by Winding Pathways | Feb 20, 2025 | Mammals
Night activity
Coyotes have moved into town. They’re showing well within huge cities and towns from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Sometimes early news reports of urban coyotes bring concern among residents. Are they dangerous? If you listen to media or follow social media then you might reach one conclusion. And, if you use logic you come to a more reasonable conclusion.
Long Relationship With Coyotes
Coyotes are secretive creatures.
Our relationship with coyotes goes back decades. In the fall of 1971 Rich worked for a farm chemical company in Idaho, delivering fertilizer to wheat farms. One day after he and a farmer unloaded the truck, they sat on the tailgate eating lunch. Across the harvested wheat field, a coyote emerged from the woods and pranced along the field’s edge. Although he was far away, we saw him successfully catch a tiny animal, probably a mouse.
The farmer said, “There goes my best employee. That coyote works night and day catching mice that eat my crops. He never complains, doesn’t expect a paycheck, and completely takes care of himself.”
Coyote Expansion
Back then coyotes mostly lived in rural areas from the Midwest to the Pacific Ocean and north to the Arctic. They never abandoned their rural roots, but over the years enterprising coyotes moved into towns and cities and expanded their range to the Atlantic. Now they’re common across nearly all of North America. Although rarely spotted, coyotes have moved into town.
Adaptable Coyotes
Coyotes are amazingly cunning and adaptable animals. Their much larger cousins, timber wolves, were trapped and shot to extirpation in most areas. Despite centuries of human persecution, coyotes kept expanding. Unlike wolves, they learned to adapt to living in close proximity to humans.
Local Coyotes
For many years a coyote pair maintained a den and raised litters of pups in a den about 300 yards from our house. We don’t see them often but spot their tracks crossing our lawn after a new snow. Every once in a while, a distant ambulance or police siren warns motorists to pull over. Often “our” coyotes respond by singing just after the siren stops. Sometimes they yip and yap with no obvious triggering sound. We love hearing them. YouTube has many videos of coyotes howling.
Diet
Tell tale sign of coyotes
Although a coyote’s favorite meal is a mouse, cottontail, or other small mammal, they enjoy a varied diet that can include fruit, dead roadside animals, discarded pizza slices in an urban alley, and a host of other goodies.
Are Coyotes Dangerous to People?
Everything’s relative. Since 340 million Americans live close to coyotes it’s amazing how few incidents occur. They do happen, with the highest number of coyote bites happening in California. For detail check out publications at Urban Coyote Research Project.
Contrast that with deaths caused by dogs. Their bites cause an average of 43 human fatalities a year.
Are They Beneficial
They sure are. Drive through suburbia on a June evening and odds are that juvenile cottontail rabbits are hopping on lawns, in gardens, and across roads. Do the same drive in the fall and only an occasional bunny may be sighted. If left unchecked both rural and urban areas would be overrun with mice, rabbits, voles, and rats. Thank coyotes and owls, hawks, and foxes for keeping prey numbers at a low enough level to make gardening possible,
How In the World is “Coyote” pronounced
We prefer the Idaho pronunciation “coyOTE” with two syllables. Others say coyoTEE with three syllables. Take your pick.
Back to the story of the farmer. After he spotted the coyote stalking mice in his field he yelled out, “Thanks, fella. Keep up the good work!” Anyone might say the same when they spot a coyote anywhere……but be cautious. Never approach one closely, particularly if it seems ill or injured. Keep a distance away. Usually, it will slink off as soon as it spots a person.
by Winding Pathways | Feb 13, 2025 | Mammals, Nature
Beavers moved into town. Even a large city like Cedar Rapids.
Surprise
An amazing sight greeted us In December 2024, as we walked a circular trail around a tiny unnamed stream in the heart of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A beaver dam spanned the narrow waterway. Beaver-felled trees lined the bank while bark-peeled branches floated in the still water.
Nearby were two busy roads, houses, and apartment buildings. Tall downtown buildings were just a mile away. So were factories. These beavers are urban.
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Cedar Lake, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
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A beaver chew next to urban stream.
Urban Beavers
Beavers in a city of 140,000 people! 100 years ago, no one would have imagined that beavers moved into town. But today North America’s largest rodent has moved into cities across the continent. They thrive despite noise and human activity.
Watching City Beavers
Chewiing
Lots of people enjoy urban birding, and beaver-watching is just as fun. Their territory is easy to find. Fetch a lawn chair, dress warmly, bring binoculars, and perch within sight of beaver activity in the early morning or late afternoon when they’re likely most active.
What to Look For
No animal leaves such visible and durable calling cards as does a beaver family. We walk trails along rivers and often spot trees felled by the sharp teeth and powerful jaw muscles of ambitious beavers. They relish eating the thin nutritious bark covering branches. Beavers leave so much debris around it’s hard to miss finding an active colony.
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chips
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Beavers slide
While waiting for beavers to appear keep your eyes peeled. Beavers are a keystone species that alters its environment by cutting trees, digging den holes in the bank, and backing up streams. Their activity attracts many other species, including muskrats, mink, and a host of songbirds that frequent the water’s edge.
An Amazing Resurgence Follows Sad Exploitation
When early Europeans crossed the Atlantic, they found a beaver-filled continent. Experts guess there were somewhere between 60 million and 400 million of the furry animals from coast to coast. That soon changed. European beavers had been hunted and trapped for ages and weren’t common, so newly arrived Americans almost immediately began trapping the huge rodents.
Legendary mountain men combed the Rockies to find plentiful beavers and hundreds of thousands of pelts were shipped eastward in canoes by Canadian voyageurs. Many were shipped to Europe. In the days before synthetic insulation fur kept people warm, and fashionable beaver hats were made from their hair.
Decline and Ethics
The fur trade lasted about 250 years until the late 1800s when the animals had been extirpated from vast parts of their original range. Then came happier news. The value of beaver pelts sank as hats went out of fashion, trees rebounded along streams, and new conservation laws and ethics arose. That started a slow comeback, and now beavers seem to be everywhere.
Two Species
There are two beaver species – the North American and Eurasian. Both are similar but the Old-World species is slightly larger. Each species has made a dramatic comeback. American beavers were released in Finland and Patagonia, where they now thrive as invasive species.
Where Are the Beaver Dams?
Children love reading books about beavers and know that they build dams. Well, not always. These ambitious animals are smart. If their pond, lake, or river is deep enough there’s no need to build a dam. They simply tunnel into the bank to create a home or, sometimes, build a dome-shaped house of sticks and mud that’s usually easy to spot.
Crossing a small stream.
However, if their stream is narrow and shallow beavers spend nights changing it. They’ll build an amazingly sturdy and often long dam spanning the stream, creating water deep enough for good swimming and hiding a bank tunnel entrance below the surface. Beavers are engineers.
Easy to Watch Urban Beavers
Years ago, beavers were hard to find, even in rural areas. Not anymore. They’re so common in urban areas that people can enjoy them without making a long drive.
by Winding Pathways | Jan 30, 2025 | (Sub)Urban Homesteading, Energy Efficiency
Radon is an unwelcome house guest that we’re careful to boot out. We welcome wild turkeys, barred owls, and a local opossum to visit but radon comes uninvited.
Our house was built in 1947 atop an ancient sand dune formed when the glaciers receded around 9,000 years ago. Fierce Southwest winds blew sand from the Cedar River up to where our house was built thousands of years later. Down in that sand or the rock beneath it is uranium. As it degrades it turns into radon that percolates up and enters our house.
Noble Gas
Physicists consider radon a noble gas, but there’s nothing noble about what it can do to human health. Radon is a stealthy gas that is odorless, invisible, and tasteless. It’s the number two cause of lung cancer in America behind smoking.
Mitigating Radon
When we bought our home in 2010 the former owner had just installed a radon mitigation system. Basically, it’s a fan that vents radon outside. The gas has a half-life of only 3.8 days. That means half of it will have degraded into potentially nasty polonium in about four days. However, these gasses are diluted and break down quickly and pose little danger outside a building. Eventually, they further degrade into lead.
Alpha Emitter
Radon is a radioactive alpha emitter. A single sheet of paper can stop its particles. The particles are dangerous when breathed in and lodged in the lungs. There they can cause lung cancer.
Prevention
Prevention is simple and involves venting radon from the house to the outside. On a December morning Neil McDonald, a licensed radon mitigation specialist, visited Winding Pathways. He replaced our worn-out radon fan with a new one that has more oomph.
“Any house built after 2015 likely has a radon venting system built into it that channels the gas outdoors. Probably the majority of older houses have some radon inside and lack a mitigation system. Radon can be anywhere but many areas of the country have especially high concentrations of it and the Midwest is one of the worst regions,” he said while he replaced our fan.
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Simple replacement
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Neil McDonald, Radon mitigation specialist
Test Kits
Uneven is good.
A few years ago, we wondered if our radon removal system was working so we bought two test kits at a local home store. We ran a test with our system going and mailed it to a lab. It showed a pcl/L level under 2. Then we turned the system off and retested it. Radon levels were about 5. Our system works! The government recommends action in any building with a level of 4 or above. Test kits and electronic testing devices can be purchased at many home improvement and hardware stores.
When Is Radon Most Concentrated?
“Radon tends to be most concentrated in homes during the summer and winter when windows are closed and furnaces or air conditioners are running. Generally, levels are lower in spring and fall when people keep their windows open, allowing the gas to flow outside. Concentrations are usually highest in basements,” he continued.
Replacing the Machine is Part of Our Maintenance
We knew our old radon fan was on its last legs when its noise level increased. That’s when we invited Noel to visit and install a new fan. Switching it out only took about an hour.
Helpful Sites
Helpful information on radon can be found at the Environmental Protection Agency’s website. Googling Radon Mitigation takes a person to many sources. For Iowans, Health and Human Services is a helpful site. Our tax dollars doing good work to keep people safe. Radon mitigation companies operate in nearly all larger towns. We hired MidAmeria Basement Systems to replace our fan.
Making sure radon is not a problem is similar to having health checkups and cleaning the woodstove and gas fireplaces. Maintenance! We continue to welcome our wild turkeys and possums to our yard while kicking radon out of the house.
by Winding Pathways | Jan 23, 2025 | Nature
In late autumn 2024, we had only light snow. The thin coverings of snow each revealed a procession of night visitors the next morning in tracks. We got especially excited by one set of tracks. Our possum’s presence! It is our favorite opossum. We hadn’t seen him (or her) for several months and feared that the animal may have been hit by a car or suffered some other death.
The sparse snow cover made excellent tracking conditions. We were delighted to follow our possum’s tracks as they wandered past our bird feeder to our compost bin.
Opossum tracks are distinctive. The animal’s toes are almost semicircular with widely spaced toes. Raccoon toes, in contrast, are more like human toes and are arranged almost in parallel.
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note splayed fingers
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Raccoon paws are more like hands.
The possum wasn’t alone. We also discovered that a coyote had passed through our yard, deer had lingered a while and checked out the bird feeder, and a house cat visited, probably seeking a tasty mouse for dinner. We found mouse tracks but no evidence that one of these tiny rodents became the cat’s dinner. Sometimes a fox trots by.
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Hunting
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Distinctive tracks
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Fox usually trot with one paw in front of the other.
Although we have written about tracking before, we find that tracking is fascinating and a good way to enjoy winter outdoors. A light snow creates perfect conditions. The Old Farmer’s Almanac posts a useful guide on how to identify animal tracks. We are happy to re-discover our possum’s presence.
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Three-pronged turkey tracks.
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Easy to spot
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Distinctive
by Winding Pathways | Jan 16, 2025 | (Sub)Urban Homesteading, Garden/Yard, Garden/Yard
Seed Catalog Reading
We trudged through the snow to retrieve our first garden catalog. Excited! So, we wondered what our gardening friends thought of about the best garden vegetables to grow in tiny spaces. They replied about small spaces and in general.
Garden seed catalogs hold spring’s promise in your hands. These seem to sprout in mailboxes during winter’s depth. In addition to being fun reading on dark winter nights, they help plan springtime seed planting.
Changing How We Garden
We have plenty of space at Winding Pathways to create a big garden, but we decided to grow vegetables on two small garden plots years ago. Their modest size makes them easy to manage, but mostly we wanted to learn how to grow a maximum amount of the best garden vegetables from a small area. Not everyone has large spaces and as people age adapting to how they continue to enjoy a practice, like gardening, is important.
During the 2024 growing season, our gardens produced an amazing amount of food. We saved money by providing ultra-fresh pesticide-free vegetables and enjoyed nearly year-round tasty vegetables.
Readers Share Their Best Garden Vegetables
We asked a few seasoned gardeners what their favorite small space crop is.
Master gardener, Iris Muchmore, has a small backyard garden. Her absolute favorite planting is a Sun Gold Tomato. She points out that tomatoes aren’t really vegetables. They’re a fruit, but most folks consider them a vegetable. “The Sun Gold tomato is indeterminate, tasty, as sweet as candy, and productive. Children love them. One plant will grow up to seven feet tall and produce all the tomatoes a family can eat with some extras for neighbors. In 2024 we enjoyed tomatoes from June until frost from one plant,” she said.
Jackie Hull is a seasoned Virginia gardener. Her favorite vegetables are string beans, both green and yellow. She’s 83 years old and grows beans in large pots on her porch. “It makes gardening easy. There’s no weeding, only watering and picking,” she remarked.
Tasty high summer garden fruits and vegetables.
Bruce Bachman & Nancy Sauerman buy from Pinetree Garden Seeds in Maine. They comment that their favorite garden vegetable is a “…tie between tomatoes and green beans. Although potatoes, chard, and broccoli are close seconds.” Then they added with a laugh, “Oh! forgot summer and winter squash! Oops, and okra and spring lettuce.” All favorites of theirs.
Iowa Gardener, Dave Kramer, responded by stating, “I like the challenge of growing different tomato varieties and growing string beans”
Kurt Rogahn also weighed in, choosing tomatoes as his favorite. “Tomato is my favorite. The ones in the store are so tasteless! I like different varieties— red, yellow, orange, big and small.”
Jill Jones, could hardly decide as she likes just about all vegetables. And, she prepares delicious dishes from her garden produce.
Joann Hoffmann weighed in with these thoughts: She starts greens in a colander!
“I would say my favorite is a nice salad mix with arugula, red lettuce and green lettuce. You can grow it in a colander. It’s an early vegetable, likes cool weather. It makes a great base for salads all summer long. You can start it in April when it’s too early for other vegetables. As the season progresses you can add kale, swiss chard, turnup greens, mustard greens, mint, peppermint, tomatoes, cucumbers, spinach, and cilantro. Try it and enjoy great tasting salads all summer long!!”
Our Favorite Vegetable For Small Spaces
We’ve gardened for about 50 years, growing all sorts of vegetables, and are constantly experimenting with new varieties. Along the theme of Small spaces” here is our number one favorite:
Swiss Chard: Chard is a green delicious when steamed or raw in salads. We plant it in April and often eat young leaves within a month. Unlike spinach and lettuce, chard doesn’t bolt, or go to seed, and get bitter. So, we eat chard from the same clump for about five months without replanting. About two square feet of space produce all the chard we can eat. It’s an outstanding plant for folks who live in apartments and only can grow a few things in pots on the deck.
Susan Fellows is one of those people. “It’s not strong like the greens grown in the South and less strong than spinach.” She enjoys snipping off a few leaves, steaming them, and adding butter. Delicious and nutritious!
Swiss chard is the same species as beet but it’s been developed as a green vegetable. There are several varieties. All are good. Beet tops are also delicious when steamed, but they are a bit stringier and tougher than chard.
Number Two of Best Garden Vegetables
Green and yellow beans are our second favorite for our small space garden. We use two methods to create a constant harvest from June through October. We plant a small patch of bush beans in May. They produce beans quickly and the plot yields heavily for a month before the plants peter out. Anticipating this, we start another small bean plot several feet away about a month after the first planting. By the time the first plot is done, the second one starts producing like crazy. We also plant a row of pole beans next to a garden fence. They mature slower than bush beans but produce from August until frost. String beans provide great food for nearly every dinner for months.
Promise of spring
Enjoy leafing through winter garden catalogs and place seed orders early in anticipation of delicious 2025 eating. Be sure to put Sun Gold, string beans, and Swiss chard on the order list.
Some quality seed companies we buy from:
Pinetree Seeds, New Gloucester ME
Seed Savers, Decorah, IA
Gurney’s Seed and Nursery, Greendale, IN
Burpee, Warminster Township, PA
Jung Seeds & Plants, Randolph, WI
