically efficient.  Food that is not palatable to humans can be cycled through a pig or squirrel or deer and thus become delicious, high quality food, albeit at a higher cost.

When forced to choose between trees that produce excellent wood products or firewood, I choose the wood products.  The production of poles, posts and dimension lumber always results in "tops" and scraps suitable for firewood. Choosing trees that produce construction materials automatically gives me firewood as a byproduct.  The reverse is not always true.

There are niche players and cross-overs.  Black Locust does not produce an appreciable amount of human quality food (a bit of honey) but it fixes nitrogen and makes great fence posts because they are highly rot resistant.  A farmer always needs three more gates and six more fence posts.  Always.   Black Walnut produces nuts.  Some selections produce a lot of nuts.  Some just a few.  But it is one of the premier hardwood trees in the Eastern United States.  And the smaller pieces make fine fence posts because it too is rot resistant.

But as a general rule I follow this heirarchy:

1. Trees and plants that produce significant amounts of human quality food with modest amounts of effort.
2. Trees and plants that produce significant amounts of animal quality food with modest amounts of effort.
3. Trees and plants that produce durable "construction" materials in large quantities.  Prime windbreak species are a subset of this category but only when they are upwind of your residence.
4. Trees and plants that produce biomass.

Silver Maple, Box Elder, Cottonwood, Hybrid Poplar, Elm, Norway Spruce and Ash are biomass species.  It is not that I hate them.  It is just that Categories 1-through-3 pay more rent for the space that they are taking up.

More brush hauling

I expect it will take another twenty hours of work to get Salamander's orchard in a presentable state.

I worked another four hours Tuesday.  Oddly enough I did not touch a tool to an apple tree even though it is an apple (mostly) orchard and I am pruning trees.

From left to right, a scraggly Black Cherry half on the image, a Black Walnut (Kwik-crop...two lies for the price of one) and a Silver Maple.  In the foreground are three survey flags where new fruit trees will be planted and my 18", Poulan chainsaw.

The Silver Maple gobbles up enough light, water an nutrients for three fruit trees.  It must go.

Here it is de-limbed.

Gone.

I am glad the tree was not any bigger than it was.

Do you know how to make a grown man cry?

Tell him you use Black Walnut for fence posts.

Between dragging brush to where Salamander can drag it with his tractor and bucking up firewood and brush, I burned up another four hours.  I am a hurting puppy.

Black Walnuts
Most fruit trees do poorly when planted near Black Walnut trees.

My plan is to plant three persimmon trees where the surveyor flags are.  I have about 10 grafted H-120 persimmon trees in the nursery.  Two of them will get moved.  I will move an ungrafted seedling for the third tree and attempt to graft it to Szukis.

That is the plan for tomorrow.