Bad Weather and Scavengers

(note: the following was written several months ago as autumn was fading)

FARMING IS AN INCESSANT GAMBLE with the weather. Recent weather reports have been forecasting a lot of rain on the way, and we've had many wet days of overcast, with a few glorious, revitalizing sunny charmers thrown in.

To me, this variety is interesting, even beautiful. But for other people around here, the coming rain can spell difficulty, if not disaster. As in many things, timing is everything. Trying to get a harvest in quickly can scatter leavings that attract pestilential scavengers. Like grackles.

Yesterday in the blustery cold wind, Dan the farmer who works our neighbor farmer's land, harvested his feed corn in the field next to ours. He worked all day, driving his old red tractor and equipment steadily up and down across the swath of dried corn. And he worked well into the inky blue night, harvesting by headlight.

Dan had left the corn out for a long time, trying to get it dry enough so it won't spoil in storage. He uses this corn to feed his beef cattle during the winter. With rain coming he had to scurry to get as much in as he could. He didn't get it all. The field next to ours, out by the farm road, is still full of thousands of whiskery tan stalks, each with 6 or so cobs, each cob with 800 kernels dried hard and saffron yellow.

It was a lot of work to grow that corn. I've often seen Dan tending those fields. He drives his tractor, bareheaded and shirtless, white hair flowing in the wind as he turns in his seat to watch his machines. He's five years younger than me, but looks ten years older. Like most people raised on the land, he presents a genial, cheerful visage, his face crinkled into a friendly snaggle-toothed grin as he imparts savvy and sometimes inscrutable points of wisdom or opinion. But I've also seen him distracted and anxious, impatient with the questions of a greenhorn neighbor. His concerns are not minor.

Dan uses very old equipment, all he can afford. His combine, used for harvesting wheat, cost all of $3,000 and was built in the mid-40's. It uses a fortune in gas but he can repair it himself. It's a nightmare of exposed wheels and belts. His corn harvesting gear takes up the corn cobs and chews up the stalks for silage. But it leaves quite a bit of waste on the ground.

Corn kernels left in the field.

Five and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie...

Had I a shotgun, and a yen for grackle pie, I would have scored a lifetime supply today.

By dawn after Dale's harvest, there were scores of grackles sitting in the trees and on the fields, picking everything clean. By this afternoon, it was like the days of carrier pigeons - the tree down by the bottom of our land was full of them and they rose like a black cloud off the cornfields.

The sheer chittering racket of them a hundred yards away made the 17 year cicada infestation of two years ago seem like soothing background humming. It was loud and evilly weird enough to scare Daisy. The chickens not unwisely (if I can use the word with respect to the judgment of chickens) stayed huddled inside their coop.

In the late afternoon the grackles were all over our place, sitting and fluttering in the walnuts and forest trees, more than anyone could count, like black stars in the grey sky. I walked out and flushed the whole crowd. Stood in the grass up by the barn shooting with my camera upwards as they swarmed from trees up in the forest overhead, in an incessant flow lasting more than 40 minutes, thousands and thousands of them.

I ran out into the neighbor's field hoping to catch the incredible vision of them flying through the skies and over the fields. They would rise and swirl, settle then rise again like a bizarre animated swirl of soot particles over the simple scene. It began to rain but I stayed out, shooting in all directions like a maniac. But the light and my excitement worked against me and most shots didn't work. Too dark, out of focus, everything wrong. but perhaps one of over 150 images will turn out.

I went through the fence that divides our land from next door, stalking the black avian mass pecking corn on the ground, hoping to flush them in a rise over the land. They rose reluctantly from their gorging, a grumpy fluttering mass lying, a malevolent low cloud over the land until I retreated.



---------------

They have disappeared. All of them. It's evening now, almost dark. A flash of light low on the horizon to the East forsages a thunderstorm and the land is quiet. Not a bird in sight.

Where did the grackles go? Where did they come from?

Not all the corn is in and the rain is coming. I fear that the standing corn, and the months of work required to plant, protect and harvest feed corn will be wasted in hours by the rain. But Dan's a very tough, determined man and has been farming since he was 11. He's got more than a few tricks up his sleeve.

No farmer, I feel blessed and grateful to be warm and secure after this day, and not worried about feeding my livestock.