Small Town Life

We have another storm heading our way this weekend and are still recovering from the last two. Many of the older residents are finally venturing outside after five days of being snowbound. The streets are still a mess with what used to be six foot tall piles of snow at almost every intersection now melting into dirty, icy, rock hard, four foot high lumps of snow. Every street except Main is either rutted, icy, and slushy or has been plowed down to a rock hard table covered with a thin layer of ice. Since most of the sidewalks on the side streets are still not shoveled walking is treacherous. Diving is not much better.

The storm has been hard on us, some more than others, but the ones that have suffered the most are the wild animals. I went by the grain elevators last week and saw a large flock of turkeys picking at some spilled grain they had found on the ground. A farmer I talked to over the weekend told me he saw a herd of around fifty antelope standing in a corn field near the highway when he was driving to town . Other people have seen pheasants standing along side county roads near their houses. All the animals are looking for food.

When the first storm hit my husband knew the pheasants, quail, and prairie chicken would be having a hard time finding food so he went over to one of the grain elevators and bought enough corn to fill two 15 gallon garbage cans. He then drove out to the country and spread it in areas where the birds could find it but still have cover; windbreaks, culverts , and dense tall grass. The last thing he wanted to do was create fast food outlets for the coyotes by spreading it out on top of the snow in the middle of an open area.

After thinking about it some more he knew that the little he was doing wasn’t enough and started making some calls. When he was done he had about 1,500 pounds of donated waste grain in twelve 30 gallon barrels, a flat bed truck and driver to bring it all to a central point in town, and a soon to be published article in the town newspaper. The article informed people that the grain was available free to anyone who wanted to help out the wild birds. It requested that farmers coming to town stop by and pick up some of the grain to spread under any cover available on their CRP land. As of today only four barrels of grain are left but my husband said, if needed, he will be able to get more. My husband is definitely one of the good guys.


No Bloghuh? post today.


Read more about things that mystify others at participating Bloghuh? blogs this week:

Aprosexic
Blue Witch
bob's yer uncle
Depthmarker
Jen&HerBoat
Kitchen Witch
La-Que-Sabe
Purple Pen
Quixotic Evil
Who Knows Where Thoughts Come From