Farm Bulletin: The Case of the Missing Chicories

When we city people take the occasional drive in the country to clear our heads of the tumult of urban life, it's easy to drive by the fields planted in long, symmetrical rows of various crops and think only of how pretty they look or of the food they'll produce. But this land also has a hidden life not visible to the casual passerby, one that makes our ordered urban lives seem placid by comparison. It's the reason I love the essays of contributor Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm, who gives glimpses into what's really going on between those neatly planted rows.

The bobcat, Lynx rufus, is a furtive spirit, more often observed by what is left than its actual presence. Our cur, Tito, picks up the cat's scent and has developed the sensible habit of demanding human company and looking over his shoulder when he goes out before bed. He is the same way when the coyotes hunt close by. Despite millennia of domestication, he retains the survival instincts of his ancestors. The average bobcat adult weighs about 20 pounds (9 Kg), though individuals can approach 40 pounds (18 Kg). Their diet is mostly rodents, though they can kill much larger animals if the opportunity presents itself, even deer. The bobcats west of the Cascades are distinctly darker than others of the species, and are recognized as the subspecies fasciatus.

Bobcat kittens.

We first saw the bobcat in September hunting in the draw, recognizing its feline gait and stalking mannerisms, an animal obviously leggier and taller than the feral tabby cats that survive being tossed out of passing cars as kittens by careless souls, but not a positive identification without seeing it face-on. Later in the month, Zenón went out at dawn to pull rocks from a newly cultivated field and saw "un gato grande" hunting voles in fresh ground, a more certain sighting. Our neighbor Darwin, a veteran hunter and outdoorsman, made the positive identification in late November when he turned a corner near his blind and came face to face with the cat. As he described it, they both paused, staring at one another for a moment to catch their breath, before the cat bounced away into the canary grass. In the twilight of Christmas morning, we watched the bobcat lope across the field and down the road towards the creek, quarry in its jaws. Evidence points to its denning at times in the briars near the pump station, a hunch with which Tito, his hackles high, concurs.

Animals that are active during the day are described as diurnal, those at night nocturnal. Crepuscular animals are active at twilight, the edges between day and night. In habitat as well habit, the bobcat is a species that thrives on the productivity of edges. As we have described previously, we are situated where the Tualatin Valley is at its narrowest between the Coast Range and the Tualatin Ridge, providing a short corridor between those two forested foothill habitats. The farm itself is a mosaic of cultivated fields, oak savannah and wetland, offering a lot edges between these ecotypes. The effect of our "edginess" is best seen in the variety of raptors that hunt on the farm. Kestrels, harriers, red-tail hawks, barn owls and great horned owls all nest on the farm, osprey and bald eagles nest in the valley and hunt here. Migrating cooper's hawks, sharp-shinned hawks, merlins and peregrines pause to fatten up during migration. Elk, deer, mink and cougar, among others, use the farm as a path between the foothills, but they pass quickly and with purpose beyond our boundaries.

Chicories, you will be missed.

The bobcat is likely a visitor as well, a youngster seeking its own territory. That it has lingered so long explains in part why we have so few chicories this year, even though we doubled our planting. We adhered to our pattern of crop rotation without considering that the planting bordered part of the farm that was in fallow for the past year. Last spring, the population of meadow mice (voles) was low so we paid little heed to them in our planting during the summer; it was an understandable but unfortunate oversight. Unobserved by us, the population in the fallow field skyrocketed over the summer, and there are few crops so well suited as chicories for feeding a hungry hoard of voles through the cold months. By September we sensed the problem and did everything we could to salvage the crop to no avail. Wave after wave of voles have kept the raptors well fed, and the surplus rodents kept us in the bobcat's hunting territory. The ground is covered with holes barely a foot apart, and the cold snap made the little rodents that much more ravenous. Without a bounty of fat, chicory-fed voles, the bobcat would probably have moved further into the foothills where there is better cover and a supply of prey, and less competition from the coyotes and raptors.

In the popular literature, healthy predator populations are supposed to stabilize prey populations, creating a population equilibrium and thus providing a service to humans. Yes, predators are valuable components of a healthy ecosystem, but it is important to understand that population dynamics in prey populations are driven by many environmental factors. Disease, weather, food and cover availability, for example, all have a far greater influence on rodent populations than the predators. Face it, predators are, like us, consumers rather than mere service animals. There is parallel with farming in that no matter how good we think we are as farmers, the weather and other exogenous factors ultimately determine our success. We can plot and plan, but the weather and vole populations defy anticipation for both bobcat and cultivator.

When you are chewing on life's gristle,
Don't grumble, give a whistle,
And this will help things turn out for the best, and
Always look on the bright side of life,
Always look on the light side of life…

Heeding Eric Idle's advice, as you grumble about the sloppy farmers who failed to deliver your chicories this year, maybe it will help to know that a leggy, elegant bobcat is meting out some form of retribution. And a host well-fed raptors as well. It is, after all, a backhanded compliment to our farming efforts that so many other animals thrive on the fruits of our labor.

Top photo by Calibas from Wikimedia Commons. Photo of kittens by Summer M. Tribble from Wikimedia Commons.

Farm Bulletin: A Peaceable Kingdom

In the middle of the frenzy that is the summer harvest, this week contributor Anthony Boutard stops to remind us about the other creatures that call Ayers Creek Farm home, and to ponder his and Carol's role as caretakers of the land.

The waxing gibbous moon rises in the late afternoon and reaches its apogee during first half of the night. As the moon develops its belly, it provides more light for the coyotes as they move about the farm. They often chatter, a kind of "I'm here, where are you?" mixture of barks and yips. They also have their choral moment which starts out with calls and responses, followed by a rising crescendo of barks, verging on a howl. It ends abruptly. They call mostly at night. Interestingly, their conversations are never overtly aggressive; we never hear snarling or fighting among them.

Coyotes are furtive animals, though in the spring when food is short they are less reticent to show themselves. Often a coyote will shadow the tractor as we mow the berry rows, pouncing on the fleeing voles (left). At the southern end of the berries is a small canyon with a dense thicket of native roses along its eastern flank. In early April we spotted four very small coyote pups along the edge of the roses, which we mistook for rabbits at first sight. By May, they were bigger and given to playing outside of the briars, and the count rose to eight pups.  That is on the high side for a litter. During this time, the mother hunted all through the day.

Through the summer months, the coyote diet is almost entirely fruit. They eat a lot of cherries early in the summer, followed by prunes, blackberries and then grapes. This summer fructivory performs a valuable service for us by cleaning up the fallen fruit. The energetic demands are lower in the summer, so the coyotes' "Dick Gregory" diet makes sense. In addition, the dry summer soils make it hard to excavate rodent nests. Come the autumn rains, they will shift back to rodent hunting. Regardless of the season, birds are an insignificant part of a coyote's diet.    

As organic farmers, we judge the health of our land by the health of the predator populations. In addition to the eight coyote pups, our barn owls raised five owlets (right) and fields are thick with tree frogs. When we see good numbers of weasels, spiders, snakes, dragon flies and lacewings, we are comforted knowing there is a shadow productivity, a separate harvest, that works in concert with our efforts to grow nutritious food.

In the legal world of organic agriculture, it takes three years to earn certification. At the ecological level, it generally takes a farm many more years to recover from the chemical assault of modern agriculture. Recolonizing the land with a diverse guild of predators is a slow process, and we still see holes in the structure after 12 years of managing this patch above Ayers Creek. For example, we have only seen one western fence lizard here, and we should have a good mix of these reptiles. We suspect the absence of a corridor for recolonization leaves us bereft these animals. Someday we will wake up and see some lizards, and know the farm is a little bit more complete.

You can find the Boutards most Sundays from 10 am until 2 pm at the Hillsdale Farmers' Market. For a complete schedule of Willamette Valley farmers' markets, along with maps and links, click here.