Steve and Family's Great Adventure

 We are enjoying the photos Steve and Munazza are sending as they sightsee their way up to our farm from California. Kestrel and Cedrus are on spring break and having a wonderful adventure in a beautiful, rented RV with their parents.

The first: On Our Way

 The second, two minutes later: Almost...

Will have to find a way to release the emergency break first… 

 Definitely on our way...

 

 

Lunch stop first day... at Black Butte Lake

 

Plan A was to tour Shasta Caves.  We were too late. When I saw the sign
“Fall into Redding’s Falls", Plan B came into being. 

11:16 p.m. Finally in bed in Weed….Good night. DAY TWO ...Mt. Shasta! from Munazza... If you like lentils...  

 from Steve... Here's our morning view...  

  From Weed to the Oregon coast... somehow... Steve: We're a little south of Port Orford. Just north of Gold Beach, I think? 

See big kitties today. Did not get peed on by adolescent lions. Was good.

 

Munazza: Zig Zag Zig

 

Big Cats World Park - Oregon

 

   

Smith River - California

   

Honey Bear RV Park - Oregon

  Day Three... up the Oregon coast... in fog and rain 

  

  At the end of day three, they landed at our farm... with a delicious supper for all from a Thai restaurant in Depoe Bay. And harrowing tales of their adventures that were not indicated in their lovely photos! It turns out their first night out was pretty miserably cold...... and coming up the Oregon coast they couldn't see the ocean most of the time for the fog and rain. And then there was the time they left the gas cap off... But they took it all in strideand arrived here in good spirits with tales of the beautiful endangered big catsat the Great Cat Park in Cave Junction, Oregon... and more.  Next post I'll tell about their three days here... that included one sunny fog-free day at the beach           

 

Jessie Anne born June 6, 1999... died March 1, 2022

 Tragedy struck the farm on the last day of February. Jessie Anne colicked. I walked her as I had done with her two years ago and she came out of it then. But not this time. So I called the vet who came out and did what she could. Although Jessie seemed a little better in the morning, it did not last. We took her, at my vet's recommendation, to the Oregon State University veterinary teaching hospital in Corvallis. The news was not good. She most likely had what apparently is common in middle-aged and older horses: a strangulating lipoma. And the blood and other work-ups did not look good. They recommended euthanasia. And so my beautiful palomino mare is gone. Her daughter Nightingale has been devastated, but is gradually getting used to having to pal around with Mr. Smith instead of her mom.

Jessie Anne was a very sweet tempered horse, always willing to do whatever was asked of her. I miss her terribly. I thought the best way to memorialize her is with a few previous posts from this blog.

 Polly, Jessie Anne's mom, was an older registered Morgan mare when she came to us from friends to be company for Mr. Smith. Polly was much more than Mr. Smith's companion. She took care of whoever was on her back, no matter their level of experience.

 


And she gave us Jessie Anne, my first palomino. That was in 1999, before I started this blog. Someday maybe I'll tell the story of my coming off Mr. Smith and landing in the hospital for a week with a partially collapsed lung... missing Jessie Anne's birth. (Not Mr. Smith's fault... rather my own recklessness.) 

The reason I have this photo of Jessie Anne on the day she was born is because my dad drove here from his ranch two hours away to take photos of her, drove back to Salem an hour away to get them developed (this was before film-less cameras), then to McMinnville to the hospital to give me photos of my new baby on the day she was born. He knew I was devastated to miss her birth. Daughter-in-law Jessica had talked my husband, a non-horse person, through the birth over the phone.

 The following photos and captions are mostly from 2012...

Polly's daughter Jessie Anne is a sweet, gentle soul, and anxious to please whether you're riding her or on the ground.

Her daughter, however, has a different personality. She loves people, so long as they are petting her and admiring her, but she has not yet decided that the person on her back is in charge of where she should go or how fast. Nightingale, I think, was allowed to get away with murder by her sweet mother, Jessie Anne. She lets me know by her singing neigh if I'm five minutes late with her meal. Or if she wants out of the paddock *now* to graze.

But she is a beauty...

In this post, Polly, Mr. Smith, and Jessie Anne give summer visitors rides:

https://lindafink.blogspot.com/2010/07/summers-on-farm-always-bring-city.html

 

 

 

 

 June 2020:  Jessie Anne was being closely attended by a family of Brown-headed Cowbirds. They happily gobble up all the insects Jessie Anne stirs up for them. I'm sure she's happy to have them do that.

 

 

 

 

September 2020 with daughter Nightingale

 

 May 2021... perhaps a foreshadowing of trouble to come... "...On the morning of the 20th, I went out to feed the horses and found Jessie Anne down, unable to rise, with her back legs on the wrong side of a pillar so when she tried to stand her legs crashed into the pillar. From the abrasions on her legs, she had tried many times and was now exhausted. All I could figure was she had rolled in the soft dirt in the open horse barn and landed in an impossible position. If we had rolled her as one does a cast horse away from the obstacle, we would have just turned her into the wall. Johnny went for ropes and we tried to figure out what to do. We decided if we could get her legs in front of the pillar, she might be able to get up. However that proved difficult. Eventually, between her thrashing when we tried and our rope pulling, we did get both legs in front of the pillar, but she was so tired that she could not stand when she tried. Her daughter was standing nearby. It occurred to me if her daughter went out into the field, Jessie Anne might get motivated to try again. So I opened the gate and Nightingale went out but stayed close to the gate, nibbling grass. That worked! Little by little, Jessie Anne thrashed her way in the direction of her daughter. When she had worked her way to where she was headed downhill, she was able to get her feet under herself and stand at last. She walked very unsteadily toward her daughter. I cleaned up her many abrasions and put healing Balm of Gilead on them. She spent the day standing near her daughter. Her cowbird friends kept her company and kept flies off her back.

Now she is all healed and had a wonderful time yesterday rearing and kicking and acting like a wild thing, happy to have muscles no longer sore."

 

2022... But perhaps that, or the mild colic in 2020, was the beginning of the strangulating lipoma that would take her life. I will always remember her as the sweet, cooperative mare who loved her daughter Nightingale so very much.

What a privilege to have shared the life of this beautiful, sweet animal. Nightingale and I will always miss you, Jessie Anne, and never forget you. Rest in peace.

 

Kestrel is Fifteen!

Kestrel and Cedrus had prepared for Kestrel's birthday the first of many promised joint performances and put it on youtube. Kestrel did the photography and production of Cedrus playing a classical piece he had composed. Beyond amazing, here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHIbl-XoULI 

  Their future joint performances will feature Kestrel singing, I'm sure, in that amazing beautiful deep voice. I will send links to anything they provide.

 The photo above shows how tall Kestrel suddenly is. He has passed his mom, his grandma and grandpa... and is approaching his dad.

 

Someday, the pandemic will be over or at least enough in control that we can get together with our California grandsons in person... hopefully before we have to look up to *both* of them.

 

Finding the Rainbow

It's been a rocky several months. Just before Thanksgiving, friend Mark fell, broke his shoulder, and spent the holiday in the hospital. It turned out he had more wrong than was caused by the fall. We agreed to keep his adorable and much loved little dog, Ranger, until he was home again.

Ranger accompanied us on several raptor surveys as well as two Christmas Bird Counts. Here is Ranger following Johnny in the snow on the Dec. 16 Christmas Bird Count ...

 

Mark went from hospital to Skilled Nursing and never left. Mark died on January 22, the day after Johnny's 79th birthday. 

Another friend of Mark's knew Ranger and loved him and we were glad to have Ranger get a permanent home. Here he is on February 2nd, the day he left... on our dirty floor. A muddy farm is not a great place for a little dog.

 

In addition to being the day after Johnny's birthday plus the day Mark died, January 22 was our friend and neighbor Irv's 92nd birthday. At least one person who visited him that weekend came down with Covid. Irv isolated when he found out, and seemed to be okay for awhile, until he wasn't. Irv had refused to be vaccinated. He fell ill but seemed to rebound. We tested him with a rapid test on January 27. It was positive but he still didn't want to go to a doctor. He would get better and then worse and finally agreed to go to a doctor on Feb. 3. The doctor sent him directly to the hospital. He tested positive for both Covid and Influenza B. Irv died on Feb. 10 in the hospital, surrounded by family.

We, mostly Johnny, have been dealing with all that must be dealt with after Irv's death. Irv's son, the executor of his will, lives across the mountains and relies on Johnny to take care of Irv's place and be keeper of the house key for family members to come in and sort and organize and take what each wants. Johnny cleaned out the freezer, keeps the pellet stove working when needed and tended the chickens. Fortunately another neighbor now has the chickens.

Irv's funeral service is this coming Thursday, outdoors, at the cemetery. It is all emotionally exhausting. 

So we took off on February 13 to celebrate our 55th wedding anniversary by escaping to the mountains. Of course, we got lost getting where we planned to go... Mt. Hebo. It was a lovely sunny day and I wanted to see the view from on top. We went up the mountain but not the right one, apparently, then down the other side until we hit Highway 22. So we decided to continue to Hebo and take the more civilized road up the mountain. But first we stopped at Gunaldo Falls along the way, as we always do. 

I decided to try to take a selfie with my Nikon camera, the way people do with their smart phones. We have no smart phones and I'm not smart enough to figure out the timer on the camera and set it up at a distance, so here we are in front of the waterfall. A long way in front of the waterfall... which is clear across the canyon...

 

That little white streak next to my glasses is the waterfall. That thin red streak on my forehead is from Irv's rooster that I caught the day before and put in a cage for the neighbors who were taking Irv's chickens. I caught the 13 hens without damage... theirs or mine.

And onward we went and up the very long, steep road to the top of Mt. Hebo.  Along the way is this sign... Since we were being tourists, I took its picture.

 

And then we're there!

 

 

Here is the long awaited view of the ocean from on top...

 

Yes, those are clouds over the ocean. Oh well.

 The meadow up there is lovely...

 We started home by the way we had tried to come up since it would be shorter than the way we had come from Hebo. Alas, the road was deep in snow and did not look like anyone had successfully made it through. 

 

So we went back to Hebo and Hwy 22 and home.

Today, the day after our anniversary, is Valentine's Day. It started out with a beautiful rainbow, so I jumped out of the EZ Go that I was hauling horse manure in and ran to the house for my camera. 

I noticed that the west end of the rainbow seemed to be pointing at a Red-tailed Hawk sitting in our big scraggly-topped fir where raptors like to perch.

 

 At the end of the rainbow there may not be a pot of gold, but there was, on this day, a hawk bathed in rainbow light. 

And so, life goes on...

Cedrus is Thirteen!

A year or two ago, the California grandkids started a tradition of birthday presentations by Zoom, since we could not get together. That seemed to go by the wayside in the last half of 2021, maybe because we couldn't believe we were still isolated. But the tradition has been given new life by Cedrus, who did an amazing presentation for us via ZOOM today, the day before his actual birthday.

Cedrus eating Tiramisu

Below is our zoom screen with the California family, including Cedrus, top left, Auntie Fudge (best Auntie ever, says Cedrus) top right, and Grandma and Grandpa (that's us) at the bottom. Grandpa was working at setting our house on fire by lighting candles to celebrate Cedrus bday, then holding them up to the screen for Cedrus to blow out. (I'm not sure Grandpa quite has this Zoom thing figured out.) Of course, they were relight candles anyway so it took some effort to get them out.

Cedrus' talent knows no bounds. He showed us some of his art work. It is amazing. I don't know how to steal from his web site so here is the URL: https://haupieekeewie.wixsite.com/cedrusbukhari/art

The photography part of his website is equally amazing. https://haupieekeewie.wixsite.com/cedrusbukhari/photography

 Cedrus shares his January 17th birthday with Kinnera, our surrogate granddaughter, who is, unbelievably, 22 and a college senior at Pacific Lutheran in Tacoma, Washington. She is going to graduate with honors, then take a free 5th year that the college is giving to their students because of the whole year they had to do classes online. We see Kinnera even less often than we see the California kids, but she and her mom did visit us briefly this past summer.

 

In my dreams, Covid is in the past. Cedrus and Kinnera both come visit us for their birthday on January 17... some year. Until then...

Happy Birthday!

 

January Bird Surveys

 With December's snow and wild weather mostly gone, we have been doing our monthly bird surveys whenever we can. Saturday, Jan. 8, we did the Grand Ronde raptor route. The white-tailed kites apparently left when the snow fell. They have done that in the past. I guess they don't like snow. Red-shouldered Hawks were still around, though. Such lovely birds.

Monday, January 10, had reasonably good weather, too, so we did our North Santiam raptor route. I took a photo of a light phase Rough-legged Hawk but it was a long way away and I did not get a good photo.

 

Today, Jan. 12, tide and weather cooperated to let me do my January beached bird survey. On the way, I stopped, as always when the streams are running high, to take a photo of Gunaldo Falls. In the summer, it is a trickle, at most.

 
I'm glad I waited to get to the beach until two hours after high tide. Any earlier and I would not have been able to walk the beach to my starting point. I think it must have been higher than the 7.7 feet predicted.  The white foam is where waves were reaching when I was there. They had been lapping at the foot of the dune. 

This bumpy log, looking into the sun, was bumpy with resting shorebirds: Dunlin.

 

 

I walked past and took more photos. These Dunlin looked annoyed at my intrusion.

 But maybe that's just how Dunlin always look.

There was only one "beached (aka dead) bird" to tally. The high tide was pretty efficient in washing away most small items. But it sure deposited a lot of driftwood.

Now it's time to stay home and get some work done here. Although I would rather be birding...