Grazing Goats

Weather: Some rain yesterday and today.

Last rain: 2/23. Week’s low: 21 degrees F. Week’s high: 62 degrees F in the shade.

What’s green: Leaves on junipers, yuccas, and other evergreens, grape hyacinths, vinca, coral bell, blue flax, Mexican hat, and cheat grass. Hollyhock seedlings coming up. Pink evening primrose leaves beginning to green.

What’s turned red or purple: Sandbar willow and some rose branches; alfilerillo and coral beards tongue leaves

What’ turned brown or yellow: Weeping willow, arborvitae and some other evergreen leaves

Tasks: I worked outside for the first time last Sunday in an exposed area. I had a block path that had been taken over by a rose bush, and I wanted to reroute the blocks around the canes. The ground was damp and warm enough to be comfortable to handle.

Monday I continued the work, but hit frozen ground as soon as I got near the shadow of the garage. Perhaps coincidentally, I was working in the area where the rose that had dropped its leaves.

When I had problems with frozen ground last spring, I removed dirt to expose the iced area to the sun. The next day, I was able to work that area, and prepare another. This time, I removed dead rose leaves that were mulching the ground on Monday. Saturday, when I went back to work on the path, the surface was thawed enough to work a few feet.

Animal sightings: Three robins, a male and two females were in the drive Saturday morning, but didn’t stay long.

Weekly update: Longfellow wrote of the "forest primeval" in Evangeline. He was speaking of a world bereft of the French who had settled in Acadia.

Today the term refers to woodlands that haven’t been logged, and thus are called "old growth" to distinguish them from the second growth trees that returned after logging.

It carries Edenic connotations of land before the existence of human beings. Like the old-new growth terminology, it assumes a binary classification: self-perpetuating ecosystems that existed before Europeans and the managed forests of today.

What is missing from this view are all the variations in human contacts with trees that have existed for centuries. The problems of forest fires are recent, not part of the historic landscape. The solutions for preventing conflagrations may exist in those historic patterns.

In Portugal, officials recognized part of their problem was that people who maintained remote forests had left isolated villages for more comfortable lives with such amenities as indoor plumbing and electricity.

This summer the nation began reintroducing the goats that had fed on the underbrush, especially on steep slopes.

The problem was finding enough men to tend the animals. Shepherding is tedious work in isolated conditions.

In this country, the Reagan library imports hundreds of goats each year to clear vegetation around the facility. Of course, the other thing that saved the building from flames this summer was the paved parking lot, which acted as a firebreak.

The problems with using animals as tools in fire prevention go beyond the difficulties of finding enough goatherds. Many forest historians blame overgrazing for the destruction of woodlands in places like northern New Mexico. They can’t conceive of grazing as a solution. It’s rather like convincing people the way to prevent smallpox is to give them a small dose of the disease.

More critical is the question of scale. Overgrazing in Rio Arribe county occurred when businessmen turned one part of Spanish agrarian life into an industry, and put more animals on the land than the vegetation could support. A predictable Malthusian catastrophe ensued.

It would be difficult to manage a grazing program in today’s political environment. One assumes, if enough money was involved, entrepreneurs would appear but then would lobby for more access than forest managers were willing to give.

It’s easier to avoid political pressure from wealthy campaign contributors than it is to confront Malthusian constraints, and so the possible becomes the unthinkable. The Reagan library could act because it was on private land.

Notes on photographs: All taken 22 February 2020.
1. Cheat grass (Bromus tectorum) coming up within a clump of buffalo grass (Buchloe dactyloides).

2. New growth on a hollyhock (Alcea rosea).

3. The nearly completed reroute of a path by a rose bush.

End notes:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Evangeline. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1847.

Audrey McNamara. "New Southern California Blaze Is ‘Encircling’ Reagan Library." Daily Beast website. 30 October 2019.

Raphael Minder. "Scorched Portugal Turns to the Goat as a Low-Cost Firefighter." The New York Times website. 17 August 2019.

No More Water, It’s the Fire Next Time

Weather: It’s silly to say Friday was the coldest day of the year and decade, when each was only three days old at the time. However, -3 was as cold as I remember here, certainly the coldest since I had an outdoor thermometer.

The day after New Year’s it snowed. Because the temperatures only rose above freezing for a few hours, it lingered. The frigid temperature came the day after the snow when nothing had melted into humidity and no clouds existed to hold in what little heat was generated.

That morning, around 8:45, the air was so cold the moisture condensed on the bare twigs of trees into frost. This wasn’t a snowfall, which lays flat, even when piled in a jumble of large flakes. Each droplet of water was turned into a separate flake that stood erect on the boughs, turning everything into a classic winter scene.

Last snow: 1/2. Week’s low: -3 degrees F. Week’s high: 51 degrees F in the shade.

What’s green: Everything is under snow.

Tasks: I’ve begun the annual task of creating templates for the new year’s record keeping. I begin with the checkbook, then move on to plant records. Each year I’m forced to work around whatever changes Microsoft introduced during the year into my database software. If my computer was capable of responding to my voice commands, it probably would have shut itself down and refused to come back up.

Animal sightings: No animal tracks in the snow yet.

Weekly update: I had a stitch in my side Monday evening, a sharp cramp on the left side of my chest. Of course, one immediately wonders if one should get to the emergency room. The location didn’t seem right, so I took an aspirin and rubbed an herbal ointment over the area. Within an hour, everything was relaxed.

By chance, I had an appointment for a message the next morning. After the therapist found the offended intercostal muscle and asked the usual questions, he said one function of those muscles was to expand the space between the ribs when the lungs needed more space to operate.

That made sense to a mind that quickly slipped from scientific fact to speculation.

Earlier in 2019, I had replaced my undergarments because the elastic had gotten so tight that it made it difficult to breathe. I assumed I had just added a layer of fat there, to match the other layers that were replacing muscles. Somehow, I get fatter without gaining weight as I age.

In the past month or so I started having problems again. It didn’t make sense that I had added that many extra cells in so short a time. Besides, I had no problems in the morning. I only had to shed in the late afternoon and early evening, often when I was doing my nightly hour of walking.

Tuesday I reasoned the problem wasn’t me, but bad air that was causing my lungs to work harder for air. The question was: why was the air worse this year?

I talked to a man in line at the post office before Christmas who said he hoped it would snow, because there was so much pollen in the air that it needed to be cleared. My therapist said he’d been suffering and would blame his juniper allergy, only he knew it was the wrong time of the year. He also estimated some 90% of the people he saw were complaining of some kind of respiratory problem.

A sudden flash of enlightenment. That morning I’d seen a news story about the 4,000 people trapped on a beach in Australia who were driven there by wildfires.

Those fires have been raging since October, which was before I started having problems with elastic encircling my rib cage.

Lord knows what’s in the air. The heat is so intense in Australia, it’s creating its own weather systems. Those storms and fire tornadoes are localized. [1]

All I know is that it is burning scrub and grasslands, not forests. I don’t know if any of those plants are like Russian thistles and contain noxious chemicals that protect them from predators. [2] Many of the local animals have been incinerated [3] and sucked into the atmosphere’s dust.

It’s easy to get a false sense of security in this country. The common weather maps only show the United States. They don’t include the oceans were storms begin, except during hurricanes. Then, it’s usually the Atlantic.

Last week I considered the possibility our recent storms were related to one that affected the Philippines about the time I was talking to that man in the post office about the possibility of our getting snow.

One wonders how something so far away can reach us here in the Española valley. In 1883, a volcano in Indonesia’s Sundra straight erupted. Krakatoa sent a sulfur-rich cloud into the atmosphere that effected the ability of people everywhere on the planet to see the sun for five years. [4]

The winter of 1887–1888 was so severe it wiped out the open range cattle industry on the great plains, and ended the era of the cowboy and drives along the great trails to Kansas railheads in places like Abilene and Dodge. [5]

Scientists have problems moving from hypothesis to fact because the weather is not a simple phenomenon. They need to factor out concurring events to establish clear causality. And, of course, the mere presence of alternative events provides the evidence used by their critics to discredit their work.

With Krakatoa, the weather turned cold before the eruption, and the weather was warm immediately after. Record rains were recorded in Los Angeles. [6] Then the cold set in, and lasted until 1888, with the most severe storm occurring in mid-January.

Weather forecasting was then in the portfolio of the army. Thomas Woodruff issued no warnings for the January 1888 blizzard. Climatic data collection was in its infancy. Possible omens existed, but were outside the scope of his instructions. David Laskin concluded his

"failure, if one can speak of human failure in the face of a storm of this force and scale, is that he lacked imagination. A common failing in a person trained and drilled all his adult life in military discipline."

No imagination is as bad as too much. When one removes all the competing theories, one is still left with facts that need explaining: the death of cattle on the Great Plains, the fires in Australia, and people’s breathing problems this winter. They exist, whether of not the connecting tissues of scientific explanation can be established.

Notes on photographs:
1. Frost on flowering crab apple, 3 January 2013.
2. Frost on Stella sweet cherry (front) and globe willow (back), 3 January 2013.
3. Snow on Stella sweet cherry, 23 February 2019.

End notes:
1. Reuters. "Australia Bushfires Are Creating Their Own Weather Systems." Posted by Huffington Post. 4 January 2020.

2. Burning Russian thistles (Salsola pestifer) were discussed in the post for 19 December 2010.

3. Sophie Lewis. "Australian Wildfires May Have Killed Half a Billion Animals." CBS News website. 2 January 2020.

4. Wikipedia. "1883 Eruption of Krakatoa."
5. "Open Range." Encyclopædia Britannica website. 20 July 1998.
6. Wikipedia.

7. David Laskin. The Children’s Blizzard. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Quoted by "With a Bang: Not a Whimper: The Winter of 1887-1888." Minnesota. Department of Natural Resources website. 10.

Fire and Ice

Weather: The difference between morning temperatures below 20 degrees F and afternoons when it’s possible to work outdoors in the sun is the difference between the pessimist and the optimist. The Weather Bureau falls in the second group when it says there was a warming trend this past week.

Last useful snow: 10/27. Week’s low: 14 degrees F. Week’s high: 62 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Cholla cactus; leaves on privet, juniper and other evergreens, Japanese honeysuckle, yuccas, red hot poker, chives, grape hyacinth, bouncing Bess, pinks, pink evening primroses, golden spur columbine, snapdragons, blue flax, green leaf five eyes, hollyhock, winecup mallow, Queen Anne’s lace, anthemis, yarrow, purple aster, dandelions, June, needle, and cheat grass

What’s still gray or gray-green: Leaves on Apache plume, cliff rose, fernbush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, catmint

Tasks: I continued cleaning debris from around some rose bushes. The limiting condition wasn’t the weather, but my socks. I wanted to wear wool ones, but they collect bits of weeds and grass. It can take 15 minutes to clean them when I come in.

I found some rubber boots that came over the ankle. However, they only kept out the seeds when I made sure my sweatpants’ bottoms stayed outside the boots. When the elastic slipped inside, the cotton acted as a conduit directing the organic bits onto my socks.

I was cautious when I ordered them. Years ago I used rubber galoshes for yard work. They were a bit too low cut, but the ground was rarely dry. Water from earlier rains, the dew, or my watering always created wet spots.

The last time I ordered a pair, I discovered they had been gentrified. Instead of plain rubber, the manufacturer had put in a fabric insole that not only collected seeds but stood them erect. I couldn’t remove the seeds and I couldn’t remove the insole. I could put the rubbers in the trash.

I wondered why the maker thought everything had to fit the needs of the Martha Stewarts of the world who are always immaculately groomed in the yard and stress how one needn’t be discomforted by work. The boot maker had not so such illusions about its market.

Animal sightings: Small birds

Weekly update: This week I finally got rid of the last bag of peaches. It took two months to get the harvest hauled away.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t burn anything because I had put the bags near the burn pile. It was the only gravel place that was out of the way.

That didn’t mean the burn pile remained static. I spent the fall cutting dead wood from trees and shrubs, and adding it to the heap.

Now I could burn. There were only two prerequisites: a still day and running water. The still time was a challenge in the summer. Gentle breezes always came up in late morning as soon as the air warmed. It didn’t have to be a wind to make a fire dangerous. I always burned very early in the day.

Running water wasn’t a problem. I turned the garden hose on low and held it in one hand as I watched the fire. Only rarely have I needed to turn water on a stray ember that landed in the grass.

This past week, every day was still, but the mornings were all below freezing.

I decided it would be safer if I used a hose connected to the house, rather than to the frost-free hydrant. The hose I usually used was threaded through grasses in the shadow of the garage.

At about 10 am yesterday, I turned on the hose that was connected to the house. At first nothing happened, then shards of ice came out in 3" to 4" sections. That hose was laying on tiles on the east side of the house.

Next I connected the hose that was laying on the back porch. Little water came through because of kinks. Since it was cold, I feared, if I tried to unkink it, the hose would crack. Only slowly was I able to flatten the narrowest section.

Finally, I connected the hose that reached the burn pile. It had been coiled on gravel near the globe willow. When I turned it on, more ice came out. The pieces were about 3/8" in diameter, much thinner than the supposed 5/8" diameter of the hose. This was water that didn’t drain, but stayed on the bottom. However, the ice pieces were round like the hose, not flat.

Once I had a reliable source of running water, I stuck a small piece of paper in the pile on the east side and lit it with a match. The flames worked out from the ignition point, usually advancing under the flames so the smoke pointed east. There was little smoke. What there was didn’t bother me.

The air was cold, which may have limited the temperature of the fire. It certainly was too hot to approach. The twigs turned white, but kept their shape. I suppose if I had let them smolder they would eventually have turned to ashes. They look like so many snakes in a ghostly pyre. Their diameter wasn’t that different from the ice.

When the flames had died from the last leaves and twigs, I turned the hose on softly. In some places, the remains hissed when the water hit them, and it others they did not—they had already cooled. The white remains turned black.

Smoke rose, or rather smoke and steam, and it pointed west. It wasn’t long before my stomach began to complain about the fumes.

The peach branch that came down in late May from the weight of the fruit still hadn’t disappeared. It’s been fired six times now. However, it has gotten much smaller.

This afternoon I took the small broom rake and swept up the bits of wood that hadn’t burned and directed them to the peach branch. Then, I added today’s contribution to the next burn pile. The process never ends.

Notes on photographs: Taken 16 November 2019.

Damp Leaves Don’t Burn

Weather: I wasn’t able to work outside yesterday because smoke was bothering me. I checked my blood oxygen level to make sure I wasn’t getting paranoid, and found it was down to 93. 95 is normal, and I usually register 96. Ten minutes after I put a mask on in the house, it was up to 94.

The problem with chemicals and smoke, either the ones used to dowse a fire or the ones to ignite one, is they don’t just evaporate. They get mixed in the dust on the forest floor. Once, they get thoroughly dry strong winds pick up the dust.

I had the same kind of breathing problems on Monday. This time there had been some wind, that I assume brought debris from the caldera fire site.

Last useful rain: 9/16. Week’s low: 41 degrees F. Week’s high: 86 degrees F in the shade.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red-tipped yuccas, Russian sage, buddleia, bird of paradise, roses of Sharon, datura, chrysanthemums, Maximilian sunflowers

What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Buffalo gourd, bindweed, green leaf five eyes, alfalfa, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow evening primrose, pigweed, Russian thistle, broom snakeweed, Hopi tea, native sunflowers, áñil del muerto, wild lettuce, horseweed, goldenrod, Tahoka daisies, golden hairy, heath and purple asters, Nebraska sedge, quack grass, seven-weeks, side oats and black gramas

What’s blooming in my yard: Betty Prior and miniature roses, yellow potentilla, garlic chives, calamintha, lead plant, winecup mallow, large-flowered soapwort, David phlox peaked, perennial four o’clock, Silver King artemesia, African marigolds, chocolate flower, plains coreopsis, anthemis, bachelor buttons, white Sensation cosmos

Bedding Plants: Wax begonia, pansies, nicotiana, snapdragons

What’s Coming Up: Golden spur columbine seedlings are up everywhere. Plants I cut to the ground two weeks ago have already come back with the encouragement of the high temperatures and humidity.

Tasks: The county cut vegetation along the shoulder this week.

Most of the peaches have fallen, though the ones at the top of the main tree continue to ripen during the day and drop after I’ve cleaned the area in the morning.

I ordered some iris that I thought would be shipped in October. They arrived August 31, when afternoon temperature were in low 90s. Temperatures finally cooled on Thursday, and I spent that day and Friday planting rhizomes. I watered them in, and now, last night and today we’ve gotten enough real rain that they may be able to settle.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, chickadees, magpie, geckos, toads, earth worms, bumble and small bees, heard crickets, grasshoppers, hornets, small ants

Weekly update: It may have been in the late 1960s, when I was in graduate school, that I first heard forestry experts had decided fire suppression was bad. They argued fire was a tool used by nature to maintain healthy stands of trees.

I had no reason to question what I heard until this summer. The promos for converting small fires into controlled burns said the natural cycle for fire was one every seven to fifteen years. [1] I’ve lived here twenty years. If I applied a literal reading of their argument, everything should have burned at least once since I’ve been here. Instead, we’ve only had serious spring fires caused by humans or power lines.

Following the pattern of science defined by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, forestry experts have sought an explanation for why their theory didn’t match reality and the fire regime didn’t reassert itself after they stopped putting out fires. They decided the problem was forest floors had become too cluttered from lack of fire, and no longer were able to burn naturally. That’s the rationale for controlled burns.

While the forest service was inducing fires this summer, I was cleaning debris from under some trees that had been neglected. Under the cottonwood, I only found leaves and remains of winterfat that had died when the cottonwood blocked their sun and water.

The Russian olive was a smaller tree. I found remains of grass that died when it first started growing. Inside the grass clumps I often found broom snakeweed whose seed had been stopped by the grass, then nourished by it. Over the dead snakeweed stems, I found winterfat that had started to grow in the ground protected by the snakeweed. Their limbs had gotten leggy or died as the olive canopy expanded and blocked their access to sun and rain.

It was the kind of woody mess the Forest Service deplored. It also had enough layers of wood with some air between to make them burnable, if they could be ignited.

Natural succession under a tree doesn’t necessarily follow the script of foresters. One reason they were reburning a burn scar near Taos was the wrong things had returned. Gambel oak thickets were growing instead of the desired aspens. [2] I might have preferred bunch grasses when I removed winterfat a year ago, but I got purple asters instead.

As I cleaned out debris and clipped dead wood, I put the woody things into a wheel barrow and the rest into plastic bags. The reason was simple: stiff twigs tore the bags.

Early in the season I put the dead wood around the peach and Siberian pea branches that had come down. Each time I set the pile on fire, the small wood disappeared and the bigger limbs charred and dried. It took three tries for the larger wood to ignite and become hot enough to burn. In a sense, this followed the foresters’ model for fire behavior in woodlands: fire consumed the small wood and left the healthy trees.

After working under the cottonwood, I had so many bags of leaves it would have taken a month to get rid of them with the restraints imposed by our trash company. I was skeptical the leaves would burn, but I thought it was worth a try.

The leaves and grass got compacted in the bags, then it rained on them. While the plastic kept out most of the water, moisture crept in as it does.

The middle of August I dumped the bags around another peach limb that had come down. They wouldn’t ignite. I usually can start a fire by using a match on a single piece of paper stuck into the twigs. I finally had to put a piece of cardboard over the leaves and start the fire under it for the fire to begin.

Then, the leaves and grass didn’t actually burn like the woody parts of shrubs and trees. They smoldered, and turned black. I had a deep pile of black debris, instead of a thin layer of thin ash when I was done, and the peach limb hadn’t dried. The fire never got that hot.

The Amole fire near Taos was started by lightening on September 2, and had grown to four acres by September 4. [3] The fire behavior was described as "creeping," which is exactly what I had seen happen in my yard when an ember landed in green grass. The blades would dry and burn, and maybe the blades closest to them would then ignite. But, the fire died out when it reached the space that separates bunch grasses.

That the Amole fire did no more than creep calls into question the idea that natural fires caused by lightening maintained the forest floor. It would have been a slow process to build up enough heat to ignite the dead, woody undergrowth that would then burn like the dead twigs in my burn piles.

The Forest Service’s answer was to artificially expand the fire. It cut and chipped trees around the perimeter of their proposed burn area, and added them to the fuel. Then they used "hand" and "aerial" ignition. One assumes that involved chemicals, and not matches put to tinder and kindling.

Fires started by lightening are slowed by that fact lightening usually is accompanied by rain. The Forest Service succeed in getting the Amole fire up to 1,917 acres by last Saturday, but still had a problem. Its spokesperson wrote:

"The fire carried well in the mixed conifer stands on south and west facing slopes. However, on the north and east facing slopes the fuels were not as receptive to burning due to recent rains. Green pockets of unburned fuels remain and an attempt will be made to burn these areas today weather permitting." [4]

That final attempt to finish the burn coincided with movement of water vapor from Kiki and other disturbances in the Pacific off the coast of México. I’m guessing the rising smoke mixed with the moisture and was trapped by it, then fell in the night when temperatures cooled. All I know is that, while I was miserable Sunday morning, the Forest Service was declaring victory. [5]

Notes on photographs: All photographs taken 15 September 2019.
1. African marigolds (Tagetes erecta) are the only annual that has bloomed this year. The odd leaf is from a corn plant behind the marigolds.

2. Purple asters (Symphyotrichum ascendens) that came back after I cut down a winterfat (Eurotia lanata) a year before.

3. June grass (Koeleria cristata) grows under the peach tree, where it seems to need water more than sun. It got trampled while I was picking fruit, much like it would have been if large animals had come through.

End notes:
1. SFNFPIO. "Cueva Fire on Coyote Ranger District, SFNF." New Mexico Fire Information website. 3 August 2019. "Historically, low-intensity wildfires burned through southwestern dry conifer forests like the SFNF every seven to 15 years as part of a natural cycle that removed leaf litter, eradicated disease and thinned the understory, making room for new growth and improving habitat for wildlife." SFNF is the Santa Fe National Forest.

2. cnfpio. "Smoke Expected to Increase on Amole Fire." New Mexico Fire Information website. 12 September 2019.

3. cnfpio. "Lightning-Caused Amole Fire to Aid in Forest Restoration." New Mexico Fire Information website. 4 September 2019.

4. cnfpio. "Firing Operations Near Completion on Amole Fire." New Mexico Fire Information website. 14 September 2019.

5. cnfpio. "Amole Fire Final Update." New Mexico Fire Information website. 15 September 2019.