Beavers and friends

So our insanely busy season has started this week and will go until June 15. It's turtle season plus a bunch of other threatened and endangered species surveys are going on or starting up. Papers, files, voice mails, and emails are already stacking up. Of course, everything has to be immediately attended to! But I had the chance to spend the day outside at a beautiful site very close to the office. It's a giant piece of mostly hilly woods with a big lake. There's a couple houses, a golf course complete with ponds, and some farm animals on it as well. There was a four day old donkey (donkette!) that I didn't get a real close view of...but next time. Snakes, turtles, and rare hawks abounded. By the afternoon, I was in such turtle zone that I had a hard time focusing at the task at hand which was delineating wetlands. I saw a tiny painted turtlet the size of Cashew when I first got her. I nearly fell in cooing and ahhing over the spectacle of seeing it swim in a pond. The one downer of the day was that we were swarmed by tiny flies. Thankfully I had my head net and wore it most of the day. When I finally took it off, I was overwhelmed by the brightness and clarity of everything.

Beavers had made this lake home. There were lots of chomped or nearly chomped trees. We found the lodge and there was at least one dam. Once we were done, we could either walk all the way the lake back to the car or take the so called shortcut. The shortcut was balancing along the beaver dam across the lake. I wondered if it was really a shortcut by the length of time it took me to cross the hazard covered in shrubs that threatened to push me into the lake.

Well Fiddle dee dee! The fern fiddleheads are coming up.