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defoliated pine saplings
Friday, June 3 2016
Gretchen had to drive down to New Paltz this morning to do one of her presentations at a high school encouraging kids to make ethical choices with respect to non-human animals. So her job of walking the dogs fell to me. I took them on a loop through the forest from the Farm Road to the Stick Trail, losing them somewhere on the Funky Pond highlands. Up there, I saw a number of White Pine saplings that had been completely stripped of their needles by caterpillars, leaving them looking like some completely unfamiliar form of plantlife. I read somewhere that evergreens cannot survive such defoliation, since they store so little energy.
The dogs were still in the forest after Gretchen returned home. She thought we shouldn't send out a search party because "they have to know when to come home." They ended up being out there more than five hours, a record. A little before 4:00pm, Ramona was the first to return. When Neville still hadn't reappeared a half hour later, Gretchen decided to go look for him. But just as she was preparing to set out, she heard him loudly drinking from a container of rainwater.
This evening, about an hour before my workday was to end, I drove over to Susan & David's house to begin a night of dogsitting there. Susan had said something about there being "lots of food" in the refrigerator, but I looked in there and didn't see much of interest. (I was also skeeved out by a carton of something purporting to be "vegan eggs.") It was a good thing I'd brought a bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos (the one vegan flavor of Doritos) and Chex Mix. It made for a junky, carb-heavy dinner, but I don't really care much about such things.
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