Changing of the Seasons Along the Blue Ridge

Fall is on the way, and there's a slight chill in the air, a forewarning of things to come. The hawks are beginning to think about migrating, and the deer are getting rambunctious and careless.

After a dry as dust summer, the cooler temperatures are bringing moisture. It's neat as hell to walk out my back door and see the clouds hanging below the peak of Hawk Mountain across the way, or to awaken to find that the cloud is sitting right on top of us, like a dense fog in the trees.

I had to use a down comforter last night, but then again, I had the windows wide open and both fans going, but it was a little nippy up here on the hill. We're at 3400' in a mountain "hollar", or cove, at the end of a road. There's only one residence above us, then nothing but coyotes, mountain lions, bears, bobcats, deer, etc., and forest.

Okay, so the coyotes come and go and the cougars and bears are infrequent, but they're there, and every now and then they come down the hill to mark their territory.

I bring the cats in at night. The dog - Tip (our elderly neighbors died and we "inherited" Tip) - keeps most of the wildlife away from the property. She's not really our dog, but we feed her and she patrols the hill for more than a quarter mile up and down the road. She catches the occasional rabbit, and yesterday she got a chipmunk.

The cats love chipmunks. Yum. Their snack of choice. Elvis and Wanda are Native Maine Coon cats that came to live with us while we were still in New Jersey, so they went from being "barn cats" in Maine to apartment cats in Jersey and then "mountain cats" down here in the Southern Appalachians. Sam used to belong to the elderly neighbors, too, but my husband made the mistake of petting her and giving her some food one day, and ever since then, she's lived here with us. In the last 7 years these three cats have cleared the property of chipmunks, squirrels, voles, moles, and a hell of a lot of mice. They chase off the wild turkeys. They keep the farm cats away. They've even been known to chase a stray dog off the property once or twice.

Funny thing about cats - they sometimes hang out with possums. I saw it in NJ, and I see it here. We had a possum under the house in the crawl space all last winter, and it tore up all the mouse nests and apparently ate all the babies, because we had very few mice in the house for the cats to catch last winter, and only one mouse all summer (which got into my no kill trap that I forgot I had under the kitchen counter and expired during one of our many hot spells. After awhile there was no mistaking the smell of dead mouse. Yuk!) .

Between the cats and foxes and snakes and hawks and owls and now possums, rodents have a hard time of it here. Breaks my heart. Yeah, right.

I'd prefer it if the chippies and red squirrels were left alone because they're fun, but I guess that's the way it goes. To a cat, or a dog, if they can catch it and eat it, all the better. The cats barely even lift an eyebrow to look at birds now.

I like snakes. We have a lot of black snakes here, but a lot of other snakes, too. This area is home to three poisonous snakes - copperhead, timber rattler, and pygmy rattler. Black snakes like to eat other snakes. Where there is a big black snake population, you find very few poisonous snakes.

But tell that to the Southern Baptists around here! To them all snakes are evil, so they go out of their way to shoot, run over, or hack to death any snake they see, even the innocuous little garter snakes (harmless). Most snakes eat bugs and rodents. I welcome seeing a black snake in my garden. Around here they're only supposed to get to 5' in length, but I've seen them as big as 8' and maybe bigger. I've made it part of my duty to inform locals that snakes are good and that they should just let them be.

Of course, if I saw a copperhead or rattler on this property, I'd grab my .22 and send that critter to snake heaven, but all other snakes are welcome...