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100 feet in 40 hours
Sunday, June 8 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Today was a beautiful, mostly-sunny day (at least initially), so I had no excuse not to take the dogs for a walk fairly soon after I'd drunk my coffee and absorbed my fill of the internet. I figured it had been long enough since I last saw the little porcupine on Friday that I could take the dogs down to the lake. So off we went down the Mossy Rock Trail, with Charlotte in the lead and Neville trailing well behind (as usual). A hundred feet or so from the house, a pair of phoebes in the woods (not their usual habitat!) seemed to get very upset with Charlotte and started divebombing her while making both their alarm call (a shriller of "phoebe!") and a sound I had never heard before: a click. It sounded so percussive that I thought they were maybe making it with their skeletons, but I later learned that this is a vocalization they make when particularly distressed. The only thing that could upset them like this would be if one of their recently-fledged babies were nearby.
When I got to the dock, I put my feet in the water and looked off across the slightly-choppy water. There were a couple people at the public dock fishing and someone somewhere was using a gas-powered weedeater, without which the outdoors would be uninhabitable. Eventually Neville arrived and lay on the plankwork connecting the floating dock to the lakeshore.
From there, I walked with Neville to beaver dams at the lake's outflow while Charlotte darted about chaotically. I wanted to keep Neville close in case she re-encountered that porcupine and started barking.
I'd nearly reached the cabin on the Old Lake Trail when Charlotte's barking began. It had that same frantic quality from Friday night and was coming from the same general area. I immediately ran down the trail to Neville (who was maybe 200 feet behind me). Fortunately, he was so exhausted by the walk that he didn't have the energy to go bounding back down the trail to Charlotte. So I went past him down to where Charlotte was barking. She quickly fell silent and I looked around for the porcupine. She wasn't being helpful at pointing me towards him, but I eventually saw the little guy on the ground between two closely-spaced tree trunks. As I snapped pictures and tried to get him to pose for a picture of his face, Neville showed up. So I redirected everyone to the task of hiking back to the cabin, leaving the little porcupine in peace. He'd only moved about one hundred feet in forty hours!
Back at the cabin, I turned my attention to the task of slightly redoing the outdoor wiring running to the vicinity of the propane tank. I left all the buried cable intact where it was buried, but I wanted to run the exposed outdoor romex inside PVC conduit between where it emerged beneath the entrance deck and the cabin wall. To do that, I had to pull it all back out through the wall, cut PVC to fit, thread the cable through, and push it back into the cabin basement. Getting under and then working beneath that entrance deck was not an easy thing to do with my back the way it was, and it probably would've been impossible a few days ago. After first doing some movements that had my back complaining, I found some positions I could work comfortably in.
The dogs and I started driving away from the cabin a little before 3:00pm and were home in about two hours using the scenic route through Middleburgh. When I rolled into the driveway, I saw Diane the cat there, not too far from an adult rabbit who has been hanging around. Evidently he's not concerned about a predator of Diane's size. He's also been good about refraining from obliterating our garden, though it's hard to guess why. Gretchen was already back from Connecticut and had spent most of the day reading out on the east deck.
[REDACTED]
Re-encountering that porcupine from Friday. Click to enlarge.
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