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The cows showed up this week. It’s hard to miss them. They smell. They leave the green fields looking like a cloud of locusts dropped in, shit on everything then evaporated. They wear bells on leather straps of different sizes and shapes. This makes more noise than you might expect in an otherwise silent holler. It’s bit like trying to sleep during a set by a steel band high on cheap weed.
Taking the recycling out today
Unlike other members of my family, I am not a cattle person. I don’t know anything about them. In fact, I have avoided learning anything at all. This is by design because I think cattle are just above sheep on the intelligence scale and only slightly more interesting, personality-wise. I do know that this cattle breed is native to Piemonte and their breed-specific musculature makes extremely delicious crudo/tartar. I enjoy this whenever I can. Their milk is used in several DOC cheeses, none of which have set my hair on fire but I do not turn them down when offered.
You want more cowbell? Freak
The cattle in my area stay lower in the winter and move higher in the summer. While local herds seem to move among the foothill fields that surround my place, other herds make transhumance, the ancient tradition of moving to high pastures for the summer, then reversing the process in the fall. It’s a common early summer sight in Alpine Italy, Switzerland and France (though in Maritime-Alps France it’s mostly sheep, yuck). Local villages make festivals around it. I would like to see this but have yet to.
I am working to understand the rationale behind the bells. Obviously if a cow escapes the flimsy electrified enclosure wire and disappears in the chestnut forest, a bell would prevent her from hiding from you. But some cows wear sonorous bells on thick leather straps, almost as big as their big dumb heads, while others have cheap clanky bells from vendors at the mercatino. I’ve seen massive bells at flea markets, often on carefully decorated leather collars, and around the necks of prized cows at local ag fairs. Younger cows sometimes don’t wear bells at all. Why?
High status cow? Cow on a leadership trajectory? The bell that was lying around the barn when she showed up without hers looking rode hard and put up wet?
Really high quality cows, high status ladies, seem to have the big bells and decorated collars. This helps me identify the Good Cows, but I see how this could be misleading. What if bell allocation is randomized and this cow is actually pretty ordinary?
What message is this bell/collar combo sending, to whom?
Bulls, I’ve observed, do not seem to wear bells at all. This adds a predictable gendered component to this analysis.
The only thing between me and that bull on the right is a single electric wire that did not seem to be functioning as designed. Hey, farmer, call me. I can fix that for you. Cheap rate.
When something startles them, 40 or so cattle running/jogging/walking quickly emit a metallic roar that echos up the holler and cancels out the ambient noise created by insects and birds. It is loud, but not unpleasant.
More than one lady has ripped off her bell when confronted by this coat
Fortunately for you, longtime and newbie Carpetblog reader, I made a sound file of my cows for you to enjoy. Download the WLC app and you can put it on a loop so you can imagine what a rural holler in northern Italy in June sounds like.
People complain a lot about ChatGPT. They say it is frequently WRONG. It HALLUCINATES. It consumes and spews a firehose of BULLSHIT. Because this frequently happens with people I interact with in my daily life, I avoid it in my online life.
One of my many new country-life hobbies is asking “WTF is that?” PlantNet helps me with plants, Merlin with birds, Skyguide with stars. Today I was stumped by a pawprint, a pile of shit and some holes in the leaves of my newly-planted eggplants.
“Maybe ChatGPT can handle this one with dignity,” I thought as I uploaded a photo of the paw print I saw in the mud where I park my car, across from my front door.
A large canid paw print in the mud
Typically I subscribe to the principle “if you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.” Sure, this could be a dog print. But I know the local dogs. No dogs this big run free in my tiny hamlet. Also, wolves are a verified thing.
After some bickering, ChatGPT confirmed: it’s most likely an Italian Wolf.
After this successful confidence building measure, I asked ChatGPT what shit in my woodshed and why. It came back with: FOX.
A pile of shit in my woodshed
“Key Identifiers:
Shape and Size: The scat is twisted and segmented, which is typical of carnivores/omnivores like foxes and martens.
Contents: It appears to contain many seeds and berry remnants, suggesting a fruit-heavy diet — very common for these animals in spring when berries and other vegetation become available.
Location: Found on a trail or open ground, another behavior common in foxes and martens, which often leave scat in visible locations to mark territory.”
Extra credit, ChatGPT, for illuminating detail. I do see foxes all the time. Answer accepted. That it was deposited in my woodshed has been received as an act of hostility to which I will respond at a later date.
Exercise three, “what are these holes in the eggplant leaves?”
A monkey could tell me “Slugs did it.” But I wanted to rule out the zebras.
After some suggested control techniques that inexplicably did not include salt, ChatGPT wished me “Best of luck with your eggplants — may they grow strong and slug-free! 🌱🦔” Thanks for the vote of confidence, Chat GPT! Will you be my friend?
I did not predict the follow-up:
“Would you like help tracking the foxes and the garden pests together, maybe with a camera setup?”
You said:
why not
ChatGPT said:
“Excellent choice — tracking both foxes and garden pests is not only helpful, it's fascinating. Here's how you can do it efficiently without a big investment.”
Hold up. A camera on the slugs? That’s sort of weirdo porn, innit? Fascinating seems to be doing a lot of hard work there, given what we know about slugs.
What do we know about slugs, anyway? Well, as a child of the Pacific Northwest, Carpetblogger knows a lot. In fact, this whole story gave an excuse to dig through the poorly-organized Carpetblog archive, which is not online anymore, for one of our favorite posts, from 8 March 2008. Location: Palaska Sokak, Istanbul. Night Slugs
Regular readers know that, over the past four years, members of my household and I have gone to war with various kinds of vermin: Cockroaches in a computer, rats in a washing machine, feral cats attached to a carpetdog's head, and of course, primates.
But lately, I have been struggling with a mysterious force that has challenged me in new and troubling ways. This adversary is particularly vexing because I have never once seen it, only wiped its slime off my shoes and the entry carpet in the mornings.
The Night Slugs
Our ground floor is more or less below ground, at about street sewer level. This has a lot more cons than pros. The house is poorly ventilated so at best, it smells musty fusty in the guest quarters. At worst, it smells like raw sewage, and not just when it rains. This doesn't deter as many guests as you might expect. We have issued a lot of frequent stayer cards with the caveat "management ignores complaints about the sewage."
Well, there's also the Night Slugs.
They come every night. Evidence of them is abundant -- every morning there are slivery trails of slime along the edge of the walls and cursive loops on the carpet. Now I can keep odd hours --coming home late, leaving for the airport early, arriving home early from the airport. I have never seen a Night Slug.
As a native of the Pacific Northwest, I know from slugs. Banana slugs. The great grey garden slug. The spotted leopard slug. I once saw a banana slug the length of my forearm in front of an outhouse (that outhouse was at Sammamish Bible Camp where I accepted Jesus into my heart in an unrelated incident, not in our backyard, k?). But even in my ancestral home, which far too often sheltered undomesticated animals, slugs were not allowed.
Because slugs were more common in my childhood than dogs and cats and sheep, I learned how to massacre them early -- cups of beer, a squirt of ammonia and best of all, salt. You have not LIVED until you've salted a slug and watched it instantly dehydrate like a living raisin.
I figured Turkish slugs would be no match for a native Slug Master like me. I placed salt all around the baseboards. Imagine my horror when there was no noticeable decrease in slug activity. Apparently Turkish slugs are immune to salt.
This frightens me. What kind of invisible mutant slug is immune to salt? But you know what? It doesn't frighten me half as much as some of these helpful slug hints that I found while searching for slug pictures. (It says it's a quiz, but they're all true. Proceed with caution. Highlight: Slugs produce mucus so strong that they can hang from it in midair to copulate, which they do, at the ends of stretchy mucus strings more than a foot long.) In fact, that list -- which could only be published in a Seattle paper -- derailed this whole post for a while.
So memo to guests: watch out for copulating slugs when you get up in the middle of the night. Management does not accept complaints about those, either.
Anyway, not to disparage its otherwise stellar slug coverage, but that Seattle Times helpful slug hints article is lost to time. Even ChatGPT couldn’t find it. No matter. Trust that I summarized the highlight.
Astute readers will recall that the roe-deer population — whether alive or dead — of my holler in the Ligurian Alps of Italy occupies mental real estate that I used to devote to things like generating income.
Driven back to Nice by the extortionate costs of heating an old stone house in winter in the mountains, I spent February and March sitting under my cheap and efficient heatpump powered splits, plotting against garden invaders and other enemies. This was also the last time I was warm.
One of several great things about living in Europe in The Current Environment is you can order stuff — like electric fence chargers, posts, wire, insulators and voltage testers — straight from China without any tariffs at all. Apparently French/Italians don’t use post setters, so I had to order one of those from China too. How do they set the corner posts? Pound them with their heads?
Mine’s red and sure seems heavier than 12lbs/5.5kgs. Clank! Clank! Clank! The whole valley wonders what misguided activity Vulcan’s weird foreign mistress is up to this time.
How is that I am familiar with post setters? I am the daughter of the Wire Wizard of Kent, Washington. I was pounding t-posts before puberty. I was stronger then probably.
There’s no point in planting anything here before mid-April so I’ve had plenty of time to design the fence architecture. Because I wasn’t sure what I would do if it didn’t work — the most plausible outcome — I delayed hooking it up to the charger. I futzed around with posts and insulators, optimizing the design to keep other non-Cervid garden destroyers out too.
Carpetblog subscribers live for this degree of suspense
I connected the charger to the car battery (no electricity in my woodshed). FUCK YAH! It turns out electric fences are really pretty easy.
Because my sister lives in Florida, which can only be attributable to all the electric shocks she received as a child, I had to use the tester to see if the fence is zapping.
An Easter miracle of 8000v! Those are young cherry trees wrapped in mesh due to a deer-attack from a few weeks ago in the background. They’re now safely within the perimeter. Also that sign is for me.
To be clear, we’re not just about process around here. Results matter! Not only is the fence working, no deers have come into the garden, which I could not wait to plant, so far this afternoon.
Extra posts are for peas, beans and raspberries.
I embrace that this moment might be the apex of my garden pest-related achievements — deers are the easy ones. I still have to cope with bugs and slugs and who the hell knows what else.
You had no idea how this would turn out, did you? Share your relief with everyone
Previous posts might have given the impression that my main roe deer problem is I find them dead in places I’d rather they not be. This is true but I also have problems with deer that are alive in places I’d rather they not be.
I am very excited about my garden. It will have ample water, wormy soil and full sun. Once spring is more aggressive, I will be ready to sow so that I might reap later in the summer. I want the capacity to feed myself in case of global economic and political collapse.
This plan is not without risks. That I have neither grown a big garden before nor have I ever successfully fed myself are the most obvious ones. I mitigate the risks I can and leave the rest to fate.
Roe deer are a very big threat to my garden. I have to keep them out. But how?
“You can ask Sam,” my sister suggested. “But he’s going to say shoot the fucking deer.”
My brother-in-law Sam is a legitimate move-cows-around-cowboy. The most important thing to know about Sam is that his solution to almost all problems is to shoot them.
As predicted, Sam told me to shoot the fucking deer.
The garden in winter after I dug it all up with my spade. You can’t see all the worms but there are a lot. It’s 8m x 2m and only 3 sides need a deer fence because of the hedge
His solution was impractical for reasons I don’t need to explain.
Put "deer fence” in YouTube and a lot of colorful content emerges, mostly from the American south where “shoot the fucking deer” is the default solution. “If you can’t do that, here are some other, inferior approaches” is the subtext.
Experts say you cannot make a fence so high that deer cannot jump over it. But you don’t need to. Like Dylan at Newport, you can go electric.
This was good news. My youth was spent around electric fencing — being chased into it by aggressive “pets,” telling my sister that I’d unplugged it when I hadn’t, avoiding touching it while on horseback. Constructing an electric deer fence seemed within my skillset.
Like horses and me, deer have bad depth perception. The secret to deterring them is adding an element of uncertainty about what they will land on, like another electric fence, if they jump over it. According to the deer fence experts on Youtube, all you need is two parallel rows of electric wire set a couple feet apart at different heights to make deer distrust their judgement and find someone else’s garden. If this doesn’t work, you can add more wires. Experts suggest starting with the simplest deterrent, keeping some powder dry in case you need to escalate.
I settled on a charger, largely based on the power of this video. It’s only a couple seconds long but the goat footage is riveting. If you know goats you know exactly how it all went down.
The goat’s performance got rave reviews in the rural group chat
So, has it kept the deer out? I haven’t built it yet. Winter lingers and the gas crisis still stings. I have to wait a couple more weeks before I can stay up there without freezing. But I have all the equipment and it’s all mapped out.
If the electric deer fence doesn’t work, there’s always plan B.
The summertime Ligurian Alps are filled with pint-sized springy deer grazing in the fields in the early mornings and eating fallen apples in the orchards in the evenings. Called capriolo in Italian, or roe deer, they croak at each other in voices that sound like big dogs that have had their barkers removed. Close up, they look a bit mangy.
They're so common that they’re barely worth a remark when you see them. I suspect there’s overpopulation. Cars that leave behind bloody carcasses on the rural roadsides at dusk and dawn — peak hours for deer suicide — seem to be their only predator.
Three posts! You definitely don’t want to miss another if it comes. The risk is low though. This is just a burst of Italy content. It probably won’t last.
One summer afternoon, I found a dead deer in front of my neighbors’ gate. It was a weird place for a deer to lie dead. Our tiny road has a couple of cars on it a day, so it wasn’t hit nearby. I didn’t look closely for obvious wounds so I don’t know how it died. Perhaps it was struck by a deer heart attack, or maybe a drone.
I viewed, with immense relief, the dead deer lying in front of my neighbors’ gate as Not My Problem (NMP). Being rural Italians, my neighbors would know the correct disposal procedure. Had it died 10 meters farther down the road it would absolutely have been my problem. The forest gods had smiled on me. I would not have to learn disposal procedures under the added pressure of decomposing deer.
My perception of the neighbors as competent rural Italians was confirmed. By the next morning the dead deer was gone. I went about my day, mulling theories about how the deer ended up dead in front of the gate and where it went.
Days later another Italian neighbor, whose English is impeccable, had stopped by. Presented with the opportunity while we chatted with the non-English speaking neighbors, I said “ask them what happened to the dead deer!”
“What dead deer?”
I provided some illuminating detail in case they suspected I am a charming but delusional foreign eccentric new to rural ways (some of that may be true) who had mistaken a resting deer for dead.
Oswaldo shrugged. “Oh, probably a wolf took it away.”
A wolf! This response surprised me though it shouldn’t have. Wolves are definitely an issue on the French side of the mountains so why wouldn’t they also be on the Italian.
In the evening, I followed a path of flattened grass through the field, downhill from the neighbors’ gate toward the chestnut forest. It was getting dark. The wolf theory seemed plausible. I went back inside and locked the door.
There are wolves in that chestnut forest. Watch out deer! You’d think they’d know that
