Spring on the Old Farm

April 10--the day in 1994 my Dear Old Dad, or DOD for short, finally got free of his lymphoma-wracked earthly body and took off to fly with the hawks (and hurl a few down at me). Every year, I try to do something life-affirming on that day, something that he'd enjoy. Often it's potting up the bonsais, or planting the peas, turning some rows in the garden, or poking around an old farmstead. How about that last one? Let's go to the Becker farm!

It's not every day you see falcate orangetips mating. These jittery little bugs are among my favorite first butterflies of spring, right in there with the (increasingly scarce) mourning cloak and much more common spring azure. I thrill to the incandescent satsuma orange of their wingtips, and will them to settle, which they virtually never do.

But this trio was preoccupied and let me get close with my little phone camera. Out of focus, but it gives you that orange flash. Two males are trying to mate with the same female.

She's not having it, though, and wants to hang with just one.

Male left, female right (larger abdomen).

While they're engrossed, I get to appreciate the checkered border of those lovely fairy wings. 

Like a race flag! No wonder they never sit still unless en flagrante delicto.

And the delicately marbled undersides! Who knew? Wow, what a treat. Thank you for making more FAOT's.

Falcate orangetips, or FAOT's as I write in my notes, using a shorthand adapted from bird bander lingo, use the early cresses and rockets (mustards) as their broodplants. You'll see them flying low and bouncily along meadow borders and roadsides. 

The other one out early around here is the cabbage white. I snuck up on this one, hoping it would be a West Virginia white, but the dark patch on the wingtip and little dots on the forewing say cabbage.

This cabbage white is feeding on deadnettle, a creeping Eurasian plant that turns fallow bean and cornfields into a haze of purple this time of year. It's a lovely phenomenon from a bad weed. Its major virtue is that, like all mints, it's pretty easy to pull up.

It was a dreary gray day in what seems like an endless string of them, but I knew that would make the forsythia positively sing, so I decided to head up to the Becker farm to see that.

We passed the Toothless Lady. You may remember the white woman's slip that somehow got caught on a nail after a windstorm. I had plans to get it down and try it on. Alas.

When it finally slipped down low enough that I was able to reach it with a long stick, it was so thoroughly tangled around several nails that I had little hope of getting it. I tried, but it was anchored there for the ages. 

The wind has torn and tattered it until it's no more than a bunch of bandages, hardly fit to wrap a mummy. There will be no ghost slip selfies from me!

I still find it beautiful, and enjoy photographing it in changing light.

I could be wrong, but that warm russet color in the wood might indicate that The Toothless Lady was built of Osage orange. I have it on good authority that her attendant, a small toolshed to the south, is built of that wood. And the protected parts of it are that same beautiful orange color. For that alone, she should be an historic treasure. Not too many Osage oranges around that are big enough to saw into lumber any more. That, and the fact that I love her so. I hereby propose Historic Treasure status for many tumbledown buildings and trees on my routes. Things Zick Loves. Thou Shalt Not Cut or Destroy.

Out the back of the same barn, there is a trail of old clothes stringing down the poison ivy vines. This puzzled me momentarily, until by scanning carefully with binoculars I figured out that they issue from a squirrel's nest at the eave.  That squirrel's been busy, raiding the boxes I would love to look through, but will never be able to reach, thanks to the barn's utterly rotted floors. I am imagining the vintage clothing, chewed through by mice, sorted by squirrels, and crapped upon by 'coons.

Their colors remind me of the Buddhist prayer flags that fly in the Himalayas, starting out red, yellow, blue and white, then fading to gentle pastels.

Whipple Prayer Flags. Squirrel prayers.

The Toothless Lady continues to delight me in all the oddest and best ways. I fervently hope I am not around when she's finally torn down.  There would be rending of garments and tearing of hair.

We forged on to the farmstead.

I'm not sure what colors Chet can see, but he sure gave the big forsythia a long look. I was interested to see that the farm's caretakers, while letting the house slowly deliquesce in a squirrelly mess, decided to trim the drooping wands off the bottom of one of the forsythias this winter. Chet used to crawl under the cave they made to cool down on hot summer days. Sometimes I'd throw a cup of cool well water over his back before he flopped down. 

I walked a circle around the farmhouse, looking for flowers growing unseen. It was too early for the wild red columbine someone transplanted there years ago, but I did find a bit of hawk down caught on a grass tip and blowing in the crazy April wind. 

A little calling card from DOD. I'd bet it was redtail down, being sparkly white like that.

Then I went to see the pheasant-eye narcissus that are growing a little down over the hill. A telephone pole always spoils my composition, but I shoot anyway.

Spirea, or bridal wreath, was just going crazy in the hedge.

Chet went out into the lawn to graze like a miniature Angus x Hereford. Standing there like a cow.

Spirea makes a rather loose, messy hedge, but oh! is it beautiful in spring.

And back of the house, an old peach was blooming as it fell. Here's to blooming as you fall.

On our way home, we stopped to examine a sofa someone had left on the corner. Why would you do this? Hoping someone will like it well enough to lug it home with them? Not wanting to pay dump fees? 

I'll be curious to see if it's still there, three days later (I don't get out much).
Update: Someone hauled it away! Amazeballs.

We stopped to greet the new cattle at the Harris farm. This mama looked at me like I was dropped from Venus. That's how I knew she'd never lived here. That, and I didn't recognize her.  She has a very nice angel on her chest.

Her fat little girlcalf (look at that potchy brisket! That quadruple calf-chin!) looks as much like a sheep as any calf I've ever seen. Slitty eyes. So, so fat. Mama must make good milk. I'll be anxious to see the regular crowd come back from their winter quarters. I miss them. I heard a rumor that Bully will be sold, or perhaps already has. I hope it's not true. I'd miss his marcelled hair and his white-ringed ears, and the way he would oooof at me when I came up to the fence, then let me touch his always-wet pebbled leather nose. I'm still hoping to see him this spring.

Bully, July 2015

And of course I'm anxious to see Spotify and see if her new calf has The Triangle. They always make my day. 

These are the rhythms of rural life, the growings up, the fallings down and the yearly coming around.
Happy Free Spirit Day, DOD.

And What Kills the Killer?

If these fitness trackers you wear like a lojack do anything, it's get us out, even when the sky weeps and the chill goes to your bones. I'm thankful for that, though I'm having a heck of a time reaching my daily quota (10,000 steps) when trying to get over a cold. In decent weather, I fly past that picayune mark  every day. 

We went out for a slog through the shredded wheat meadows, trying to keep the dog clean by walking on grass. (I'd just washed him after a muddy run down Dean's Fork). 

It was a day without much visual promise. And those are the kind of days you want to watch out for.

We were coming up the middle path in our field when we all saw this thing lying in the middle of it.

It had been rained on, but by the size and content it seemed to be an owl pellet, a big one.

I started speaking in tongues, the gibberish my family is used to hearing when we've found something BIG. Do you see what I see? I was jabbering in something other than English.

That's the entire foot of a raptor.  In the pellet of an owl. I know it's a pellet because there's very little odor and the bolus is made up entirely of bone and a few digested feathers. It's pretty fresh and quite cohesive. If this were a coywolf dropping, which by its size it'd have to be, there would be colored fecal matter acting as a binder, obscuring the bone fragments, and stinkin' up the place. Plus, I can't see a coyote crunching a raptor's foot down whole. What mammal would swallow talons like that? I mean, besides a Labrador retriever? that was for Floridacracker.

My mind was jumping all over the place. Though I had already figured out whose pellet it was, I was mos def going to figure out whose foot it was. I tried to imagine any owl gagging down the entire needle-taloned foot of a raptor. 

The only owl I could see being able to do that with any aplomb is a great horned. Nope, just can't see a doe-eyed barred owl gagging down a raptor's foot. 

My first thought was that it might be a barred owl's foot, since great horneds are known to prey on all smaller owls. It's a tough world out there. 

By the time we made it back to the house, I'd been turning that pellet over in my hand, and I'd figured out that this was not an owl's foot. How? 

These. These are two rows of scutes, or scales, that run down the tarso-metatarsus (the visible yellow part of the leg) of a hawk. Owls have feathered tarso-metatarsae. The part you can see is covered with fine hairlike feathers. What few scutes they show are all on the foot proper. The exceptions are some of the fishing owls, but they're in Africa, not here. The possible owls here in a meadowy-wooded part southeast Ohio are great horned, barred, screech and saw-whet, and they all have feathered shanks. 

So it's a scaly-legged hawk, with rather long toes. Bird-catching toes.

Bill asked, "You think it could be a Cooper's?"

Synchronicity being the word of the day (remember I'd just photographed that blazing beauty in the birch an hour earlier), I replied, "I think you've got it."

If this was a Coop's foot, it was a big Coop, a female. Just a hunch. I'd have to make some measurements to confirm it.

I thought about how the kill would have been made. The great horned owl, detecting a slight movement or sound from the Cooper's hawk, who was perhaps sleeping tucked into the Virginia pines on our oil well road. Owl flying soundlessly closer. Hearing her breathe, hearing her settle her feathers. Planning its kill. Coming in from behind, strong talons closing around the hawk's skull. Bringing her to the ground, severing her spinal cord with a single nip. The Coop may never have known what took her. I hope she didn't. For what else could kill a big strapping female Cooper's hawk? And how else to do it, but by surprise, in the night? She who surprised songbirds all her life, now facing the last great mystery, and ending up in pieces in an owl's pellet. Egad. I'm glad I sleep in a bed, in a room, in a house, under blankets.

This, amazingly enough, is not the best thing I've ever pulled out of a great horned owl pellet. On the shore of Selden Cove, Connecticut, under  huge hemlocks now long dead at the sucking mouthparts of wooly adelgids, I found the carving block of a great horned owl. And there I found a pellet that had the entire, intact skull and hard beak of a belted kingfisher. Swallow THAT. Great horned owls are the honey badgers of the sky. Great horned owl don't care. She's hungry.

Because I am a Science Chimp, and have been properly permitted to make and store specimens salvaged from window and road kills for most of my life, I happened to have on hand a specimen of Cooper's hawk, and I remembered that it was a large immature female. 

I called out to the kids, "Come down here by the washing machine and I'll give you a lesson in bird foot ID."  Phoebe replied, "Let me tweet that first, and I'll come down." Which made me laugh. She has made a Twitter account called (pardon me) @ShitZickSays

which has a rather intermittent feed, since I'm not the one tweeting away. I have no power there. But I do find it amusing, to have it revealed occasionally what my kids find amusing about me.

I pulled out my Cooper's hawk skin.  Laid the pellet next to it. Talon size looked real good. The big talon you can see in the pellet, that still has its outer sheath, is the inner front toe of the bird's left foot. The one you're seeing clearly on the skin in my hand. That's the killing toe.

Started dissecting the pellet. It smelled, disgustingly and surprisingly, of turkey. Turkey! And Phoebe agreed, recoiling, her nose wrinkling. This gory remnant should not smell like something I eat. I was so glad we'd finally finished the last of the leftover turkey soup from New Year's. I think it's going to be a good solid year before I want to smell turkey again.  Couldn't get it off my fingers...I remember my specimen prep days...yep. That clinging smell. Bleh!

photo by Phoebe Thompson

Back to science. Measured the talons, just to be sure.

photo by Phoebe Thompson

Perfect match. Not only did we have a Cooper's hawk's left foot, but we had a female Cooper's hawk's left foot. The talon in the pellet was ever so slightly longer than the immature bird's talon, which might mean it was an adult bird, but that's farther than I want to take my avian CSI. The foot belonged to a female Cooper's hawk. And that, my friends, is some nice sleuthing. Helps to have the reference resources right on hand, down by the washer...

Even the metatarsal length was perfect. This was a big female Coop. That's a foot-long ruler there. Dorsal view

and ventral view.

Look how perfect that foot is next to the specimen.

Here are the scutes, gleaned from the pellet, that initially told me it was a hawk's leg and not an owl's. I'm holding them up to the hawk's leg so you can see how perfect is the match. 

Just for fun, look at a male sharp-shinned hawk in the same setting.

He's 10" long to the female Cooper's 18 3/8".

Just the foot size difference is astounding. And we get so confused, trying to tell them apart.

Based on what I see on bird ID forums (10 gazillion photos of Cooper's hawks in people's backyards, all of them asking for ID, over and over and over), I have proposed to rename Cooper's hawk "FAQ Hawk."  Think it'll take?

The Cooper's hawk's head.  That rusty flammulation is typical, as are the fine, teardrop breast streaks. Young sharpies look messier, more boldly streaked, and lack the orange flaming.

And her label. Here comes the synchronicity again. Look who collected it. Well, picked it up dead. My dad, Charles Dale Zickefoose, on December 22, 1983. I was 25 and already well versed in skinning and stuffing bird specimens, thanks to experience both in college and in Amazonian Brazil, where I prepared specimens for a small museum at INPA (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas de Amazonas). I remember her crop being dead empty, no fat reserves, nothing left of her breast muscles, either. She'd burned herself up trying to survive. HY means hatch year. I've got total length (TL), wing chord (WC) and other measurements. A pitiful 12 oz-- a well fed female Coop should weigh 16 oz or more.

On the flip side of the tag, badly oiled by age and fat in her skin, is her story. I found that a small twig had pierced her right eye, blinding her. She was probably diving into thorns to get a bird, James Bond style, and that simple accident ended her career.

I was so honored that my father would think of me and pick her up and bring her to me that I painted a life-sized death study of her, freshly dead. I'd show it to you, but I gave it to my brother. It's nice. I did a lot of death studies back then, learning from the birds how they are built, how things work and go together.  She did not go to waste. Someday she'll go to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where they already have probably 150 Zickefoose specimens in their collection.

Here's one from that period of my bird-painting life, a pied-billed grebe that hit a wire in the night and plopped dead onto a golf course in Connecticut. You can imagine what the Cooper's hawk looked like, and see what I learned about it just by painting it, dead. Click on it to read the writing. It's life-size. I still have a penchant for working exactly life-size. It makes sense to me. Look how small the wing is for that dense, compact bird! Look how the legs work--like oars at the stern. Look at the bird of this hour.

I'm still writing everything down, still picking things apart. And that grebe is still with me, like the hawk, stuffed  with cotton and with all its data intact on a tag. I'll save the hawk's leg, too, because it tells a story, and that's what I do.

I watched my little family make their way back to the house on this dreary afternoon.  I lagged behind, shorter of leg, always behind; and now carrying my precious find. 

But I was all lit up with discovery and curiosity, and burning with the certain knowledge that my Dad is still with me, placing inspiration right in my path.

This just in from Facebook friend Steve Huy:

 A friend and mentor of mine, recently departed, 
had studied raptors at the Appalachian Environmental Lab at Frostburg State in MD. His name
was Floyd Presley.

he told me that he was surprised at the number of Cooper's hawk remains they found in barred owl nests

apparently barred owls have a knack for picking off sleeping coops

We don't always know the whole story. We can pick at the edges...

A Gift, Hurled from the Other Side

I was sitting at the drawing table, trying to keep my spine straight as I finished the last of a tedious couple of months of edits and revisions to a how-to book I put together 15 years ago. One doesn't really "write" a how-to book. One puts it together.

 I entered the last edit on p. 230, pasted in the painstaking revision of a six-page Resources section, every entry and detail of which had been obsolete, and sent the dang thing off to the publisher. Don't get me wrong. It's a good book. How-to's just not my bag, never was. 

I took a deep breath and started a status update for Facebook, the little crutch/reward system I lean on when my work threatens to grind me to powder. 

"Just finished an incredibly tedious, months-eating rewrite, edit and update of Natural Gardening for Birds, a book I put together 15 years ago for Rodale Books. The thought that I might now...

And before I could continue with 

get to do something I want to is a heady one...

a great big dark shadow swooped through the feeder area just to my left. A roar of wings as doves and finches, sparrows and cardinals exploded in panic. I was off the drafting stool, lunging for my camera, and sock-foot skidding to the foyer window before you could say COOPER'S HAWK!!

My first photo was diagnostic, but not stellar. I was skidding to a halt, after all. So was she.

My second photo was The One. Jesus Mary and Joseph what a beautiful killer she is, clasping the branch with her crooked yellow hands, her eye ablaze, her outer tail feathers exclamation points!!!

Sure, there are branches crossing her, but I love this photo. She's landed in that birch like she was hurled there.

 She's just alighted and she's already planning to leave. Might as well go for it, might get lucky.

My third photo is her leaving in pursuit of juncos and white-throated sparrows.  She wound up diving right into a brushpile Bill created about a month ago, literally dove into the center of it trying to get a sparrow. Came out empty fisted, beat deep into the woods. Total elapsed time from seeing the blur of her incoming rocket to her departure: about four seconds. Raptors make my heart beat faster. Accipiters make it fibrillate.

It didn't take long for a big smile to creep across my face, as I looked at the photos and it hit me that my Dear Old Dad was mighty proud that I'd finally shoved that damn book across the finish line (again), 15 years after I did it the first time. 

And maybe he sent that beautiful Coop to say Huzzah! and Life Goes On! and Join the Party! and maybe just Hello, Julie. I'm here. You are accompanied.

He works with hawks. Hawks are his apports, the gifts he sends me from the other side.

I didn't know that word until my friend Charles taught it to me today, as we compared notes about synchronicity and messages from the departed. Far, far too many perfectly timed gifts arrive on his doorstep and mine to be chalked up to happy chance.

And the synch-up contintued when my friend Caroline from South Dakota (via New York) posted a link today to an interview with photographer Ken Van Sickle. Everything he said about photography resonated deeply with me.  Perhaps my favorite thing he said was 

"If you were there when the Hindenburg caught on fire, and you took a picture of it, that’s a great photograph. But you’re not a great photographer, because you can’t repeat that in everyday things.

"What a great photographer does is, they are consistently able to make something in a style that’s personal to themselves. My pictures don’t depend on extreme sharpness. They depend on the composition and on the subject and on the way I see it."

If you'd like to listen to his brief but spectacular interview, go here, to PBS News Hour's page.

I don't pretend that my Cooper's hawk shot is a great photograph. There's no composing a photo when you have your camera set on center auto focus, and the hawk is perched in front of you for perhaps two of the four seconds it takes you to get off your ass, grab an 8-pound rig, and skid down a hall and into a foyer. You center the thing on the bird, hold your breath and try not to punch the shutter button too hard. You punch it on the first shot, squeeze it on the second and third, and the hawk does the rest. Time's up.

However, I was there  and I did have my camera so in my view this qualifies as a Hindenberg moment. And that, and my Dad sending me a honkin' big adult female Coop as I was running my victory lap, is plenty enough for me.

More hawkish synchronicity in the next post. I'm not leaving South Africa behind. But every once in awhile the present bursts out of the woods, grabs me by the shirtfront, shakes me down and demands an audience.

Grosbeaks: A Remembrance

It must have been 1967. Our family room was done up in Early American: Bald eagles with spread wings were on everything. Four Audubon prints, a little faded, hung over the couch--the Harris' hawk, the whimbrel, the bobwhite, and the wild turkey hen with brood. I stared at them for hours, especially when I was home sick, lying in luxury, wondering what it would be like to do nothing but draw birds instead of going to school.

That winter was snowy for Richmond, Virginia. Big blankets of heavy wet snow made a mess of the streets and the southern drivers, not to mention their cars. I loved nothing more than awakening on a school day to see that special snow light peeping under the shade, the white, pure light that sets a child's heart singing with the hope of sledding instead of homework.

On one such morning, I tore downstairs to find my mother and father craning their necks out the kitchen window at a flock of strange birds in our sweet gum tree. They were mustard yellow, black and white, though some were gray, with pied wings. A ringing cleer! call punched the stillness and snow quiet. Several sat on the simple table feeder that my father had welded from a pipe and a steel plate. They had already cleaned up the sunflower seed there and seemed to be looking for more. "Giant goldfinches!" I yelled as I ran for my well-worn National Geographic Song and Garden Birds of North America. 

They were evening grosbeaks, of course, and there were sixty of them, a flock such as I've never had since at any feeder. They showed up around Christmas and stayed into spring. We began buying striped sunflower seed in fifty-pound bags. This was a pretty extravagant purchase in 1967. I got up early every morning to put seed out for the flock, which my father referred to as "Julie's chickens." We loved to watch them squabble over the food, and we loved the way they looked, hanging in the trees like big ornaments. At about the same time, my father, who always spent his free time in his basement workshop, became secretive and wouldn't let me watch him work as he always had. I suspected he was making something for me.

On Christmas morning, I awoke to the familiar sound of grosbeaks fighting and feeding, but it was unusually loud. On the dining room windowsill was a feeder, the grandest one ever made, with a long dowel perch and a Plexiglas top  to keep the seed dry, with drainage holes and a new coat of gray paint. It was three feet long, and the grosbeaks crammed into it by the dozen to wade in sunflower seeds. It was my Christmas present, and I can't remember one before or since that has thrilled me as much--not a bicycle or a guitar, a book or a trip.

My father was to make many more feeders, always from found materials--hubcaps and plastic pipes, odds and ends from the warehouse of the pipeline company where he worked. The most elegant piece he produced was a birdbath constructed of a steel pipe welded to an old harrowing disc. Its edges are gently scalloped from wear, and the iron is pitted from decades of immersion. It is the perfect depth for a goldfinch to wade into, the perfect width for a whole family of bluebirds to share. Dad painted it a creamy white to look like a destroying angel mushroom, and it does. He showed me how to scrub it out with a lump of sod, soil still attached, scouring away the brown algae. "Dirt cleans pretty well," he used to say. Your mother wouldn't agree, but it does." (He pronounced it "mither.")

The windowsill feeder finally rotted apart in 1991, and my father died in 1994. When we cleaned out the big house, I got a checkerboard he'd made, a table he'd constructed from an iron sewing machine stand and a plank of fine cherry, an ancient Scots rocker he'd refinished, and the destroying angel mushroom birdbath. It stands in my front yard, surrounded by rhubarb and flowers, and I still clean it with a lump of sod.

I have a picture of my dad sitting with me on the living room carpet, looking through a great sheaf of Audubon prints he'd gotten for me. He's in an old short-sleeved shirt, the front smeared with grease and oil, varnish and paint from his projects. I'm in heavy black Buddy holly glasses and short hair, a good look for a hardened tomboy. It's the only picture I have of just us two together, but it speaks volumes about our relationship. Youngest of the five children, I latched onto my dad the hardest, followed him around the yard as he gardened, learning his craft seed by seed, weed by weed. I feigned an interest in antique gasoline engines because he would take me out with him, looking for them on long drives through the Virginia countryside. Where there were iron wheels peeking from the weeds, there were bound to be birds, and I wore his old German binoculars' pebbled finish smooth watching them. We became good at evaluating tumbledown sheds for both their machinery and their barn swallow potential.

My sweet nieces Courtney and Christy got to know their granddad.

I am writing this (October 1996) with my three-month old daughter lounging on a pillow on my lap, her legs hanging off one side as she nurses. She will never know her grandfather, never feel him squeeze her foot, hear him say, "This baby likes to have her foot squeezed," something he claimed about every baby. He had a soft spot for little girls, as he had for me. I realize only now, on becoming a parent, that all the things a child becomes are outgrowths of who her parents are and what they do. I am grateful for all the things he was--farmer, gardener, bird watcher, handyman, teacher, inventor, teller of stories.

I started with grosbeaks, I know. I can't see them without thinking of my father. They come like a memory, unbidden, unexpected, hanging in the bare branches like scattered thoughts. They are beautiful and always welcome, though I always seem to be out of seed when they show up. Every time, I do a one-woman Three Stooges routine upon hearing their calls. I check the feeders--nearly empty. If I don't get the seed out quickly, they might leave. But if I go out to refill the feeders, I'll scare them! What to do? Sometimes I hurry out, head down, as if the last thing on my mind is evening grosbeaks. I quickly fill the feeders, then skitter back into the house. Sometimes I fling handfuls of seed out the window onto the deck. Usually, in trying to welcome them, I wind up scaring them away, and I always panic. I want to see them so badly, want them to stay until the buds swell and the cardinal begin to sing, as they did in the winter of 1967 in Richmond, when I was still my dad's little girl.

This post is in honor of my DOD, obviously. And to mark the American Birding Association's celebration of its Bird of the Year. Art by JZ.

Look! A Giant Cow!

It was time to hit the road.


We had had the most wonderful time at the Potholes and Prairies Festival. I am sorry that I don't have many bird photos to share, but there is something about a horizontal rain in 38-degree weather that puts a slight damper on bird photography. Hence the cozy diner and Pie Posts. I want to emphasize that, whatever the weather, it's always fun to go birding in North Dakota. Pictures or no pictures.

It was time to hit the highway, and we headed west this time, to parts unexplored, for our big adventure. We hadn't gone too far before a shape hove onto the horizon that resolved into a giant cow. I became extremely excited. It wasn't because I had never seen a giant cow; I had. It was because I remembered a postcard my father sent us when he was driving to Montana for a summer job once. It was a giant Holstein cow, billed as the World's Largest. This was the same cow. In that instant, seeing New Salem Sue up close morphed from a curiosity to a pilgrimage.
There was a milk can rigged up to take our donation. Seeing Sue is free, but they appreciate your dollars for road and giant cow upkeep.

Holy cow!
38 feet tall, 50 feet long, made of fiberglass and hollow, Sue nevertheless weighs in at 12,000 pounds. She was built in 1974 in LaCrosse, Wisconsin by the Sculpture Manufacturing Co. and trucked in three pieces to New Salem, ND. Area dairymen, farmers, businesses and residents chipped in on the $40,000 cost of the project. The idea was to promote the breed, dairy farming, animal husbandry, and the Holstein cows of which New Salem is rightly proud. The first Holsteins were brought to New Salem around the turn of the 20th century, and breeding stock from here has fanned out all over the country. Many famous Holsteins were born in New Salem, including Aggie Wayne Segis Pontiac, who produced 1003 pounds of butterfat in one year. Go Aggie Wayne Segis Pontiac!

It was extremely windy and cold atop the hillock on which New Salem Sue stands. Phoebe looks like she's on fire.


We were, in fact, in danger of being blown clean off said hill.


The artist, Dave Oswald, was doubtless guided in his work by dairymen, for whom ample udders and prominent milk veins are clearly a turn-on.

Look at that milk vein. I think the teats should be longer, but maybe that's just me talking.

My favorite shot of the session, taken right before I got blown over. That is a nice paint job. I could totally see my father going up and knocking on the big pink teat to see what it was made from.


I felt very close to my dad up here, he who loved farming, cattle, butterfat, and all things dairy-related; good diners; roadside attractions; giant animal sculptures, travel

and me.