{"id":113118,"date":"2022-06-26T06:12:29","date_gmt":"2022-06-26T12:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=113118"},"modified":"2022-06-26T12:44:40","modified_gmt":"2022-06-26T18:44:40","slug":"cousin-jim-dudley-and-the-saga-of-the-cat-impersonaters-on-the-montana-family-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/26\/cousin-jim-dudley-and-the-saga-of-the-cat-impersonaters-on-the-montana-family-farm\/","title":{"rendered":"Cousin Jim Dudley And The Saga Of The Cat Impersonaters On The Montana Family Farm"},"content":{"rendered":"

A change of pace for Feathered Photography today.<\/p>\n

Followers of Feathered Photography are already somewhat familiar with the northwest Montana family farm where I grew up. Originally it was actually two adjoining farms owned by my family and by my uncle Floyd’s family so all of us cousins (eight of us) pretty much grew up together and we’re still close today. Cousin Jim Dudley and his wife Sandy own part of the farm and live in the farmhouse.<\/p>\n

Jim is the older brother of Ken Dudley, whose gift to me when he passed away<\/a><\/span><\/span> allowed me to purchase my first birding lens which changed my life in such a positive way.<\/p>\n

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I’d describe part of Jim’s role today as being sort of the caretaker of the farm’s wild critters, including but not limited to the beloved Great Horned Owls that have been resident in the farm’s old granaries for many years. This is the mated pair of adults with the larger female on the right.<\/p>\n

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Recent storms in that area of Montana have really greened everything up, which of course is ideal for wildlife. The small creek that runs through the farm is often only a trickle by midsummer but a few days ago, after 3″ of rain, it was near flood stage.<\/p>\n

The creek (we call it “the crick”) was part of the ‘playground’ of all of us cousins when we were young, including what some of us still call “the old swimming hole”, marked by the small red x in the photo. I only remember using the swimming hole once, because when I was a very young kid a family friend visiting the farm threw a dead skunk in the swimming hole. I don’t believe anyone has used it as a swimming hole since.<\/p>\n

By the way, as kids we used to sled and toboggan down those sloping bluffs at the upper left. Oh, the frozen toes and the memories!<\/p>\n

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OK, that sets the stage for a story I just had to tell my readers, all instigated by a photo Jim sent me a couple of days ago. Jim has a Havahart-type trap that he typically uses to trap some of the ubiquitous gophers (Richardson’s Ground Squirrels) that burrow too close to the farmhouse lawn and yard so they can be relocated elsewhere. Recently he’s also been trying to trap a feral cat that has been making a nuisance of itself.<\/p>\n

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But a few days ago he inadvertently caught a ‘cat impersonator’, a muskrat.<\/p>\n

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The unintended victim of the trap obviously wasn’t happy with its new circumstances, so being a rodent it tried to chew its way out.<\/p>\n

Personally I find this photo extremely interesting because I see muskrats often but I’ve only rarely seen their huge rodent teeth and I don’t remember ever having such a good look at their long digging claws.<\/p>\n

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https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/video-1655822156.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n

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Jim, of course, released the muskrat at the edge of the nearly flooded creek. This short video documents the event. Sorry it isn’t centered like the photos are but WordPress keeps giving me a hard time when I try to center it.<\/p>\n

OK, now to the photo that Jim sent me that I decided just HAD to be seen by a wider audience.<\/p>\n

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This is Jim. Can you guess what he’s up to here?<\/p>\n

Yup, his next unintended victim was a striped skunk which also had to be released from the trap. As you can imagine, doing so without being sprayed would be a tricky operation, so this is Jim’s “skunk garb” including booties\/leggings, plastic gloves, goggles and plastic covering the entire rest of his body. I think Jim’s a pretty good sport to allow this photo to be taken and me to present it to a much wider audience.<\/p>\n

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And here he is, releasing the skunk within a couple of hundred feet of the house while Sandy was taking documentary photos. I imagine Sandy kept her distance.<\/p>\n

When I asked Jim if he was sprayed during the process, this was his response: “I got sprayed but the plastic stuff I was wearing got it and I threw all of that stuff away.”<\/p>\n

If you’ve ever been sprayed by a skunk you KNOW why Jim was being so careful.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Notes:<\/em><\/p>\n

All photos and video (except for the first photo) copyright Jim Dudley and Sandy Dudley and used by permission.<\/em><\/p>\n

Correction: I just learned that I got part of the story wrong. Jim actually wasn’t trying to catch the feral cat. They like having it on the farm for mouse control. He did catch it in the trap but only accidentally. Thanks for the correction, Teri Dudley.<\/em><\/p>\n

There’s another interesting story involving what we see in the last photo. In about 1950 when I was three years old our little house was just behind where Jim is in the photo. The dirt road coming down the hill at upper left led to the two farmhouses and the creek is just out of frame at upper right.<\/em><\/p>\n

We had an insecure fence around our little house with a nonfunctional gate so with the creek so close mom would use clothesline rope tied to a harness around me to keep me safely in our little yard. Mom was always either in the yard with me or watching me through the kitchen window. But on one occasion her strategy to keep me safe didn’t work and I got out of the harness when she wasn’t looking.<\/em><\/p>\n

An uncle of Jim’s, Harvey Ehlert, came driving down the hill at upper left, looked down the hill to his left and saw 3 year old me floating face down in the creek. He stopped the grain truck he was driving, raced down the hill and pulled me out of the creek – apparently none the worse for wear. Mom was a registered nurse and after a thorough check of my condition they didn’t even take me to town to the hospital. As far as I can tell there was no resulting brain damage from lack of oxygen. \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 At least nothing permanent…<\/em><\/p>\n

Thank you, Harvey! I’ve enjoyed the additional 72 years that you gave me so far.<\/em><\/p>\n

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A change of pace for Feathered Photography today. (6 photos and one video clip)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,8,361,1493,4708,6407],"tags":[6402,6405,159,6403,6400,469,6406,6401,6404],"class_list":["post-113118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-ecology-and-environment","category-family-farm-in-northwest-montana","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-muskrat","category-striped-skunks","tag-creek","tag-feral-cat","tag-great-horned-owl","tag-jim-dudley","tag-montana-family-farm-where-i-grew-up","tag-muskrat","tag-rodent-teeth","tag-striped-skunk","tag-swimming-hole"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/great-horned-owl-1767c-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-tqu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113118"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113186,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113118\/revisions\/113186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}