Half a (S)centenary

High: 43° F
Low: 27° F
Conditions: Winter Storm Advisory. Ice and freezing rain changing to snow overnight.

This entry marks our 50th post. That still makes us newbies by most blog standards, but the caninaturalist and I are pretty excited nonetheless. Since we launched Out With Ari four months ago, we’ve learned a lot. We now know the difference between an avatar and a widget (and that we’re not likely to find either in the woods of Maine). We bought a digital camera, and even mostly know how to use it. We’ve also proven Pavlov right: every time Ari, who hates having her picture taken, hears the chime of the camera being turned on, she promptly stops whatever adorable thing she is doing and hightails it into the next room.

Even the camera-shy caninaturalist, though, seems to really love our new blog project. It means we spend more time exploring the outdoors and reflecting on what we find out there: from birch bark to owl pellets, we’ve seen and experienced it all. And, for the most part, we’ve had good luck bringing our findings to the digital world.

It seems a little ironic, then, that we’d be spending our first milestone post reflecting on the limits of this medium. But, you see, we have a problem neither my paltry skills as a writer nor Ari’s technical savvy can solve. All around our neighborhood, skunks (Mephitis mephitis) are waking up and getting ready for mating season. Other than their telltale footprints we can’t see them, but we can very definitely smell them.

(photo from Animal DiversityWeb)
[http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu]

We have a robust skunk population here in the woods of central Maine, and the lot of them have spent the past four months snoozing in stolen burrows. Not only does that mean they’ve missed our first 49 blog posts, but they’ve also missed out on food, socialization, and perhaps most importantly, skunk dating. Now that the days are longer and a little warmer, the skunks know it’s time to wake up and spend their nights looking for a little nookie. Along the way, they’re fending off potential predators and maybe even unwanted skunky advances with the unmistakable smell of their protective spray.

Therein lies the rub. How do we adequately tell you, our patient readers, about this experience? Do I write about the way Ari pushes her snout high up into the air, trying to locate this richly exotic scent? Do I fumble over adjectives and try to paint a visual picture of a skunk-scented early morning landscape? Should I point out, as Rachel Herz does in her really wonderful book, The Scent of Desire, that the skunk smell as we know it stems from a firing of neurons in our olfactory bulb combined with our previous associations? Shall I tell you about the time that Ari’s predecessor, Kinch the Grouchy Beagle, tried to hug a skunk and the resulting copper cloud that hung over our house for a week? Maybe.

But if I do, will you be able to experience the vividness of this bouquet? Will you be able to smell what we smell without benefit of photo or language or any of the other things that makes blogging so great? I don’t know. I worry none of this will really do justice to the experience. But then again, if you’re one of the overwhelming majority of people who don’t find this omnipresent aroma at all appealing, maybe that’s a good thing. We’ll try for something a little less pungent for post #51.