Homesteads and hunters

I know there has been a gap in my posting but internet service is often absent or too poor to post. Not to mention that hunting leaves me very tired by evening and I have a hard time staying awake long enough! We are hunting in Nebraska while waiting for Kansas to open on Nov 10th. Although we are only 20-30 miles north of some of the KS places we will hunt, the habitat is a bit different, with less overall cover available but we are still getting into birds. There are also a lot of hunters which comes as a shock after Montana where we never came across another bird hunter. Twice already here in NE, we have had hunters who were either bold or rude enough as to actually enter a unit where they saw us hunting. Both times it appeared that they were hoping that perhaps birds would flush ahead of us and fly into the edge where they entered. Rude and disconcerting.

But one of the things that is similar between KS and NE and that fascinates me is the number of abandoned houses in the country. This is so foreign to this New Englander where a vacant house is rare and residents value and preserve old houses. Here on the prairie, populations have been declining for more than 70 years as machinery reduced the laborers needed for farming. The people who do remain here overwhelmingly want to live in the small towns and not out in the country. So there are empty and abandoned houses scattered every few miles in every direction. Some appear to be old original farmsteads, long abandoned, but others are much more recent. Sometimes the only evidence that there was a farmstead is a windbreak row of trees, now protecting only the remaining outbuildings. I have photographed a few to share and think about how proud the original owners must have been of these places and wonder where the families have gone.

What a beauty this one must have been. (click on any photo to enlarge)


This big home is pretty far gone but the many outbuildings are still good.














There is usually nothing around these homesteads for miles and miles. Well, except maybe bunches of these guys. ;-)





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