Category Archives: Photographs

1st Calf 2025

As we’ve done every year, we’re recording our first calf of the season here to substantiate of our Age and Source verification for the USDA. Tag # 3362 is now a second calf heifer.

I’ve let the blog slip by with little or no posts lately while I’ve been working on a new collection of poetry, “Native Harmonies; ranch poems”. It’s been a stop and go project for the past year that I’ve pared down to about 90 poems now. Sean Sexton offered one of his paintings that he exhibited at 2025 National Poetry Gathering in Elko for the cover. Here’s my mock up:

It’s been a mild summer as the days are now getting shorter and cooler. Big Wind last week had me moving vehicles out from under trees, gale force winds Saturday while Phoenix was also getting blown away. Influenced by monsoon activity, August is our month for thunderstorms, lightning and wildfires. Looking forward to fall, and a chance for rain.

FULL STURGEON MOON

Too bright to sleep
or wrestle with dreams
with a full Sturgeon hole
rising from the ridgeline
into the night sky

like a gigantic galactic leak
upon us, for all the UFOs
and UAPs to pass through,
for all the excuses we need
to behave like lunatics.

MY RIVER

runs over boulders,
spills and spumes
into deep green pools

or into cutbanks
exposing roots
hiding rainbow trout

beneath a dogwood’s
white blooming
I can’t let go.

Overgrown, no room
for a kid to cast
a deer hair fly—

fresh flow of time
behind me now
I go there yet

without thinking,
without yearning,
with nothing more

than feeling
the untamed current
still run through me.

Cowboy Poetry Gatherings

I haven’t the technological expertise to offer Amy Hale’s exceptional Substack post for the kind of attention it deserves, but please take the time read it via this link:

https://amymariehale.substack.com/p/cowboy-poetry-gatherings?r=4a25vl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

Amy Hale photos

Sea Chest Oyster Bar

Whether poetry or prose, it’s been difficult to post to the blog under the current political atmosphere of chaos and confusion that has become addicting for those of us who are still hoping to ferret out the truth. Though adding to the whole mess with more political poems is difficult to resist, with few facts, they are seldom enlightening. Like so many other people, we’ve not only sought ways to wean ourselves from the “latest”, but celebrate the positive with the many uplifting alternatives that surround us, reminders of the joy and grace that plays out before our eyes if we keep them open.

We shipped our last load of calves in the middle of May, and since selected our replacement heifers that will get their Brucellosis vaccinations on Wednesday. We will start supplementing them and our 1st and 2nd calf heifers soon thereafter as we prepare them to calve in September. Our carrot has been the 50th Anniversary of the Sea Chest Oyster Bar in Cambria (70 degrees). A month long celebration, we were in attendance for a couple of enjoyable nights.

Back home to 100+ degrees:

The distant hawk’s bare branch at dawn
awaits fuzzy-headed movement
to fall like an arrow fledged with patience.

The sun crawls across the flats
without a sound, wild oats bent
like blond hair combed into the light.

Shadows stretch beneath hillside oaks
into the puddled creek where an egret
goes fishing before breakfast.

California Thistle

Lesley Fry found this thistle (Cirsium occidentale var. californicum) on our Paregien Ranch to add to our wildflower collection.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY

Summer heat intense enough
to forget the rainy days beyond
the blinding sheets of delirium

framed in flames. The trickle
of the creek shrinks each day
as young cows bring calves down

to shade and well-water
before we gather to wean—
first-calvers looking for relief,

yearning for those days of virginity,
of curious discovery free
from bovine responsibilities.

Never in this world the same,
yet no better mother than a cow—
Happy Mother’s Day!

SUMMER COLOR


Look to the rockpiles,

Monkeyflowers on display

to remind of spring.

BLACKBIRDS

A blackbird perched on a rusted railing with a rustic background.

Like fighter jets after hawks,
they nose dive the dog,
attack from redwood boughs
to protect a fledgling
too soon on the ground.

A community, a murder, a grind,
a merle or murmuration
of blackbirds has moved-in,
displaced the finches’
crimson dance upon the rail

with cocky walks and orgies
of foreplay and flittering sex
anywhere they please—but ready
to herd a rattlesnake
out of the garden and barnyard.

APRIL FIRST

The birds are pairing up
as crimson-chested finches
dance and sing upon the railing,

beak-to-beak foreplay,
wing feathers quivering
before making a home

as house-hunting quail
split from their covey
to explore the garden.

A flock of strutting blackbirds
gets acquainted
while combing the ground,

and the killdeer practice
hollowing nests
in the gravel drive

analyzing traffic
before settling down
to hatch four eggs.