Sunday June 27, 2004

I spent yesterday morning taking out an old barbed wire stack yard--a storage area for hay within a pasture. The stack of hay is fenced in to prevent animals from using it before the winter season. For our purposes with the buffalo, we don’t need stack yards and do not wish to have the animals wander into them; so we remove the old wire and fence posts. Working alone, I have the relative quiet of the location among some cottonwood trees along the old river bottom, and the solitude (and/or isolation) to experience a little silence away from the demands of working with machinery and people. Even so, I was still working with a few hand tools and of course the uncontrollable barbed wire. Not my favorite, but the day was pleasant and I was perfectly at ease with the job, the end result of which is about a half pick-up load of hand rolled wire and a bunch of steel posts.

I finished about noon and came back up to the house where I met Emily Schwing, an intern from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota who is working here for the summer. She has been working as a ranch hand and doing some research of people long ago gone from both the deeded and leased areas of this ranch, the homesteaders and other landholders who have since sold out and moved away.

The real purpose for being where I was had little to do with the stack yard. That was just an excuse, I suppose, a reason to get a closer look at the natural habitat of the wildlife. The work gives me several hours of being in a single place, moving around the place several times in a not too hurried manner: unclipping and unstapling wires, rolling the wire, pulling and stacking posts and finally loading everything into the truck to haul it off.

While working, I listen to and watch birds: flickers, redheaded and hairy woodpeckers, sharp tailed grouse, and meadowlarks (I dislocated a half-grown one from its nest). I can observe antelope, deer and rabbits. There are reptiles: garter, green racers, rattlesnakes (although none on this trip) and bull snakes. There are cavities in the cottonwoods from which kestrels fledge their young and a pair of Cooper’s hawks whose nest I have not yet located. Then there is the flora within the confines of this roughly 30x25 yard area that has been essentially untouched since the stack yard was emptied no less than five years ago. So, the prairie sand weed, blue gramma, buffalo grass and snowberry has had a chance to dislocate the Japanese boume and cheat grass. Then it strikes me. The homesteaders too have been dislocated, perhaps not altogether accidentally, by the western prairie habitat for the most part better suited to a thoughtful stewardship of ranching rather than traditional, old-style European farming techniques.