Pickin' Up Pawpaws

We've been to Montana, but there is so much wonderful stuff happening right here in Appalachian Ohio I hardly know what to do with myself. If you want to know what makes me completely and utterly happy, read this post. It is hard to write as I have pawpaw processor's elbow from squooshing pawpaws through a colander all morning, getting that rich yellow pulp that makes my heart sing and my guts go OH!

Anyone who has visited our house knows that food is a huge part of our lives. Local food, so, so much the better. Local wild food found on our land: best best best. I found a new grove of young pawpaws blooming deep in our east valley last spring and tied some pink flagging along the oil well road so I could revisit in September. When I started seeing coon and coyote poop full of pawpaw seeds, I knew it was time to go shake some trees.

So on a fine Saturday morning the whole family, Chet Baker too, trooped down the briery slope to the new pawpaw patch. We were not disappointed. The very first thing Phoebe found was a muddy box turtle with blazing red eyes. He was muddy because he'd been soaking in the oil road puddles.
The very next thing she found was a bunch of pawpaws!
Pawpaw hunting is really more pawpaw rustling. You peer up into the canopy, see pawpaws, count them, and then shake the trees. Generally, the bigger the tree, the bigger the fruit. We get very excited when we see the fruit in clusters. We call the clusters "kittens." Um...because a good pawpaw is about the size of a newborn kitten, I guess. We have our own language when we're hunting pawpaws.

Five in this cluster. They fall all around you--ploop! ploop! ploop! ploop!--you hope not on your head. Because the big ones hurt like crazy. And you can't always tell how many pawpaws a tree has. Sometimes it's a big surprise how many plop out of it when you shake it.

See those huge ovoid leaves? There's nothing else like them. And they always grow in patches. Which is probably because there are so many seeds on the ground from all the dropped fruit. Or perhaps they propagate from root shoots. I do know that the pawpaw's dispersal mechanism is simple. Plop to the ground when you're ripe, and something furry snarfles you up right then and there. You hope it's something that's big enough to swallow some of your huge slick lima-bean sized seeds as it's snarfling your delicious yellow pulp. And then to poop them out at an undisclosed location, sometime later. Ow ow ow. That something would be a raccoon, an opossum, a deer, a coyote, even a fox...there are plenty of candidates. Humans are another decent prospect, even though we're too fussy to swallow the seeds. We spit them out as we walk, and that accomplishes about the same thing, minus the dollop of fertilizer.

In our woods, this constitutes a big pawpaw tree, a Daddyshaker. They do attain the size of normal trees, eventually, but being shade-grown, they grow very slowly. And our land has been abused--cut and grazed, cut and grazed, cut and grazed--for so many decades that the neat stuff is just now coming back into it. We've let it rest for 18 years, and it's starting to pay off.

Liam looves pawpaws. May I eat this one?
Yes, of course!
He polished off four that morning. To eat a pawpaw, you just bite right through the skin and you get a mouthful of big shiny brown seeds and sweet pulp. You suck the seeds and skin clean and ptoo them out. And your hands get really sticky.

Phoebe picked up the cluster of kittens.

Papaw got some, too. And Chet Baker ate his own pawpaw. By that time my hands were so sticky I couldn't touch my camera. You'll just have to imagine the cuteness.

Nothing makes the Science Chimp happier than a successful pawpaw hunt in our very own woods with her mate and young. It brings out the caveman in all of us.

monkeycam shot by BilloftheBirds

Did I say nothing makes the Chimp happier? Well, there is something...see the next post for The Science Chimp's Biggest Entomological Adventure.

Over Beartooth Pass--More Rodents!

There is something deeply disorienting about climbing high, high up over a mountain pass--let's say Beartooth Pass, between Montana and northern Wyoming--and going from hot hot summer, strip-off-your-shirt summer--to walls and fortresses of lingering snow, to American pipits scrounging snowflies, for Lord's sake, because there's nothing much else to eat.

If the hairpin turns and the million-foot dropoffs on the road weren't enough, that simple dissonance would be scary enough for a person like me, who is so tied to the seasons and the particular light of a particular time of year that I really don't know what to do with myself when everything is upside down and we're making snowballs in mid-June.

Snowfields, just now melting off. And mountain bluebirds, giving their low chortle and floating from boulder to boulder, just to bring me to my knees.

Mountain bluebirds in hard mountain light and thin mountain air, bolts of cobalt and cerulean, straight shots to the heart.


We get back in the car and OK now I'm a little freaked out by this.

I mean, we had a whole winter of this, well, nearly this, and I thought I could put my white knuckles away. Hon, will you please drive? I'm done.

Whoa. Car coming. Let's push on, get down to some altitude that makes sense for an Appalachian Ohio girl. I'm feeling a little woozy, here on top of the planet.

I know what will fix me. More cute rodents.

We offered Corn Nuts and almond bits, but sunflower seeds were the favorite. We looked him up in our Kaufman Field Guide to Mammals of North America.

Wrong page. Them's Californy chiptymunks.

Least chipmunk, Tamias minimus. Mmm, how cute! And teeny. And snappy and bold.

But wait! there's more. A golden-mantled ground squirrel, Spermophilus lateralis, such an arresting HUGE creature that it elicited gasps of "What the heck is THAT?" from us. The thing was at least 10" long and fat, fat, fat. I immediately christened it the Sumo Chipmunk.

No secret how it got that fat.

Gimme a peanut, now.

Dead heat between the yellow-bellied marmot and the Sumo Chipmunk for favorite rodent of the trip. He's just a guinea pig in chipmunk's clothing.

We made it through Beartooth Pass and happily descended into... YELLOWSTONE!!

Before we start wallerin' around in Yellowstone Park, I have a few pressing Ohio matters to share. Pawpaws and a spectacular caterpiggle... Speaking of Ohio matters, don't miss the next Ohio Ornithological Society conference October 8-10 at the Radisson Eastlake (Cleveland). Field trips, crazy great migration birding, even a Lake Erie 'pelagic' trip. People--it's an inland sea! and it has some surprisingly great birds. Go here for details.

More Adorable Rodents of Montana

Looking at my recent entries, it seems I have developed a preoccupation with rodents. The truth is that I like rodents as well as I like any wildlife. Mostly I just like any wildlife that lets me get real close with my camera.

I'm remembering a Patton Oswalt line. "I like porn. Because I can get porn."

But I do like yellow-bellied marmots, and not just because I can get pictures of them. A marmot is nothing more than a nicely colored woodchuck that lives in a group. And living in groups, yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) are a lot more noticeable than our solitary eastern woodchuck (Marmota monax) is. Eastern woodchucks generally reveal themselves only first thing in spring, when they're ratty and moth-eaten and hungrily vacuuming up clover in tiny median strips, or the rest of the year, when we find them taking dirt naps on highway shoulders. Marmots are also bolder, perhaps because having many eyes watching out makes them feel more secure in revealing themselves. Perhaps they aren't as heavily persecuted in the wild West as woodchucks are back East.

My affection for woodchucks is sincere; I have a number of wonderful woodchuck stories. The people who lived on our Ohio farm well before we bought it used to take in injured and orphaned wildlife. I'm thinking it's something in the water. Anyway, they had a pet woodchuck that loved to play. Its favorite game was to be slid on its back across the kitchen floor, caught, and slid right back, like a hockey puck. You have to love a rodent that likes to do that.

On our way to Yellowstoen, we stopped at Pompey's Tower, a state monument to Lewis and Clark along the Missouri River in Montana.

William Clark's signature, on the rock of a stack called Pompey's Tower. It was named for the toddler son of French-Canadian expedition cook Charbonneau and his Native American wife, Sacajawea. Lewis and Clark took a huge shine to the child, who they nicknamed Pompey, and named this promontory after him. He was the expedition mascot. I would think a toddler would be a bit of a liability on the push into the Northwest Territory, but Sacajawea must've stocked up on disposables and Tupperwares full of Cheerios before they took off. By all accounts Pompey was a happy baby, even though he was probably chewing on a bit of dried bison sinew instead of Pepperidge Farm Flavor Blast Pizza Goldfish.

Wild rock pigeons flapped and moaned from their nests along the flank of Pompey's Tower.


At the park below, we ran into a little colony of yellow bellied marmots.

They had burrows at the base of the huge cottonwoods along the river.

They peeked out and then came out, perhaps to see if we had any food to offer. Note the white brow band--distinctive.

Also distinctive is the pot-bellied profile when the animal sits up to take a look around. Awwww!

At this point, I was jonesing bad for a fix o' Chet Baker, having been away from him for a whole week.
So when a marmot spraddled out in what we call the frogleggin' pose, I melted.

They seemed to know I meant them no harm (or know that I thought they were meltingly adorable) and relaxed visibly after a little while.

At last, a little babeh marmot peeked out from his cottonwood fortress. Melting, complete. Just another bit of fauna I would love to have in Ohio. Magpies and marmots.