Thursday, June 11, 2009 - Red Rock, East Chatham NY
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Fox kit hangout, Home Farm, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, June 11, 2009
Raising street smart kits
If you want street smart kits raise them on the street. A family of red foxes has been doing just that for several years now, a couple hundred feet down Clark Road from the house. This young guy has gotten to the point where he will alertly stand his ground as a car passes. Their den is at the base of an old tree a few feet off the road to the right. This kit and his sibling across the road are sitting above an old dry culvert where he can take refuge in an emergency.
Night camp
On my property off Less Traveled Road - The Home Place, Red Rock, East Chatham NY
- I used to camp in a few locations on what little I had left of the family farm
- In the driveway by the house
- Across the road where the barn once stood
- On the 20 acre piece off Less Traveled Road
- Now, with the kind support of the friends who now own the place, I camp across the road where the barn once stood.
- Verizon cell phone service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
- Verizon EVDO service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
- Find other references to Home Place
- List the nights I've camped here
- Check the weather here
Sweet, Rich Hickory Milk
Hickory was another favorite. Rambling through the Southeast in the 1770s, the naturalist William Bartram observed Creek families storing a hundred bushels of hickory nuts at a time. "They pound them to pieces, and then cast them into boiling water, which, after passing through fine strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid" to make a thick milk, "as sweet as fresh cream, an ingredient in most of their cookery, especially hominy and corncakes." Years ago a friend and I were served hickory milk in rural Georgia by an eccentric backwoods artist named St. EOM who claimed Creek descent. Despite the unsanitary presentation, the milk was ambrosial - fragrantly nutty, delightfully heavy on the tongue, unlike anything I had encountered before.