Happy Hour in Whitefish

Logger Bob Love, the real thing.

August, 6 -- Whitefish, Montana

It was our last day at Carl's cabin, because we were heading North to Alaska the next day.

We drove to Kalispell for supplies and to have a tire repaired,and then we pigged out on barbecue.

Food coma soon followed, and we headed home.

Carl had the foresight to save some of the meal for the ladies, who had been busy at the cabin, and this made our power-naps somehow excusable.

When we awoke the woods were rumbling. So we strolled over to watch Logger Bob sawing and munching piss firs with his machines.

Bob is the real thing. No lumbersexual wears pitch-stained pants, and smells like chain saw exhaust.

Carl hired Bob to thin the piss firs, "because they crowd out the larches and pines".

"They're as common as wood rats around here, and they stink like rats, too."

(Carl always abuses my favorite rodent in my presence.)

Yep, Piss firs. I hadn't heard of them either.

The colorful moniker comes from the subalpine fir's habit of releasing a stream of water when bored with a forester's auger. So says the Slang Dictionary. 

Break time in the pickup.

While we admired the machinery, Bob's dog Sparky hunted Montana's other native scoundrel, the bushy-tailed wood rat.  

Sparky knows where to find these handsome rodents, and how to flush them, and if he doesn't nail them on the run, he trees them and stands vigil till they come down and make a run for it. 

Our dogs Fred and Petey found Sparky to be a really neat guy, and joined him in the chase, but they just didn't get the waiting game under the tree.

Sparky stood vigil while
Petey and Fred wanted in.

Fred can't even catch a squirrel, and thinks the game ends when the squirrel goes up the tree.

So when Sparky treed a rat that afternoon our dogs drifted off and were soon looking wistfully into the cabin.

Before long it was happy hour, and a chance to chat with a real Montana logger.

We gathered on Carl's porch next to the beer cooler where Moose Drool and other brews greased the skids.

Soon we swapping stories about trees, timber, wood, land, and of course wildlife.

Old snags?  Bob knew of a big one used by bears as a hibernaculum.

I asked if he had ever seen a wolverine out here. 

I doubted he had, but I was wrong.

"I passed one on the shoulder of the road one morning.

"It had it's head up the butt-end of a road killed deer, and was within shooting range of any passing pickup. 

"So I walked it away from the road and called the game warden."

"The warden dragged the carcass up into the woods, and the wolverine survived a close call with civilization.

Salted into Bob's accounts was the name of Bud Moore.

Moore grew up in the Bitterroots, trapped and built cabins as a teenager, was a Marine during WW2, and worked for the Forest Service most of his life.

He was one of those rare individuals who "listened to the land and learned from it".

"Bud was like my brother, grandfather, father, mentor and best friend. It was like we'd known each other in previous lives, and reconnected.  We will again one day."
  

Moore was a toddler when writer Norman MacLean worked for the Forest Service, but their paths crossed decades later when MacLean needed a fact checker for his draft of A River Runs Through It.

In Bob's words . . .

"McLean didn't know Bud at the time, but since Bud knew the country and characters in the stories, he asked him to check the manuscript for facts.  In Bud's words, 'I took my red pencil to it and sent it back'.  The edits didn't go over well, but Maclean eventually agreed they were warranted."

"Bud was on the team that investigated the Mann Gulch fire, and was responsible for the Fire Fighter's standard safety rules, which are still in effect today."

"They are fashioned after the Marine Rules of Battle Conduct.  Bud had been in the Marines, and couldn't recall the rules to the letter, but he thought they'd be applicable to fire fighting."

"The team was meeting in DC, near some military facility.  Bud went out and found a Marine at a bus stop, and asked him to recite the rules.  He wrote them down, brought them back to the meeting, and they were adopted by the FS."

The Maclean-Moore relationship grew into one of mutual respect, and when Moore was writing The Lochsa Story he observed that "McLean took care of my inclination to put outdoor pursuits first, desk work last. Every time I dropped my pencil and looked at my fly rod, he would show up in some form or another."

I had one last question before Bob headed home.

"What's wrong with Sparky's paw?" (Sparky favored one paw. Was it a casualty of the chase?)

"Compound fracture", said Bob. "He broke his leg when he fell off a roof, trying to get deer fat I'd put up there for ravens.   

"Maybe I should have had it cut off. He wouldn't be in such pain, but he wouldn't be able to catch wood rats either." 

It was a happy hour I won't forget.

References
Cawelti, John.  www.press.uchicago.edu/books/maclean/maclean_cawelti.html
[an interesting excerpt about Maclean's analytical and critical compliment of a lecture Cawelti once gave at the University of Chicago -- from Cawelti's book, Norman Maclean: Of scholars, fishing, and the River]

Moore, Bud. 1996. The Lochsa Story, Land Ethics in the Bitterroot Mountains. Mountain Press Publishing Company, Missoula, Montana

Maclean, Norman. 1992. Young Men and Fire. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

A dirty filthy but princely rat

A bushy-tailed pack rat (Neotoma cinerea) in a pile of slabs in an abandoned saw mill (Flathead County, Montana).

They may be the best looking rats in North America, but it doesn't matter. In western Montana bushy-tailed wood rats are regarded as dirty filthy rats.

"How could such a princely rodent alienate so many?" I ask.

"Because they stink, they make a mess, and they crap and piss all over the place", Carl answers.

Carl's photos show the ugly truth happening on his front porch.

Bushy-tail caught during intimate moment
 of fecal assessment. (Photo by Carl Hansen)

A poop-obsessed pack rat seems to nuzzle and whisper tenderly to its fecal pellet.

Bushy-tail aids in the delivery of a fecal pellet
(photo by Carl Hansen)

And here you see the rat aiding the passage of a fecal pellet with the tender care of a midwife delivering a babe.

This may be an example of coprophagy -- recycling nutrients in the fermentation products of the caecum, but never mind.

Even David Attenborough's soothing zoological wonderment at such phenomena would not change the minds of the pack rat's detractors.

A pack rat midden in an abandoned cabin.

The beautiful furry rat has other unsavory habits -- like moving into human habitations and decorating with foliage, twigs, and anything else that strikes its fancy.

The middens become their toilets, glued together with urine and feces, and in due course the reeking mass solidifies, crystallizes, and becomes amberat, which acquires a resinous bouquet, and in fact was once mistaken for Native American peanut brittle by a gang of starving 49ers.

The pack rat however has redeeming qualities beyond its good looks and silky Chinchilla coat.

Scientists now know that this dirty filthy rat is an environmental historian.

Countless generations of pack rats have been contributing to some middens for at least the past 25,000 years.

These paleo-middens are monumental edifices hidden in rocky canyons and caves, and they contain a treasure trove on data on environmental change and its consequences on body size as an adaptation to heat dissipation.

The biologists quickly realized that fecal pellets in paleo-middens were not all the same size, and used Carbon 14 dating to assign ages to feces and associated plant parts.

They validated the relationship between pellet size and body size by examining several species of wood rats, and they did other tests to verify their findings.

Guess what?  Pack rats that lived 20,000 years ago in the shadows of the glaciers were impressive hulks.  They are estimated to have weighed as much as 450 grams (roughly a pound).

They grew smaller as temperatures increased after the last glacial, and by the mid-Holocene, about 6000 years ago they were 20% smaller than their ancestors.

It paid to be big, and even today the bushy-tailed wood rat is the largest living species of its clan.

The old pack rat may have a few nasty habits, but it's still a princely looking rodent.   

"Where is it? The viagra doesn't seem to be working".

Reference

Smith, F.A., J.L. Betancourt, and J.H. Brown. 1995. Evolution of body size in the woodrat over the past 25,000 years of climate change. Science, Vol. 270:2012-2014. 

The secret cache

The secret cache, now stashed in a
chainsaw chain container. 

For the sake of the story, I'd like to say . . . "when Carl reached the rafters and tugged the black plastic bag, the truffles showered down with the force of a Montana hailstorm".

But it wasn't exactly so.

The garbage bag contained truffles alright, but they were tucked into the folds of two canvass cots intended for the codger and the redhead, who were about to arrive from California.

For the sake of the story I might also add that "Though we slept comfortably in our sleeping bags, those cots infused our slumber with a subtle but pleasing essence of shaved tartufi stewing in risotto."

But it wasn't exactly so. The truffles give off a mild odor, but the cabin smelled of lodgepole pine logs and fried steak.

Looks like several species.

I am tempted to say that "the delectable fungi were evidently the last will and testament of 'Old One-eye', the murderous Montana chickaree whose squirrelly chutzpah summoned his own demise.

But I'm not sure the sack of dried truffles was actually of his doing.

The chickaree isn't the only mycophagist  in our western forests. There is no shortage of truffle gourmets, including several species of chipmunks and the northern flying squirrel.

Biologists used to examine stomach contents to learn about food habits, but now they can identify truffle eaters by the spores in fecal pellets.

It's tedious work, but Carl could identify the maker of the secret cache with much less effort.

All he has to do is stuff a camera trap inside a black plastic bag with two canvass cots and hang it in the rafters of the shed.

If he's too busy I know an old codger who would be more than willing to give it a try.

Camtrapping Griffin Creek

Griffin Creek, Flathead County, Montana.

After a Montana breakfast (steak, eggs, and strong coffee), and a two-hour warm-up (sanding boards for Carl's log bath house), we are ready to hunt beaver on Griffin Creek.  

Griffin Creek isn't at all like the tumbling streams of the Sierra Nevada.

There are no noisy boulder gardens, logjams, or water ouzels, but it is just as wild.

We launch the canoe.

The creek meanders quietly but flows strongly, and soon we find ourselves trapped in a channel 8 to 12 feet below a vast willow-choked floodplain.

Here and there you can wade the shallows to mid-calf, but then the bottom drops off into a dark 12-foot pool.

We are two contented codgers, adrift in the current, basking in the grand ambience of wild Montana.

Carl fly fishes aft; I play with my new GoPro Hero2 at the stern.

This is cool. I feel like a frontiersmen.

Apparently Carl is on the same wavelength.

"Did I tell you a grizzly visits this area?"

"Oh, really?" says I.

I have a hunch where this is going. My friend is well-read in frontier history. I preempt his mischief.

"And didn't Hugh Glass get nailed in a patch of willows just like this place?"

The only shot of the beaver's tail was hazed
by moisture on the lens. 

"Yep", says Carl as he guides the canoe into a muddy beaver canal.

We paddle for 50 feet and belly to a stop in the mud.

"The dam is just ahead. We'll walk in, but don't run if you see a grizzly."

"Roight", says I with sarcastic British tone.

A minute later we are standing before a 4-foot beaver dam, deciding where to stake our cameras.

Carl settles for a set on the dam, and I decide on a set looking up the dam's spillway.

I am rummaging through my pack looking for a mount when Carl announces that he's finished.


"What, finished? I haven't even started."

In a few minutes I finish my set, and Carl kicks a few sticks out of the dam.

The spillway starts to gurgle. Raised in Montana, my friend knows a thing or two about beaver.

"That'll bring 'em in".

Such are my memories of wild Montana.

A day later the redhead, Fred, and I headed home to California.

Carl agreed to leave the cams out for a month and to mail them to me before he heads for home back east.

He emailed me a couple weeks later.

"Pulled the beaver cams today.  I was going to check on them and pull mine if the batteries were dead - which they were - but on the way in I saw human boot prints in the mud and got a little concerned so pulled both cameras. . . . 

"Wanna hear the good news? I'm sure you do! The old master once again blew away the student. You got dozens of good shots of Mr. Beaver going up and down the dam - some real close. I got a few lousy photos of beaver far off on the other side of the dam, then 200+ photos of waving grass and trees. Grrrrrrr!"

Wish I could take the credit, but Carl was just too trusting of his trail camera's PIR sensor.

Those motion detectors are suckers for hot air, and they've tricked me too many times. I set my cams for 24 hour detection only in cold weather or when the camera is in full shade.

Plus, I have a long way to go to match the beaver pictures taken by my fellow camera trappers on Camtrapper.com.

But the best part of camera trapping isn't always the pictures.

Timelapsing a stump

Dawn at the cabin, Flathead County, Montana.

A couple weeks ago I tried my hand at "timelapsing" the feeding frenzy at Carl and Ginger's cabin in western Montana. 

Ginger's dawn ritual includes stoking several stumps with black sunflower seed, and shortly thereafter the feeding frenzy begins.

I normally use the standard homebrew with passive infra-red sensor built into the controller, but this was a photo-op chock-full-o-squirrels, and Carl and I wanted to test two new set-ups. 

Two codgers setting the Canon Rebel with the Trailmaster 1500.

We rigged my Canon Rebel XTi with a Trailmaster 1500 active Infra-red sensor, and a highly accurate sensor it is.

The subject has to break the narrow active infra-red beam to trigger the camera, which means you can capture photos in a specific location and distance from the camera.

The downside it that it takes more time to set than a regular homebrew, but that's a small price to pay for a crisply focussed photo of Sasquatch, right?  

We also played with a Canon A630 that I had hacked using the Canon Hack Development Kit or CHDK.

With this camera we experimented with timelapse photography using intervals of 30 and 5 seconds. 

I should point out that you can create timelapse sequences with irregularly timed exposures using any trail camera if the subject rewards you with a pile of images over a relatively short span of time.

True timelapse however shutters pictures at regular pre-selected intervals using a controller programmed for timelapse, or in this case, a timelapse script for CHDK. 

When we compared the results, we found that . . . 

the Canon-Trailmaster set-up took very good pictures, but many opportunities were lost because of the narrow zone of the AIR sensor. In other words, it wasn't clicking away at one picture every 5 or even 30 seconds.

The Canon timelapse on the other hand generated a huge number of images, and so there was bound to be a few good ones showing diagnostic characters.
Thus we identified the chipmunk as the red-tailed chipmunk (Tamias ruficaudus) -- a new species for the codger.

Mountain chickadee

With the exception of Steller's jays, which were constantly flinching, the birds were not as bold as the rodents.









Here's a couple hours of stump dancing condensed to a couple minutes.