Puppy Love?

The three dogs we rescued from the roadside are really thriving. Good food, veterinary care and lots of love have allowed them to become happy and vibrantly healthy. They were tiny when we found them. In my blog post the day we found them, I had written that they were perhaps five weeks old. I think I was mistaken. Back then, they weighed about one kilo each and I could hold all three in one hand. Now, I can hardly hold one of them with both of my hands. They have grown like crazy and obviously have more growing to do. If they grow into their huge paws and oversized ears, they will be quite big.


Adorable as they may be, we really cannot keep all three. During this vagabond stage of our lives, there is no telling where we will be even a year from now. Also I worry about our cats. The dogs are respectful of them and have learned that in the family hierarchy cats rule, but still I worry. So, parting will be sad, but we really do need and want to find homes for two of them. They are probably about ten to twelve weeks old now and are at the perfect age for adoption.

So, without further ado, allow me to introduce:

Tip

Tip is the female of our trio. She is a spirited sweetheart who absolutely loves to be hugged. She has beautiful short fur which is not quite brown and not quite black. I would describe her as being a sable color. Her paws are white, her white belly is speckled with Dalmatian-like spots and the very tippy tip of her tail is white. She is by far the smartest of the bunch and discovered that bath-time on a hot day is actually nice. Her brothers still run when I pick up the hose…

Mooch

When we found the puppies by the side of the road, Mooch was the first to come to us. A very sociable dog, he is also the first to come out when people come to the house. We call him Mooch because he really hogs attention from his siblings and has to be the first to do everything. He is deep shiny black with a white star on his chest. His eyes are the most beautiful chocolate brown – a very handsome dog.

Red

Deciding which dog to keep for ourselves is tough. They are all great and each has his or her own special characteristics. Maybe it is because of his mellower disposition that Mooch and Tip often leave Red out of their games. But he would rather sleep at my feet than chase and wrestle with them. He seems to have chosen us, so we choose him to stay. Even on their first day here, I had commented that the red one seemed more sickly. Now I think I was just seeing an early glimpse of his laid back personality. He actually turned out to be bigger and thicker than his siblings. I should probably have named him Tank, because he is built like one.

If you have room in your heart and your home for one of these dogs, and can provide the love and care they need, please contact me as soon as possible. You will not regret it.

Water, and Lots of It

Today would be a good day for sipping hot tea and baking scones. The skies are battle-ship grey, and the cold rain is coming down in horizontal sheets. Mother Nature decided to take care of the drought. Unfortunately, she procrastinated to the point of having to give us all the rain at once. The parched earth just cannot absorb the rain quickly enough. The pasture in front of our house is now crisscrossed with rivulets of fast moving water. The pond, in which the water had been steadily receding to the point of the banks almost caving in, is now overflowing out to the driveway, which just may be impassable by our car.

We would have had those scones and tea I mentioned, but had to mop the laundry room floor instead – with an inch of water. We thought it had come in from a window which we had forgotten was open, but noticed as we mopped that the water level would just rise again. Our Sisyphean task was the result of not just the window, but water seeping in from below as well.

Side view of driveway.

Already wet, Cesar and I donned our rain coats (and little else – bare skin dries so much easier than clothes) and had a very wet walk-about. We found white water gurgling into the pond via the formerly dry streambeds which feed it. We began to walk through the shin-deep water of the lowest part of the driveway but remembered the shoddily buried electrical wires there and thought better of it. After our little tour of the property, we came back in and had some hot cocoa and listened to the plop plop plop of water droplets falling from the ceiling.

Water flowing out of pond overflow drainage.

I am not complaining. We are wearing our big fluffy bathrobes and just chilling out. The cows will be happy, the grass will be a brilliant green tomorrow, and the frogs are chirping and squeaking and blurping away having their little Dionysian amphibious orgies. The rain has stopped, probably just for a brief respite, the water has receded slightly and the winds have really begun.

Blood Sucking Devils

I think if given the choice, I would trade vampire bats for mosquitoes. Even though the vampire bat takes about two teaspoons of blood for its meal, and a mosquito takes five microliters (5 millionths of a liter), I would rather play host to a blood sucking mammal right now than suffer the incessant irritation of the plague of mosquitoes we are currently experiencing. Why there are so many, I do not know. Perhaps it is the time of year, recent relief from the drought, or just the normal state of things where we live. Whatever the case, we find them in every room of the house and I am usually greeted by a small swarm of them whenever I open the back door. Our sleep is interrupted every night by their bites and our groggy slaps and involuntary scratching in response.

Short of burning cow dung (which I plan to try this evening), we have pretty much exhausted our options of controlling the little bastards. We have tried a bed net, citronella candles, mosquito incense coils, a wall outlet device that looks like an air freshener plug-in, and various chemical sprays in increasing degrees of toxicity. And still I slap and scratch at myself.

I like to know my enemy, so after reading a bit about mosquitoes, I am not surprised they are such a successful species and impossible to get rid of. Craig Childes describes the mosquito thusly in The Animal Dialogues:

“a nightmare insect that will find you anywhere you hide. Of any creature this size, the mosquito has the most complex mechanical wiring known. Fifteen thousand sensory neurons reside in the antennae region alone. The sensory organs of the head are arranged like clockwork. Electron-microscope examination reveals interconnected rods and chambers, pleated dishes and prongs and plates. It looks like a science-fiction world of satellite dishes and receiver towers. These take the mechanical and chemical environment and translate it into a tactical array of electrical impulses to the mosquito’s brain, a brain the size of a pinprick on a piece of paper.”

The mosquito just goes to show that nature is stranger than fiction.

Through trial and error, we have developed a multi-faceted approach to control the mosquitoes. I can’t say we are bite free now, but this approach gives us some relief. For starters, we keep the doors closed at dusk, which seems to be when the hovering blood suckers are most active. Every few days, I apply a repellent spray inside and around the house. I alternate spraying with a chemical called Stockade (active ingredient is cypermethrine) and a stronger one that is still safe for pets, called Derribador (active ingredient is deltametrina). My goal here is to keep the mosquitoes and flies away while mitigating harm to other insects, if possible. Then, as a final low tech option, we sleep under a mosquito net. This sounds romantic, but try it for a while and it becomes annoying.

The mosquitoes have driven me to these steps. Until moving here, I was very much anti-chemical. Uruguayans have a chemical for everything though. Almost half an aisle at the grocery store is devoted to various insecticides and repellents. I guess I am just fitting in.

Know thine enemy. A few interesting facts about mosquitoes.

• Only female mosquitoes bite. They require your blood for egg production.


• If a mosquito is released in still air, it will come directly to the nearest host, even if it is one hundred feet away.


• A mosquito locates you by sensing the carbon dioxide of your breath, lactic acid from your skin, traces of acids released by the bacteria living on your skin and the moisture and heat emitted by your body.


• Even mosquitoes have a purpose. In addition to feeding on you, they also serve as pollinators, feeding on the nectar of flowers.


• One female mosquito may lay 100 to 300 eggs at a time and may average 1,000 to 3,000 offspring during her life span.

Wild Skies

Evening view from the front of La Gaia.

La Gaia is situated in a little valley at the beginning of the sierras. Whoever built this house laid it out very nicely. It faces North exactly, so we have lovely sunrises to our right and mesmerizing sunsets to our left. Being at the edge of the sierras, we also have a nearly constant dry wind that drops down from the hills. I think it is due to that wind that we have such impressive skies here.

Sorry, Montana, but this is big sky country. This evening we were working in the back field and I noticed that suddenly, the light seemed different. Huge clouds had rolled in and there was an opening of clear blue sky right over our heads. The effect was that of a huge but soft spotlight shining down. Everything looked more crisp and defined. Glancing up, I saw part of a large rainbow in the east. Behind me, big dark clouds were rolling in, making the sunset monochromatic and eerily impressive in shades of steel blue, with brilliant patches of light shining through in shimmering metallic shades impossible to describe or reproduce. Big alto-stratus clouds in the north reflected light from the setting sun in shades of pink and purple. Cesar and I just stood there for a while, enjoying the break from our work, and pointed out the various features of the sky to each other. It was nearly 9:00pm and the moon was bright through a thin veil of clouds, but there was still plenty of daylight. These skies are too special for me to waste a moment by running inside to fetch my camera, so I hope that by my description you can paint your own mental picture of the scene.

The sky is something that modern people forget to pay attention to in their hurried lives. I can see how ancient peoples who lived much closer to nature than we do were so aware of their natural environment, especially the movements of the sun and stars. I noticed last night that Orion is slightly more westward than it was when we arrived. That is something I never would have noticed at home since we can barely see the stars there for all of the light pollution.

As I type, the wind is blowing quite briskly. I can hear it moving through the trees and around the house. I think we will have an interesting sky in the morning. We always do.

Mom, look what I brought you!

I have found a few things around the house which gave me a momentary shock. Finding some kind of animal in an unexpected place, like a frog in the toilet or a bat hanging from a door frame gives me a quick little jolt every now and then. There is a split second where every nerve becomes alert, then immediately back to normal when my brain processes that it’s only a bat, a frog, a big hairy spider or a snake. This morning we had come home from grocery shopping and the dogs were ecstatic to see us as usual. I decided to unlock the back door instead of the front, turned the corner to the back porch and got one of those little jolts I just described. Then I started laughing as Cesar came around the corner, concerned about what had made me emit that little involuntary shriek.

With three dogs around, it had to happen eventually - a little bit of the dead cow from next door made it to our house. For days, we had been finding what I thought were sheep hooves. I would hear the dogs snarling and play fighting like they do when they have a special toy and would inevitably find the fought over object to be a black hoof. With so many sheep about, I just assumed that maybe they shed hooves occasionally and the dogs were finding these little treasures in the field. Little did I know they had been visiting the dead cow and pulling off its hooves. But this time they got lucky and the lower leg came away with the hoof. I don’t think they really knew what to do with it, but they did bring their trophy home. So it turned up like some kind of sick mafia warning on our back porch.



Curious now about hooves, and the difference between cow and sheep feet – cloven, one, two, or three toes? I Googled “cow hooves” and was surprised to see that nine out of the first ten results were for mail order cow hooves. Who knew? And here we get them for free!