Ice structures on leaves

It’s been a bit colder here than usual the past few days, with night-time lows in the high teens and freezing fog some nights. Yesterday Jack the mastiff and I walked up Star Gulch Road, which goes along a stream with several private gold-panning claims on it. But it was way too cold for panning!

Nights of heavy frost had enrobed the vegetation in dense but delicate icy structures.

Jack and I each pursued our personal obsessions. His are: following wherever I go but arriving there first, and of course sniffing around the woods to see what creatures have been there. Mine, that morning, were: walking fast enough to stay warm, interspersed with stopping and kneeling to take photos. Jack probably thinks the camera is some sort of mechanized human sniffer when I put it up close to things. Well, he’s right, in a way. I’m afraid I do see more when I take the camera, and certainly the camera remembers things better than I can.

Sometimes Jack responds oddly to objects; a statue of a horse or animal is approached cautiously and sniffed at full extension, ready to leap away. On this walk he saw a large wooden “Put out your campfire” sign, on 2 wooden posts, and reacted as if it were some strange beast. He barked at it until we got up to it then very carefully checked it out. Well, if it had been an animal it would have been quite a big one, easily six feet tall with legs made of four by fours, so I guess I understand his caution if not his failure to discern its true nature. Or, maybe it was really some entish thing just pretending to be a sign . . . you never know.

Acorn Woodpeckers and Steller’s Jays

We see Acorn Woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus) only occasionally, so when two adults and a youngster showed up at the feeder the other morning we were delighted. These are showy birds, adding light yellow to the customary woodpecker color scheme of black/red/white. They came to the tube feeder with a spiral wire around the outside which is supposed to encourage woodpecker use, but our resident flickers (who nest inside the walls of the barn) rarely use it.

The third bird was smaller than the other two and took a while to figure out the feeder. He wanted to cling to the bark of the nearby tree and reach over to the seeds, but was finally doing it the easy way by using the wire.

I wish I could say I’d taken these photos, but without a long lens there was no point, and the birds were very wary of us even watching from the kitchen window. These are all from flickr, under Creative Commons licenses.

The picture below illustrates why they are called Acorn Woodpeckers. They drill holes to store the acorns. “As acorns dry out, they are moved to smaller holes and granary maintenance requires a significant amount of the bird’s time. The acorns are visible, and the group defends the tree against potential cache robbers like Steller’s Jays and Western Scrub Jays. Acorns are such an important resource to the California populations that Acorn Woodpeckers may nest in the fall to take advantage of the fall acorn crop, a rare behavior in birds.” [Wikipedia]. Their diet also includes insects caught in the air, fruit and seeds, and sap sipped from holes they drill.

Photo byKevin Cole, Creative Commons.

The facial patches may be white or light yellow; our visitors had showy yellow faces. Very handsome birds!

Photo above by Len Blumin, Creative Commons.

The Steller’s Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri) mentioned above as a stealer of acorns is another notable bird here in the Pacific Northwest, striking in appearance and a bit thuggish in behavior. They’re larger than the Acorn Woodpecker. Upper parts vary with latitude from nearly black to dark blue.

Photo above by Vincent, Creative Commons.

Some have light blue markings on the forehead and/or above the eyes.

Photo above by dotpolka, Creative Commons.

Photo above by randomtruth, Creative Commons.

What is so special about the skylark? (that’s the bird, not the car)

Of all the birds I’ve encountered in literature, the skylark has been most intriguing. First, because to the writers it is so powerfully representative of freedom, inspiration, hope, and joy; and secondly, because we don’t have them here in North America except for rare solitary “vagrants”, and introduced populations in British Columbia and on San Juan Island in Washington State. Every time I read an ecstatic poem about skylarks, I wondered why this bird, among all of Britain’s songbirds, evoked such emotion.

There are an abundance of poems to and about skylarks; I’ve collected some and put them here, with the less familiar ones at the top. For more, in a wide range of quality, see pp. 53+ in The Bird-Lovers’ Anthology (a Google book), or this search at Bartleby.com.

I had always made the facile assumption that the source of this bird’s literary mystique must be that it had an unusually beautiful song. Certainly it’s not known for its plumage; as befits a ground-nester, the skylark has cryptic coloration, with streaky earth-tones.

Image by Daniel Pettersson (under creative commons license)

What about the song? It’s unusually varied––

Bird songs are among the most complex sounds produced by animals and the skylark (Alauda arvensis) is one of the most complex of all. The songs are composed of ‘syllables’, consecutive sounds produced in a complex way, with almost no repetition. The male skylark can sing more than 300 different syllables, and each individual bird’s song is slightly different.

and in captivity, skylarks have shown remarkable ability as mimics.

My neighbor has an English skylark that
was hatched and reared in captivity. The bird is a most persistent
and vociferous songster, and fully as successful a mimic as the
mockingbird. It pours out a strain that is a regular mosaic of
nearly all the bird-notes to be heard, its own proper lark song
forming a kind of bordering for the whole.
American naturalist John Burroughs (in Birds and Poets)

But perhaps they are not, in themselves, especially melodious. Burroughs goes on to criticize the skylark’s own song:

His note is rasping and harsh, in point of melody, when
compared with the bobolink’s. When caged and near at hand, the
lark’s song is positively disagreeable, it is so loud and full of
sharp, aspirated sounds.

And when I listened to the song myself, it seemed pretty enough but insufficient to stir so many hearts so deeply. You can hear it online: Portland Bird Observatory site ; or on Soundboard ––choose the one titled “Sky lark male song”, 33 seconds long.

I embarked on an exploration of the skylark, to find out the basis of its literary renown, and here’s what I found.

Thou only bird that singest as thou flyest,/Heaven-mounting lark…

Photo © Martin Cade, Portland Bird Observatory site

First the basics: the Eurasian Skylark (Alauda arvensis) is larger than a house sparrow, and smaller than a starling; breeds from Britain to Siberia, and south to India and North Africa; and nests on the ground in open areas: meadows, salt marshes, heaths and farmland. The nest is a cup on the ground made from grass and hair.

Unlike most perching birds, the male sings in flight, and what a flight: he starts up suddenly from the ground, goes up high in the sky––50 to 100 meters––and hovers there for a few minutes, then plummets down to land on the ground. And all this time he is singing: while he rises so high that he may be scarcely visible, while he stays aloft, while he plunges to the earth again. “…drowned in yonder living blue/The lark becomes a sightless song “ (Tennyson, In Memoriam).

Experiencing the Skylark’s song

So, what moves the heart so much, when the skylark sings?

Jules Breton, Le chant de l’alouette (“Song of the Skylark”), 1884</

I think we can sum it up this way: early, sudden, humble, ascendant, prolonged.

Early

If you get up very early in Britain from April to August, and out into an area of grassland, farmlands, or marsh, this is likely the most prominent bird you will hear, starting even before the sun rises. (They sing throughout the day, but it’s most striking in the hush of dawn.)

The bird sings not from a perch but while flying, so the song emerges from the sky above, as the night flees and the first glow of dawn appears. It becomes associated with all the possibilities of a new day, the freshness of dawn, the light banishing darkness.

(Photo)

“I rose early. I went into my garden before breakfast and stood listening, but towards the common there was nothing stirring but a lark.”
H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds

“Though there was nothing very airy about Miss Murdstone, she was a perfect Lark in point of getting up. She was up (and, as I believe to this hour, looking for that man) before anybody in the house was stirring.”
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

To hear the lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull Night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise.
John Milton, L’Allegro, l. 41

[Spring] When … merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks…
Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost V, ii.

The association of the lark with dawn is so strong, poets even credit him with summoning the sun:

The busy day,
Waked by the lark, hath roused the ribald crows.
Shakespeare,Troilus and Cressida, IV, ii

The skylark is early in another way too, beginning to sing in the first part of summer (it’s considered to provide “the quintessential sound of an early British summer”), so it represents the end of…no, not the end of wintry weather––that makes reappearances even in summer––but the prospect of some warmer sunny days. Don’t take this lightly; drizzle, rain, fog and chill are so dominant that the climate was once described by a tongue-in-cheek booster, “writing on one of those raw, damp, sodden English winter days”, as “the best in the world because it is just depressing enough and, though beastly, not too beastly” thereby contributing to a hearty vigor. (Mary Borden, “In Defense of the English Climate”, Harper’s Magazine June 1930)

Being associated with the idea of summer is more powerful than we post-industrial urban humans can easily comprehend. The arrival of spring and summer meant not just longer days and better weather, but the beginning of another growing season, an end to the monotonous diet and shortages of winter, the return of birds and flowers, birthing season for livestock, easier travel between farms and villages.

Sudden

Only the lark leaps out of ruts like a live dart, and rises, swallowed by the heavens. Then the sky feels as though the Earth itself has risen.
Gabriela Mistral, The Lark

And now the herald lark
Left his ground-nest, high tow’ring to descry
The morn’s approach, and greet her with his song.
John Milton, Paradise Regained, bk. II, l. 279

Humble yet ascendant

This is a small brown bird, which nests on the ground and seeks invisibility there.

Photo, Pensthorpe Nature Center.
(Drawing of a skylark constructing the hollow and lining it with grass). There’s a terrific commercial photo of a startled skylark rising from the nest as several well-grown chicks call in protest.

Its nest, eggs, and chicks are vulnerable to trampling and to all sorts of predators including rats (infra-red photo below; if you have trouble making out the parent bird, on the left, look for the bright white dot of the eye).

Yet it abandons its reclusive habits, to deliver a long song while ascending and hovering in the sky. It’s unclear how much time the male spends at the nest, but he does fly up almost vertically from his unseen location on the ground when beginning his song display.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire…
Shelley, To a Skylark

Perhaps John Burroughs, whose critical judgment of the skylark’s song was quoted earlier (“…positively disagreeable, it is so loud…”), would have liked it better had he been hearing it while the bird was far overhead, instead of nearby in a cage.

Several poets have drawn particular attention to the skylark’s two worlds, sky and earth. It soars, sings, then drops to a point unseen on the ground where mate and nest have remained. Wordsworth says “Type [model] of the wise, who soar, but never roam—/True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home.”

With regard to ascendant flight, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says on a page for children that “Quite often, a skylark will fly over to the other side of the field before launching itself upwards into the sky. This is to trick you into thinking that it is nesting somewhere else, to keep its nest site a secret.” Since singing isn’t mentioned, maybe this is the (non-singing) female reacting to someone getting too close. The sudden rise of the singing male is nearly always a feature of his literary appearances.

Prolonged

The song generally lasts 2 to 3 minutes, quite long by birdsong standards, and is often even longer later in the season. What a great effort is put forth by this bird (which weighs only 30-45 g), singing continuously while he is zooming up into the air, holding steady aloft, and plummeting down!

Photo montage by Mark Kilner, (under creative commons license).

Putting all this together, imagine standing in a field near dawn,

listening to birdsong pouring down from the sky for two minutes or four, a very long time, as the singer rises, hovers, swoops above you, often visible only as a speck in the blue. Finally he plummets to the ground and is lost to view. (Photo, dawn in the Lake District)

The human listener is drawn upwards, inspired, filled with joy.

Aside from inspiring humans, what might be the function of the Skylark’s song?

Male birds sing mostly to proclaim their territory. For Alauda arvensis, with its long and varied song, there is a refinement to this:

”Dialect features are used for N–S recognition in a territorial species with a large repertoire”––or in other words,

Uttering the song serves to mark a male’s territory; listening to nearby songs lets him know exactly who’s where. It has been shown that neighboring skylarks have similarities in their songs, “common sequences of syllables “, which aren’t found in the songs of males from outside the area. When a resident male hears a song lacking the shared phrases, he reacts more strongly to defend his turf (and mate) because he knows the singer is a stranger and more of a threat than one of his familiar neighbors who already have established territories. It makes me wonder, when a stranger succeeds in settling in, how long does it take him to acquire the local dialect? Or is that a rare event, with vacant territories being claimed by the offspring of local pairs?

In an interesting turn of phrase, this phenomenon is called “the ‘dear-enemy effect’ … a reduced aggression from territorial animals towards familiar individuals, generally neighbours, with whom relationships have already been established”, presumably in order to conserve energy.

Singing as a conspicuous show of vigor

The long effortful singing serves as a proof of fitness: to potential mates before the breeding season, and at all times to potential predators such as merlins––small falcons that specialize in hunting songbirds. (Merlin, Falco columbarius, Photo)

The male lark continues to sing even as he is being chased by aerial hunters like kestrels and merlins. A study of anti-predation behaviors found that “[m]erlins chased non- or poorly singing skylarks for longer periods compared to skylarks that sang well. A merlin was more likely to catch a non-singing than a poorly singing than a full-singing skylark.” [the repetition of ‘than’ is in the original, perhaps indicating a descending likelihood of being caught]

Conservation status of the Skylark

The skylark population in Britain and Western Europe has dropped precipitously over the past 30 years; I found estimates for Britain ranging from 50% lost, to 70% lost. In some areas they are gone completely. The decline is most likely caused by the move to from spring to winter sowing of cereals such as barley and wheat, which deters late-season nesting attempts––second and third clutches––and may reduce winter survival because there are fewer fields of stubble. For nesting and foraging, the birds prefer areas with low cover; ideal vegetation height is 20-50 cm. I would think that the use of pesticides is probably a factor also since the young are fed on insects. Use of previously fallow ground for biofuels further reduces their nesting areas.

(Photo BBC)

Since this problem was recognized, farmers have been encouraged to leave unsown “skylark plots” in the midst of their fields and so far results are “encouraging”, in that the rate of decline is not so sharp. [More on skylark conservation in Britain here; Royal Society for the Protection of Birds report, The State of the UK’s Birds 2008 here.]

Skylark set-aside plot.

Aerial view of skylark plots.

Recently fledged juvenile skylark after banding.

Banded skylark about to be released. These birds were caught by startling them up into pre-set mist nets. Both photos from Mark Thomas, Bucktonbirder.

Skylark, Blackbush Fen, 6th July 2007, © Peter Beesley; Cambridgeshire Bird Club.

Skylark, Dorset, photo © Charlie Moores.

I can’t leave the subject of the skylark without mentioning Ralph Vaughan Williams’s lyrical work for violin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending. It is said to have been inspired by George Meredith’s long poem of the same name, but surely the ground had been prepared by Williams’s own experience of the skylark’s song and flight in his native England. If you look on iTunes you can find one offering of the entire 14 minute piece, for $0.99; the rest require you to buy an album. Or hear it on Youtube; many choices are there, including these: London Symphony Orchestra , 5 minute excerpt; or entire, in two audio installments, Orchestre de Chambre I Musici de Montréal, part 1, part 2.

Lizard skin

There are quite a few alligator lizards around our place, and one of them left a shed skin for us to find last month. Our lizards are probably the Southern Alligator Lizard, (Elgaria multicarinata). (See here for range map and basic info.)

[photo © Gary Nafis, from the californiaherps site]

The skin is complete, although in two pieces (ventral or belly view below).

The larger scales of the head

[photo © Gary Nafis, from the californiaherps site]

are clearly visible, or at least their clear covering is.

Also the legs, as they were arranged when the lizard wriggled and scraped its way out of the skin.

Here are the rear legs and vent.

And here’s a photo by Mark Leppin, in Northern Oregon, of the belly of a live alligator lizard:

The shed skin is turned inside out as the lizard peels it back over its head, by wriggling and scraping against whatever’s handy. Unlike most lizards, the alligator lizard sheds its skin in one piece (the one we found tore in handling), but it is like others in usually eating the shed. Depending on an individual’s health and rate of growth, it may shed every four to six weeks. Beforehand lizards and snakes may seek out water or damp places to help loosen the skin. The process is said to take only a few hours for those that shed in one piece.

Alligator lizards are insectivores but also take small eggs, snails, and probably anything else that they can find. The young are live-born, and we see them each summer––scarcely over an inch long, and very fast once they learn that everything bigger than they are regards them as lunch. The adults lose their tails once in a while, perhaps to snakes or other predators, and regrow them but the regenerated tails look stubby, not long and whiplike. Every dog we’ve had has tried to catch these creatures, without even coming close. My attempts to take pictures of them have all failed too, they’re just too wary and quick.

Photos: mute swan with cygnets

See these full-size (much better!) here. [Photos by Richard Meston, on a visit to Bicton Park Botanical Gardens near Sidmouth, Devon. They appeared in the Daily Mail.]

Victorian Square in Sparks, Nevada: a public plaza with no public

Early on an autumn morning I walked around Sparks (contiguous to Reno) a bit, just the area around the Nugget casino. The Nugget is about the biggest thing in this low-rise town; the original casino and one of its newer hotel towers are pictured below.

Across the thoroughfare is what seems to be an extensive public area, called Victorian Square,

with a bandshell-like gazebo.

But alas, the constantly-flowing music comes from speakers mounted on the lightpoles, and the only other living creatures I saw were a man picking cans out of a garbage bin, and a lonely pigeon.

The lack of pigeons emphasized to me the lack of public use, since wherever people congregate outdoors for any period, pretty soon they start dropping bits of food. When pigeons can’t find any reason to flock around, then the area is really unused.

But there was a sundial showing the correct time, just in case you’d hocked your watch and lost the money the night before.

If I’d been there a month earlier, on a Thursday between 4 and 9 pm, I could have caught this event:

The sign promises a “family activity park”––whatever can that be? Probable answer: one without “adult activities” like drinking and gambling. (I’m so behind the times, when the TV tells me a movie contains “Adult themes” I always have a micro-instant of thinking, Oh, it’s going to be about philosophy, or honoring one’s commitments, or solving world problems.) Anyway, as far as I could see the plaza itself included no play structures, no kid-sized statuary of animals to swarm over and sit on, no tile chess boards, no fountains, no picnic tables, few green areas to sit by…in fact for a while it seemed designed with the idea of clearing a defensible space around the casino where machine guns could command an open line of fire. Or it may be a disembarkation place for gamblers arriving by bus from California.

Along the edges there were a few survivors of the older buildings that must have been cleared for this big paved plaza area. One was the Victorian Penny Park Casino, closed.

And an old brick building, maybe a former hotel, with a vivid exterior including painted roses under the windows.

Looking back toward the Nugget I spotted these women: a few other wanderers who’d gotten bored and turned to stone? no, it’s a really incongruous effort at public statuary.

I didn’t cross the street for a closer look, but a good guess would be that they are either four of the muses, or figures representing Nevadan history and industry. The two female figures in the middle seem less than pleased: one gathers her skirts up as if recoiling from her surroundings, while the other has a melodramatic “You’re breaking my heart” look. The third is holding something bulky to her stone bosom, probably part of the day’s take from the casino, while the last (on the left) stands erect, leg akimbo, and has thrown back her outer garment. Her I can place, with the aid of a taxi sign seen later; she’s inviting you to the world-famous, umm, museum that is nearby.

Views of a lion skull

Recently I had the opportunity to photograph a lion’s skull. Since there seem to be few detailed photos of this subject online, I’m posting several here.

The ruler at the bottom is 3.5 inches (89mm) long. I don’t know the age or sex of this animal, only that it was an African lion. The ragged hole on top of the skull is a bullet hole; more about that later.

The large openings flanking the nasal cavity, and beneath the huge eye-sockets, puzzled me. Turns out they are the passageways into the eye area for the infraorbital nerve, artery, and vein (technically, each of these two openings is termed the “infraorbital foramen”). The infraorbital foramen is indicated by the arrow in the anatomical illustration below, from the University of Wisconsin’s digital collection of Veterinary Anatomical lllustrations.

In searching out what these openings were, I came across the information that Asiatic lions often have divided infraorbital foramina, with a bony bridge across the opening. Most African lions have the single open foramen seen in the skull I photographed. It is believed that the modern lion originated in Africa, and some researchers think that a severe population bottleneck at some point in the recent past of Asiatic lions may have allowed this variation to become common.

[]Thanks to Bibliodyssey for the post on these great illustrations.

The longitudinal grooves or clefts in the upper canines seem odd, though I found similar ones on another skull pictured online. Most of the lion skull images online were casts, replicas, and lack these grooves.

On the side of the lower mandible, insertion openings for nerves or blood vessels are clearly visible.

Turbinate bones and the air we breathe

Few skulls or replicas online show something I was especially interested in, the delicate turbinate bones within the nasal cavity. These are thin bony structures, with a rich blood supply, found in all modern warm-blooded animals. Here they show a complex scrolled shape that is marvelous to see.

The turbinates are also seen in the first photo; the close-up above is taken from a lower vantage point, looking farther into the nasal cavity.

What is the function of these unusual structures? The tissue covering the turbinate bones warms, cleans, and humidifies air as it is inhaled; the air exhaled from the lungs, which has picked up even more heat and moisture there, is cooled to reclaim moisture and prevent dehydration. The turbinate system also benefits the sense of smell. Humidifying the incoming air is necessary to “preserve the delicate olfactory epithelium needed to keep the olfactory receptors healthy and alert” (Wikipedia); the turbinates also increase the surface area of the inside of the nose and direct air upward toward the olfactory receptors. And, in humans at least, the tissues are what get swollen and obstruct our breathing, when we have allergic reactions.

The dinosaur connexion

The turbinates interested me because I remember reading speculation, in Digging Dinosaurs by palaeontologist Jack Horner, that dinosaurs were endothermic, warm-blooded––and he based this partly on indications that some skulls showed signs of turbinate bones (I don’t recall what exactly he described). However, that book was published in 1988, and it appears that subsequent researchers have failed to substantiate his suggestion. The delicate turbinate bones rarely survive as part of fossilized skulls; for example, none have been found in fossils of ancient birds’ skulls, even though the birds must have been warm-blooded. Some dinosaurs have thin tubular nasal spaces, as do present-day reptiles, and it is argued that those with narrow nasal cavities couldn’t have had turbinate bones. The question is not settled, but the current consensus seems to be that dinosaurs were not warm-blooded. For point-by-point summaries of the controversy, these seem good: The Evidence for Ectothermy in Dinosaurs (cold-blooded) and The Evidence for Endothermy in Dinosaurs (warm-blooded). Wikipedia considers some additional points in Physiology of dinosaurs.

Cause of death of this lion

The lion skull had been lent for a display in our local library, by the US Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory in Ashland Oregon. It’s the only lab in the world devoted to crimes against wildlife, and I’ll say more about it in another post. The skull had been evidence in a despicable case: an individual bought up lions (they breed easily in captivity) from roadside zoos, put them in small enclosures and sold the right to shoot them. My grim theory is that the “hunters” were required not to shoot at the head, so that more shots could be taken at the living lion, before the highest-paying customer delivered the coup de grace in a shot to the top of the head. First, that would yield the most money for the scumbag, and second, it would have been very difficult to make this shot to the top of the head of a lion still standing.

At least the person running this was tried, and convicted with the assistance of the Wildlife Lab. Highly unlikely that he received a sentence I’d regard as sufficient, though.

A Cape Lion (Panthera leo melanochaitus, now extinct) in a drawing of the Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. Circa 1650-52. Location: Louvre, Paris. Source, Wikimedia Commons.

Threshing grain at the historic farm

Here’s the old-style threshing of the grain at Hanley Historic Farm, Oregon; the beautiful golden “stooks” of gathered and bundled grain stalks appeared in an earlier post.

These stooks of hand-cut wheat, composed of bundles each tied with a stalk of wheat, sat out for weeks drying, and waiting for the Harvest Day Event on September 4, when the draft horse enthusiasts and old ag machinery collectors would join forces.

First the big placid draft horses made their way down the field, stopping to let workers with hay-rakes pitch (that’s “pitch” as in “pitchfork”) the stooks up onto the wagon, seen in the first picture. Once the wagon’s full, it heads back to the “home” end of the field.

There, the old threshing machine awaits, attended by half a dozen or more other people who will fork the grain from the wagon onto a moving belt.

But first, line up the wagon next to the working area.

Then the horses are unhitched and led away; I thought perhaps this particular team did not like the noise of the machine, which was considerable. In 1900 or whenever this machine was made, a farmer’s team would probably be accustomed to the machine after a couple of acres had been worked, and would wait–––or two wagons could be used, hitching the team to an empty wagon to continue collecting the grain while the full wagon was threshed.

The entire machine is long, with belt-driven parts to move the unthreshed grain into the whirling blades that knock the grain off the stalks. The next step separates grain from chopped straw or chaff.

It may be a machine, but it is fed one fork of grain at a time.

Streams of grain and chaff are blown through long pipes: the chaff into a pile, the grain into heavy cloth bags.

As on every farm in the history of the world, there’s work for kids old enough to know the routine.

The filled bags are hand-sewn shut.

Once these threshing machines came into use, horses provided the power for only some of the work. The thresher itself ran from a steam, or later gasoline, engine powering the main belt. This day, a more modern machine was used for the Power Take-Off (PTO) to the thresher.

Here you can see the power belt, and the chopping teeth that actually do the threshing.

Although the chaff is just being blown onto a pile in the background here, it is not a waste material, but would be used for bedding in stalls during the winter. Mucked-out straw would be used for fertilizing fields or maybe the kitchen garden area. These days, commercially produced wheat straw is used for decorative interior panels, making ethanol, soil amendment, animal feed (treated with urea, and with nutrients added, yuk), paper, and packaging. Many new uses are being examined. And of course, it’s still good for animal bedding.

Our view of early machine threshing on this day didn’t show what hard work it would have been, when many acres of grain had to be gotten in before the weather changed, when teams of horses brought a continuous supply of grain to the people feeding it to the machine, and the labor of bending to sew bags and then tote them away never stopped. But, unlike a lot of physical work in the industrial age, it was not what you did 50 weeks a year. There’s a pride in getting it done

and those too young to take part look on, eager to be old enough.

And when the belt stops moving, the old hands find a spot in the shade.