Beaver pond finale

We finished up the beaver pond site today. Of course there were a couple minor snafus. I arrived late, of course. My boss came by to check out some areas I was concerned about. I got all the maps out and we were going over them in the back of her truck. She then departed and 15 minutes later I realized that I didn't have my maps. They were still in her trunk! I called her and thankfully she was still in the area and not only were all the maps in her trunk but so were my sunglasses. I'm not sure why she didn't notice when she shut her trunk since they were all layed out. I think this site plays tricks with everyone's minds. It's so beautiful that you get easily distracted and that's when the fun begins.

Above is the house on the site that I'd like to live on. It's right on the giant beaver pond. It's almost like a vacation house it's so remote.

Here's a fun sea of skunk cabbage. It's out in all its glory. This is what most of the day looked like.
Cool root action. It'd make a great little home for some critter.
Here's another awesome stone house on the site. I'm really glad the dogs were in the pic. Too bad the mastif had to be tied up...but he cracked me up with his lazy, slow and low woofs. It's like he can't be bothered to freak out like the other dogs do, but he still wants to participate.
Here's a box turtle I found at the second site we have to do down the road from the beaver pond site. We drove the perimeter and I'm delighted to say there is an alpaca farm on it. You know that hours will be wasted and many pictures will be taken while I play with the alpacas.

In good news, I went outside to fully investigate the loss of the suet feeders. I didn't want to go yesterday since they just sprayed for bugs. I discovered one suet feeder lying on the ground in the thicket of bushes. The suet was completely gone but I suspect that the real culprit here is racoons. I don't know why the condo people would remove the suet, but throw the feeder on the ground in a dense thicket. The other feeder was nowhere to be found. I was suprised because it's difficult to remove the feeder since I loop the hook back around into the wire mesh. I guess racoons are craftier than I expected. So one feeder is back in action and to be safe I made sure it was even more hidden.

Beaver and donkette

I got to go back to the big site with the awesome lake and beavers. I'll need another day out there as well. Thankfully most of the work is done though. It still was a lot of walking and the day didn't start out great. First the directions told me to get off at an exit that didn't exist. So I took the next exit and thought I could fumble my way through the backroads to the site (which was the way we came the first day). The scenic tour as my father would call it. Problem was that the street names didn't match my road map. I ended up going around in a giant circle, ran over a squirrel (it was insane and ran between my front and back tires), and was like 15 minutes late to meeting a co-worker and the surveyor. But I eventually made it and the day began.

I found another beaver lodge (see above pic). This one appeared to be occupied because once I approached it there was a lot of activity in the water. Look at this cool beaver unintentional art. It's like a palm tree. I should cut it down and sell it.

What I was really excited about was seeing the baby donkey. I don't know who the daddy is because there were no adult dark colored donkeys. The donkeys, pony, and mini horses were all very polite. There was no biting or other bad behavior even when I was completely surrounded. I must have took like 10 pictures of the baby donkey. None really came out well since the bugs were causing it to itch and contort into uncute photos.

This little mini hourse is called the General. They say the General is semi retarded and should have never been able to walk. See his weird leg. But it looks like the General is living the high life and spends his time generally annoying his companions but sniffing their butts and stuff. He's also covered in grass.
The vanilla colored mini horse is the General's mom. She's pretty.
Nevermind all the above fun distractions, the wetlands on the site are nice....which is rare. I could waste days there just looking for turtles and other critters.

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.