Cocoposts

Project Pasture

Conservation easement establishment is progressing and the tree project is gearing up. 
I only wish I’d started ten years ago. 

 

The Victorian Hotel

 

Sadie:  I love them. Old places but especially old big richly storied hotels in western towns. 

Cat:  I worked at an old resort near Denver for a summer. It was memorable but not endearing. I can smell it now - mold and dust. Not entirely unpleasant, or among the least unpleasant things I recall. The work was grueling. It consisted of dragging an old vacuum cleaner to hillside cabins and cleaning all day after serving breakfast, then cleaning ourselves up to serve dinner. We slept in a bunk room under the porch with cheap polyester blankets, no insulation and touching wiring. We got one day off a week, alone, when I would drive to Denver in a borrowed VW Beetle to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

S: It was pretty - that canyon and the trees and the grand old three-story tower. We rattled the bones of that building at that square dance in the lobby. The whole place was alive. Give me an old hotel like that over a new one any day.

C:  Sure, if you like the smell of rotting wood and body odor. The worst place I ever stayed was an old “Victorian” in Texas. Historic, they said. Charming, they said. There were bugs. It was cold. It was windy. The windows whistled and the closest decent restaurant was thirty miles away so we ate peanut butter on stale bread and had bad coffee under dusty stuffed dead things in the morning. 

S: I remember that place. I recommended it to you. The taxidermy display in the dining room was impressive. 

C: There was a grizzly bear behind the table and a mountain lion above it. It felt like I was the meal. And it wasn’t cheap. I’d prefer a new La Quinta or Embassy Suites to fancy crown molding and a piano player in a derby.

S: Dull and anonymous.

C: Just what a hotel should be. I don’t want character. I want to sleep.

Orange

Sky, Balloon, Coyote, Dog

Cloud Laundry

White puffs move and gather

light goose down feathers

shaken from the blue sky sheet

Sandhills on the Rio

Gravestone

 
San Lorenzo Mission Cemetery, Polvadera, NM

Mice Are Back

It’s like I thought if I killed two or three … or eight they'd get the message. But NOOO. They know “No cat,” and have ventured in again - into the underspace where they make nightly forays onto the counters and into the cabinets. They’re safe from Mr. Coyote and his cousins who thrive, polishing off the last roaming cats, hens and pheasant in the neighborhood.

Last night I heard the snap. But the sound of flopping went on too long and in the morning I saw the poor thing firmly snapped in half and very much alive. And angry. About the only thing worse than taking a dead mouse out of a trap is taking a mad mouse out of a trap. Maimed mad mouse.

I suspect them of some form of coordinated vengeance now. 

 

 

Birders at Coronado Historic Site

…which would more accurately be called a prehistoric site are encouraged to look for a variety of species including wild turkeys that inhabit the bosque.

New Mexico Game and Fish just announced they’re proposing to delist the rarest turkey species existing in the state today - Gould’s wild turkey. (Article in Current Arghh) Because. Reasons.

Also read about how the trump cultist down there has introduced legislation to “protect” the oil and gas industry from species conservation.

Most of the photos of turkeys in New Mexico online are people posing with dead ones.

Game and Fish has more on protecting, and not, Gould's and other turkey types here.

 

 

Ancient Pet Turkeys

My idea of what ancient pueblo villages looked like did not include so many birds.

The excellent lecture series by Archaeology Southwest on Avian Archaeology is ongoing and past talks are up on their YouTube channel. The next on Turkey feather blankets will include blanket maker Mary Weahkee who replicates them using ancient techniques. The research Cyler Conrad presented is here. Upcoming topics include birds of Chaco Canyon, turkey burials, depiction on pottery and macaw and parrot keeping.

(Image from Archaeology Southwest)

The widespread evidence of domestic turkey management by ancient people indicates that they were managed in different ways and kept for different purposes. They were tethered, penned, housed in converted room blocks, and allowed to free range. Every part of them was used - eggs, feathers, bones. Maybe they provided pest control.  Maybe they provided companionship.

Judging affection for animals from the archaeological record is impossible, right?  But it's clear turkeys were valued very highly and there seems to be little evidence that they were raised as a primary food source. They were more valuable, for whatever reasons, alive.

There's a broken wing splint artifact in a display case at the Coronado Historic Site. I saw it years ago and think about it frequently. It's not the only example that's been found. The turkey's wing was broken, reset and healed. You don't do that to just any old bird you want to eat and make flutes out of.    

 

 

Log March 26

Status:

Decided to organize the shed but got lost

in old ribbons and horse memories

I tacked them to the wall

and tucked them into my heart.