Grasslands at the End of WInter

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Undertaker-in-Chief

In the Grasslands of the southern Shenandoah Valley the end of winter brings a new crop of calves and a stand of grass weary of its winter burden, gnawed short and peppered with frozen Frisbees. The grasses will start to grow in a fortnight but for now the cows rely on hay unrolled in the pastures and the rodents skitter in scant cover. The calves begin to hit the ground and the raptors rake the rodents. It is a rhythm harkening to millennia of shaggier ungulates farmed with fire and eating native stands free of fescue, but otherwise not so different from the tempo of our time.  Of all the players, the raptors and rodents may have marked the changes least.

One constant is the first-calf heifers, bison then and cattle now, struggling with calves sometimes more developed than they can birth.  Without the herdsman’s vigilance the late-adolescent labor can claim both mother and young. A calf is head-locked and stillborn and the work of saving the heifer reveals that the calf would have passed the head constriction only to be hip-locked as well.  It is a life that does not happen.

Or perhaps it does.  Life throbs in the pastures of this mini-Serengheti  and little goes wasted.  Turkey Vultures cluster, solemn bishops bound by their protocol;  a pair of Common Ravens drives them off. A Bald Eagle bumps the Ravens, upending the carcass for the fresh underside, a Schwarzeneggerian dead lift of fifty pounds.  The over-boosted audio in the eagle video’s second scene includes the faint bark of a red fox.  Is it protesting the eagle? The great bird launches with a full crop and in its talons a goodly share for an incubating mate.

By day Red-Tailed Hawks pick off the exposed rodents, Harriers sweep the swales.  At dusk a roost of Short-eared Owls ghosts into the gloaming to mouse through the cows and the scampering calves that won the birthing lottery. 

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 Late Winter -- Not the Best Time To Be a Pasture Rodent