Journey to Olde England

The England I Had in Mind
Flower carts, high tea, antique book shoppes, thatched roofs, and James Herriot

                                                 The England I Landed In

It was not the England I had envisioned -nor was it the birth 'day' setting I could have ever created, but none-the-less, here I was ...completely unaware as to 'where' I was.  I stood for a long moment, taking it all in.  The unsuspecting traveller, while able to wash down their burgers, scones, fish & chips, and ice cream with an expresso or latte, can also find an Alchemy shoppe just to their left, right next to The Black Rose drinking establishment -AND according to the brick wall, as a bonus, one can also find Karma in that same direction.  Such a find!  If however, drinking, alchemy and karma are not to your liking, you can always ask the 25 ft. gender-specific, Star Wars guards to your right, what they enjoy doing for fun on a Saturday afternoon ...that is, unless the God-like alien above them isn't too deep into mind control.  If this all seems a little too surreal to take in, no worries, you can always find repose over at "little Japan" (to your right), or, back up just a few steps to the cafe on your left, sit for a spell, and clear your mind with the help of a good water pipe.  

The beauty of it all is that British Security is right there at your fingertips -just to the left of CP3O's knee and to the right of the ice cream cone.  Happy birthday to me!

The England I sought, while making the journey for the sole purpose of keeping my visa status legal in Sweden, I found 90 miles to the Northwest, and had to pay 20 GBP to see.

The Victorian Bakery ~which included several pieces of shortbread at half the admission price!

Some unusual games of chance ~ just think, all it takes is 1 ball to win ...it must truly be a game of skill!  I've known players in this day and age with many balls who had no skill what-so-ever!

                                     The diffused light and the smell of leather

I spent 2 days getting to know the British better -they are quite a lively group.  When I did finally tire of strolling through the villages, I managed to find some lovely paths to explore down by the River Severn.

                        With fruit right off the vine and still warm from the sun ...

                                  and surrounded by the colors of autumn ...

                                                  I sat down on the rocks,

                                  and cooled my weary feet in the River Severn.

(note: Unfortunately, after giving my feet a good soak, I chose to explore the area a little further upstream.  Following the water's edge, I turned a corner and came face-to-face with a nuclear power plant -yep, right on the shores of the River Severn.  My jogging has improved immensely)!

                                                    Lessons learned:

Look for dead fish before you soak your feet in just any ol' river,

&

How to catch a man in Shrewsbury

                               Some lessons in this blog are better than others!

Back to the Goats

With the bulk of the studies now behind me, I have been able to return to the more practical aspect of training.  It is somewhat humbling to see how my timing and once 'clear' cues have deteriorated.  There's nothing that can snap me back into shape like the expression on a goat's face, when he clearly doesn't have a clue as to what I want.  Perhaps it's the natural 'yellow' of a goat's eyes, or the horizontal, rectangular shape of their pupils as they focus upwards in my direction, but whatever it is, they have mastered the gaze of intimidation. 

oh yeah??

I became so intrigued by their expressions, that I started to do a little reading.  A fellow blogger named 'guernyjourney@blogspot' posted the photos below, which substantiate the fact that a goat's eyeballs can rotate within the eye socket. Note that position he marked on the slope of the nose remains the same in both photos, while the angle of the pupil changes.   All this -the rectangular pupils and the rotating eyeballs -so that the goat can better see my cues and ignore them!

       Below is a photo of my trainer, posing nicely at his home -our local 4H-Club.

Benjamin is 100% goat, and he seems to enjoy his elevated status.  If he chooses not to do a behavior I've asked him to do, which results in no slice of apple, he has learned that that he can slightly lower his head in my direction, and I will quickly jump out of harm's way. This seems to please him greatly.  I know this because he wiggles his tail, while he emits a strange little sound that, without a doubt, is a goat-giggle.  

Not Benjamin, but a prime example of a 'goat-giggle'

He really should be more grateful.  As of 3 weeks ago, he was scheduled to be euthanized.  The reason? -he tends to be aggressive to the guests who visit the goat house.  The Club chose to neuter him, thinking this would resolve the problem, but it only served to make him unattractive to any other farm who might be willing to take on his case.  I championed his cause -stating that he is a very talented goat; albeit somewhat stubborn, who's now in the process of learning all sorts of wonderful cues and engaging behaviors; certainly a clever goat. The end result is that I now am in charge of correcting his aggressive charges at 5-year-olds.  sigh.

A clever goat, indeed!

                                                      Lessons learned:

Never turn your back on something with horns this size!

Their Lives on Paper

The stillness of the year returns in Autumn.  The berry-pickers have left the rocky shorelines, and only footprints remain on the sandy beaches of the Stockholm Archipelago. 

Campfires are no longer for marshmallows, they're for warmth to offset  the chill of Autumn evenings.  Marketplaces sell their cloudberry jams, and the thought of searching for mushrooms creates a fanatical glaze in the eyes of most Swedes I know!

With the thesis writing now completed, I want to taking some long morning walks in the woods, while the air is still richly scented with  evergreens and damp moss.  Soon enough, the first icy frosts will crystallize the forests, and my sense of smell with go into deep denial.

The days spent with the little wildcats have gradually transcended from my memory -onto sheets and piles of data, with some 3,200 minutes of their lives now nothing more than permanent impressions locked within my often inadequate words.  I'd like to hope that the research would instill some "training" awareness in wildlife facilities who are still in the process of implementing enrichment programs, or perhaps even go so far as to change the lives of animals in captivity for the better, but the transparency of that thought only reflects my overly optimistic, and sometimes unrealistic nature.  Small steps ...small steps.

So, with the smell of birch wood smoke and morning fog hanging low in the air these days, I'll take a little time to walk into the forest, breathe in all the earthy smells, enjoy the changing colors, pick some kanterelles to later saute in garlic and butter, and then simply sit back and take in the incredible stillness of Sweden's autumn.

Lesson learned:

Light a fire, and keep the windows open

 

The Writer

Proceed with caution ...thesis writing ahead!

                                                                           Lucrecia as Poetry                                         Salvador Rosa                                                                                                                                                                                                    

The bloggie will be allowed to blog again as soon as the first draft of her thesis is completed!

Lesson learned:

Procrastination is an evil thing!

The Blues of Summer

...Imagine a country where 17% of the ground coverage is wild blueberries.

...Imagine a summer sky and a sea so blue that it becomes difficult to determine where the blueberries end and the scenery begins.

...Imagine buckets and buckets of tiny antioxident wonders in pancakes ...pies ...muffins

and tarts.

I close my eyes and see nothing but a mass of blue. My fingers are permanently purple. My back, rounded as a tortoise I once tried to train, and if I tried to quickly stand up straight, I'm certain I'd fracture several vertebrae.   

And no matter how long it's been since the sun and moon exchanged places in the sky, I can't seem to stop picking. 

 

I'm told it's a condition that strikes 
unsavy animal trainers every July here in Sweden.  This year, I tried to counter-act my harvesting compulsion by bringing my son along to utter verbal reality checks every hour, on the hour.  It helped somewhat, but there always seemed to be one last "perfect" berry that just had to be plucked. 

After sketching the nearby artist's cottage, and monitoring my progress over the course of several hours, my son finally got my attention.  Even with my head in the bushes, I heard the smultron cider cork pop, and the sound of the cool, bubbling brew filling two glasses.

Lesson Learned

Summer in Sweden is bewitching

The tiny 'smultrons'

 If 17% of Sweden's ground-cover also contained these,

 I'd be dead by now!







The Fairy Creature

In Scottish mythology, Cat Sith is a fairy creature, sometimes a witch, resembling a large black cat with a white spot on its chest -notorious for haunting

the Scottish Highlands. 

The creature can move in silence,

 and strike before its seen.  

Cat Sith is legendary and ferocious,

with a bold and fiery spirit,

and of all the Scottish wildlife,

it is the creature considered to be

the most "untameable".
                                           Kerry Kilshaw

Leaving the Highlands always seems a little surreal to me  -as if one should pass through a misty veil that separates the wilderness from the city of Edinburgh.  Perhaps it was there, I just didn't see it. Instead, I had allowed my mind to sway back and forth between a wakeful state and slumber, as the bus ride transported me back towards the city -leaving all the waterfalls and heather-covered mountains of the Highlands somewhere behind that veil of mist.

Upon my arrival in Edinburgh, I took time to settle into my B&b before pulling out the research papers (all 3,200 minutes of them!), and turning on the computer.  It's an odd feeling in this age of technological dependency, to press the "start" button on  a computer -only to find oneself  starring at a totally black screen.  I fortunately had done a backup on the portable device back home before I left Sweden.  If I hadn't, the research, the blog, and this blogger would all have come to an untimely, dramatic end.  Heart failure is not a joking matter!

Two weeks have passed since the burial of my computer, and now all is well.  The research for the first writing deadline has been completed, and I'm slowly starting to gather up speed for the second stage of the project.  I love the process of writing.  It forces me to sift through a multitude of details -a high class junkyard in my case, in order to find the core of what's  truly important -and in this project, I believe I have.

To be honest, when I first began the research, I knew very little about cats -in fact, I wasn't much of a cat person at all.  I respected their independence, but I really didn't understand it.  However, studying these little creatures for the last 3 months has surprisingly taught me a great deal about myself.  They taught me - despite all the research that's been done, and all the conclusions that other people have drawn, that a trainer and an animal start their relationship with a clean slate ...that you shape the relationship with love, first and foremost, before you ever reach for a reinforcer.

Very few people have attempted to train a European or Scottish Wildcat, and those who have, generally have used a 'trial and error' method -which typically ends in an 'error'.  During my training sessions with the European wildcats, I attempted to use a new training method developed at the University of North Texas.  I will go more into detail in the next blog, but for now, let me just say -It was highly effective! 

Untameable? -perhaps. 

Untrainable? -not in the least.

Lesson Learned:

You don't always have to love

only that which loves you back

                                                         

                                                           Mike Tomkies

                                                            Naturalist

An Chat Fiadhaich

"Na Bean D'on Chat Gun Lamhainn"  

"Touch Not the Chat bot a Glove" 

(Olde Gaelic Saying)

 

To date, the meaning of the old saying above seems to be somewhat vague...depending if one reads the word 'bot' as 'but', or just as it is, which would then mean in Gaellic 'without'. In the highlands of Scotland, however, it clearly is clan specific - and historically  the inference most likely shifted in proportion to either the battle at hand, or the miel 'in hand'.   As for my first encounter with the phrase, I read the words to mean that one should wear a glove before touching a wildcat, which clearly made good sense to me, but to the 14 clans that make up the "Clan Chattan Association" (translation = the Clan of Cats ...yes, there is such a thing!), it was a warning to anyone who threatened any member of their clan

Along with many other interesting tales, I was led to believe that the Scottish Wildcat was much larger, and much more fiesty than its European counterpart, but I'm happy -and quite relieved to say that this only seems to be a spin-off from the animal's legendary fame -one well-earned after the creature survived the ice-age and then moved on to a 9,000-year reign of terror in the British Isles.

Upon my arrival at the Scottish wildlife park, I was greeted by 3 very lively female wildcats, and 1 easy-going ol' Tom.  The Tom and his mate live together in 2 enclosures that fortunately have been opened up to give them a little more leg- room. This extra space was needed for the expansion of their family 7 weeks ago.

                                          (see "Kitt" and "Katt" below)



 









The other 2 female cats live in a separate enclosure, but conveniently still  within view of their neighbors.  This makes for better spying and intimidation practices,  extremely gratifying  activities that occur whenever there's a lull in the action.  Time in between the spying and intimidation festivities is spent stalking creatures that get too close to their enclosures, chasing butterflies, playing tag-and-swat with each other, and for the family unit -there is always the occasional hiss and growl that keeps the kids in-line when they practice their hunting skills on the black tips of their parents' tails !

It's a very different feline energy that exists here in the Highland enclosures.  There's much more cat-to-cat interaction and playing going on.  I have yet to see any of the cats display fearful or stress-related behaviors towards the zookeepers or even the most unruly of the park's guests. 

My goal over the next 2 weeks is to try and understand the variables that might be contributing to such behavioral differences between the Swedish cats and the Scottish cats.

One of the walkways and a small portion of the enclosure

I've begun the process by looking at the enclosures themselves. With an overall "Laura Ashley meets Cirque du Soleil" kind of ambiance in  the Highland's design, they are a bit smaller than the Swedish enclosures, but still  nicely forested inside -giving the cats many resting, playing  and perching areas.  The most striking difference, however, is that of the aerial walkways -which run like monorail tracks for gerbils on speed throughout what appears at first glance to be Scotland's entire network of remaining forests.  There's no shortage of places for the cats to go as  the walkways lead them over red squirrel and wildbird feeding stations, directly above and across visitor trails, around both sides of the pine martin's enclosure, and if the park should ever choose, the doors that lead to the other cats' enclosure could even be opened up -thus making for one giant wildcat metropolis and I'm quite certain, the speedy exodus of one particular pine martin. 

Tomorrow, I shall have a look at the zookeeper's daily routine with the cats -more specifically, their feeding schedule, enclosure cleaning schedule, enrichment and training, vet check-ups, health-care procedures, and any other information that the 'keepers' might be able to provide.

Clearly, something here is making a difference -thankfully.

Lesson learned:

Whatever one thinks they know about Scotland,

 the tales -just like the country, definitely become more grandious and colorful
the further north one goes.
                                   carol