More Reasons to Love New Hampshire

Drought has hit New Hampshire.  Laura Knoy, on New Hampshire Public Radio,  was talking about it my whole ride in to work this morning. 

When I arrived at work, I talked to a woman who lives in Pelham, who told me her lawn had turned brown but the main problem where she lives is not drought, but flooded basements.  

Flooded basements, in the middle of a drought? I asked.

Beavers.  The trouble was beavers.

Beavers have dammed a creek which runs along the back yards of  a dozen homes and it has backed up and flooded basements. One of the neighbors went out and shot some beavers and tried to break down their dam. (No easy thing, considering the construction. Not for nothing the beaver is the mascot of MIT.) Compared to this neighbor, my recent attack on the hornets' nest was a mere police action. This beaver thing was all out total war. 

The lady who reported this to me, Tammy, was still trying to make up her mind about the morality of the attack.  "It's not as if you can sit down and negotiate with the beavers," she observed.  "But they are very cute. And my other neighbor, who is a pigeon person was very upset."

A pigeon person?  

"He's in a pigeon club," Tammy said.

"A pigeon club?"

"They live in a coop and they are the type of pigeon which flies off somewhere with a message and then returns home. I don't know much about it. But he has no family, just a girlfriend of thirty years and these pigeons."

"is it just pigeons?"

"Also a few chickens and a rooster. That rooster is one stupid rooster.," Tammy said. "He sounds off all day long, not just at the break of day."

"One of my neighbors has been thinking about getting chickens," I told her. "But she was afraid of stepping on eggs all around the place."

"That's why you get a coop. Then they lay them in the coop. Plus, you need the coop because of night predators."

"Like what exactly: predators?"

Fox

"Foxes, mostly. But in New Hampshire, also fisher cats."

"I think we may have those in the woods behind us," I said. My neighbors had told me sound of the screeching I had heard at night was fisher cats. 

"If you've heard what sounds like someone strangling an infant, at night that's a fisher cat," Tammy said.

Fisher cat

"Then we have fisher cats. We had coyotes in Maryland, which everyone denied but we heard them at night," I told her.  ":Had to record them before people would believe it. People were in deep denial about the coyotes." 

coyote

"Same with fisher cats. " Tammy said.  "Nasty little beasts. Worse than coyotes."

"We have wild turkeys in the woods."

"Oh," Tammy said,  "Those are just New Hampshire squirrels. Very common."

Not my favorite neighbor


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So that's a morning conversation around the water cooler at work in New Hampshire. 

In Washington, we talked about the stupid things politicians and pundits had said. With Donnie John and Bill O'Reilly on the loose, I can only imagine what conversations in Washington are like now.