For more great pictures of local wildlife check out Edmonton Land Trust.
It is 9 AM on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021. It is -38 degrees Celsius or -36.4 Fahrenheit here on the ranch. The wind is making it feel a lot colder than that.
I was up at 5:00. The light began to creep across the yard at 5:30. By then I had made my usual morning pick me up of very strong coffee, hot chocolate, raw oatmeal, and blackstrap molasses all mixed together. And I had geared up. I had put on my insulated coveralls, fur lined mukluks, wool toque, neck gaiter and leather gloves.
Then I took Butch for a walk. He had also been geared up in a wool coat, fur lined leather paw mittens, and the part he hates, a dog toque. We went around checking the waterers. They are all equipped with temperature sensors so I could have just looked on my smart phone and seen they were all fine. But I am old school.
It is a beautiful morning. Not a cloud in the sky. Butch I wandered from watering station to watering station and finally arrived back at the house at 8:00. We saw cattle and horses contentedly drinking, several barn cats, a family of skunks, and a great horned owl.
Truth be told this is one of my favorite times of year, deep winter. This is actually the first real winter day this year. We usually have had 20 days of -30 by this time. This year it has been very warm and very dry and this is the first -30 day.
The weather forecast says it will be like this for a full week. I am hoping for two weeks at least. This land, this soil, these plants, the flowers and trees, insects and animals have all evolved to survive the cold. Many have evolved to thrive in it. Not having the cold here messes with all the interlocking ecological cycles going on all around me.
Consider wasps and wild bees. If we don’t get that bone rattling cold too many wasps over winter. They attack bee colonies for their honey but also compete with solitary wild bees for resources. Not to mention they make late fall, one of the nicest times of year here, into what I call EpiPen season.
We live, each and every one of us, in a web. It is an interlocking web of cycles and feedback loops. Truthfully, as a Natural Historian I will freely confess there are many thinks about this web we do not understand. Among other things, we don’t know how to exist in that web without damaging it in ways we don’t fully comprehend but can see are very bad for the web.
Here is a puzzler for those metaphysically inclined. When I first decided to seriously commit to being a farmer and rancher there were more than 30 derelict or abandoned farms and ranches for sale in this part of Alberta. I only bid on this one. When people asked me why I wanted this land, the worst of all. I said, and boy did I get some funny looks, “I hear my ancestors calling”. That was the truth.
Ten years later a backhoe dug up the first artifact that tied my ancestors to this land. It dated from 4,000 years ago. There are three active digs planned here this summer.
Why did my ancestors come hundreds of miles across hostile territory to camp here? We have no idea. We just know they did it year after year for hundreds and hundreds of years. Why did it attract me so powerfully? I couldn’t really have heard my ancestors calling could I?
In any case this is where I feel at home. Where do you feel at home? Why?