Tornado (?) ... Again

What do you do when you discover your sheep worming practices - have stopped working?  You medicate the flock; again.  Immediately.  Which means rigging a catch-pen, then wrangling 40 sheep. This situation was discovered when a ewe went down, and the vet called. (This isn't the tornado part yet; wait for it.)

 That ewe is fine now; but her lamb died; and we lost 2 more sheep; both of them not strong animals to begin with.  If you're losing animals- more can go down fast, if you don't act.  So; drop everything- and for several days we had a worming rodeo -
















Far above and beyond the call of duty, Sara and Tommy provided 98% of the muscle - and agility.

The vet thinks a major factor in our worm treatment being inadequate is - the worms are becoming resistant to the 'usual' medications.  We'll be changing several management practices to lessen the pressure on the sheep.  The previous years we had no problems.

They've responded quickly to the medication; now entirely back at work mowing wild parsnip, etc.

Oh, and the tornado.  We got hit by something last night; the damage is actually far more extensive than the previous event.

The Weather Service says that storm carried 70 mph winds - but I've been through hurricanes, and this looks worse- a lot worse.  Some of the damage is healthy trees just snapped off, from this MinJon apple to a mature sugar maple within sight of the house.  Some of the trees smashed are in a straight line; but some trees are down at different angles, like the winds were rotating.

 We've lost some very significant trees- tops broken out of several very big chestnuts- which we'd been encouraging large crowns on for better nut production.  For those familiar, M-241 may have to be entirely coppiced, M-096 has lost about 1/4 of the crown, M-073 may be snapped entirely off.  Plenty of big chestnuts survived, of course, but those trees have long records of great production...

A big loss- this Luscious Pear tree- set fruit with all this blossom - but more than 3/4 of the crown was broken out -

and...

The big butternut survivor that we've watched for decades- blew down, uprooted in spite of the ropes and anchors we put on it after the first tornado.  It lost the wind protection from the sheltering aspens - which all blew down, twisted

...  Big Momma is what we called her.  She's down right across our woods road.  And if you'll look behind the down tree - you'll see a young, totally healthy hackberry that was just broken over.

We have quite a few seedlings of Big Momma growing, and her progeny are all over the woods - but this is a real loss.

Now we get to play Pick-Up-Sticks.  Used to be a favorite of mine, 60 some years ago...