Snowshoeing just requires that you put one foot in front of the other

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

Blame it on weather or maturity, but we hadn't explored the terrain surrounding our new Sandhill Llama Farm in the way we typically have other places where we've dropped roots in the past.

Abbie, Mat and Suzie embrace the cold

For one thing, we can see all of the 18 acres from the house. We know where to watch the deer pop through the fence line or the turkeys march along the edge of the hay field.

Motivated by recaptured youth, we patrolled the perimeter on show shoes in December's single-digit temperatures. The youth came in the form of two 20-something nephews who spent the Christmas holiday with us.

Abbie, Mat and Mat's girlfriend, Suzie, live in D.C. but embraced the snow and cold with childish enthusiasm -- well, at least the snow.

We equipped everyone with the smaller, modified version of bear paw snowshoes popular today. Vinyl stretched over tubular metal replaces the traditional ash frames strung with rawhide strips. They are lighter and more maneuverable.

In our yards, mow is less

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

OSHKOSH — How did tradition, professional consensus and neighborhood peer pressure arrive at the unsustainable conclusion that we should surround our homes with a monoculture of cool season grasses?

Lawn. It covers 92 percent of our suburbs. We keep it alive in this unnatural environment by soaking it with purified water and burning fossils fuels to cut back the growth we have stimulated.

Prof. Doug Tallamy, who chairs the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, suggested a standard for evaluating our yards a bit more thoughtful than making everything the same. How about we choose plants based on how many species of caterpillars they support?

Coming down from the sandhill

In several of these columns, I've described events happening "up on the sandhill we call home."

From the threatened Blandings turtle crossing through the yard, to the screetch owl in the rafters of the barn, to the adventure of cutting a wasp nest out of a tree in the llama pasture, a lot of nature happened on that sandy hill outside of Hortonville.

But we no longer call the sandhill home.

Plans for a four-lane highway bypass across the road, running through the farm field where I counted cranes, watched tom turkeys in full display and saw deer gather by the dozens in the evening, was not something we cared to hang around to witness. That and thoughts of growing older in a two-story house with the maintenance of an oak woods sent us looking for a new place in the country.

Wolf hunt grey areas addressed

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com 

Not many people are neutral on Wisconsin’s wolf hunt. They represent nature free and wild to you. Or they are a threat to be feared by you.

What if you owned livestock in an area where wolves roam? What if your cultural traditions held them to be sacred?

These and other points of view will be explored fully at a program on Wisconsin’s wolves 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 13, at Mosquito Hill Nature Center, N3880 Rogers Rd., New London. It is a chance to harden your position on wolves or better understand the other side of the issue.