There are a couple more days to the deer season, but I think I've given it my best shot for this year.   I had some good opportunities that I failed to react fast enough to put meat in the freezer, but I learned a lot.   Next year.  Its time to move on to other things.... like preparing for the Solstice Bonfire!

I continue on and off to run the excavator and more recently, we've fired up the Marooka , which traverses the marshy ground with ease.   All to create more open water areas to facilitate the migrating waterfowl needs.

"...this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate.  So many people wanted to believe me!

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."    Howard W Campbell Jr in Kurt Vonnegut's   Mother Night

Based on the amount of money Linda and I spent on gasoline this year so far, we have conservatively contributed about 7 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere from that source alone.  (26# CO2 per gallon of gasoline burned)  Doing our bit to warm the planet.

We had a good visit with Tracey and Donald on Thanksgiving.   Donald has lived his whole life in the Clinton County north country of NY, and I learned a couple new terms.   The tree I know as 'ironwood' in our area, American Hophornbeam, (Ostrya virginiana), he knows as 'hardack'.   He was touting its value as a very hard firewood, well capable of holding the woodstove fire overnight.   And if  you weren't careful in the way you burned it, it could burn too hot and 'twist' the stove.  That was the second new term, by which he meant it could warp the iron.  May have to add both to my vocabulary.

Moving muck at Montezuma has progressed to where we are working at the water's edge.   The softer soil requires the use of wooden platforms to support the enormous weight.  

Evening Grosbeaks are kinda unusual around here,   but quite a beautiful bird.  Seen here in Wayne County Saturday.

Cecropia moth cocoon found while sitting in my tree stand.  Didn't know what it was until I looked online.

The cocoon has a small hole in it which didn't bode well for the moth pupa.










I had to cut it open and there was a small, hairy beetle.   It had apparently had a number of meals before leaving four beetle pupa in the cocoon.   Nice plan for the beetle.

I also got to play with this monster

The Montezuma Wildlife Refuge is opening up more open water habitat in 1600 acre Main Pool.  Some areas are so thick with cattails that it is not useful habitat for waterfowl.   Enter some big equipment to excavate cattail muck... mountains of it.    I recently got involved by way of driving the JCB dump truck as a volunteer.   The articulating aspect makes it fun to master, and sharing the narrow dirt road with tourists and birders, probably gives them a bit of concern.

Boat completed! and it handles very well.   Fun to see the water through the skin of the boat.

Canoe is nearing completion.   A little sanding, another coat or two of varnish, and put the dacron on the seats.   I painted a male wood duck head on each side of the bow.   Maybe we'll see if it floats soon.

Kevlar roving, (threads) are added to the canoe diagonally to add strength to the shell of the thing.   Very lightweight, but with tremendous tensile strength.   I can't break them.   They are glued at the gunwales with a hot melt glue tape.  This glue has enormous holding power in the plane of the tape, but surprisingly little strength if you pull away from that plane.  Being a hot melt adhesive, it is also easy to retighten a strand if it appears to have some slack.

Once the roving was on, it was time for the Dacron to be glued on with the same hot melt tape.   I was in new territory since I have no experience with gluing and shrinking the dacron to the shell, but with a little practice on scraps and a bit of caution with the ironing action and temperature setting, it all worked very well.

The next thing will be to paint the dacron with varnish which will waterproof it and actually glue it to the stringers.

Did some baling of hay here with our equipment, then got an offer from a neighboring farm to buy the standing grass hay that we had left... and they would harvest it.   It sounded great since our baler is making some serious sounds that portend equipment death.   So El-Vi Farms cut, raked, and baled the hay.   Their equipment makes ours look pretty puny by comparison.

Our baler makes bales that weigh about 40#.   Theirs averaged 435# each, and they were set a bit smaller than they meant to.








Then they came to pick them up and haul them away.   Helps to have the right tools.   Fun to watch... and I didn't even get tired.

Slowly getting back to the boat project. Center thwart is in, seat frames are in.   Sanded everything and 2 coats of varnish on.   Amazing how much surface area all those stringers and ribs add up to.

Steam bent to pieces of ash around the bow stem and stern stem while it was easy to use the boat as a form.

Next thing will be the kevlar roving that gives a lot of diagonal strength, and then the dacron covering.

The boat is progressing.

Canoe project

I've embarked on a canoe building project.   The design is called a Geodesic airolite.   see http://gaboats.com/ 
Its partly because I am on the lookout for lightweight boat options, but also because its a building design quite different than some I've tried before.

I started with butternut stringers to run the length of the boat.  Its lightweight, strong enough, and I had a board long enough for this project. ( That board came from a tree that fell down in the woods).   I had to steam bend the ribs, so some nice green ash would be nice..... so off to the woods.   I found a stunted tree 6" in diameter that had a nice straight base and not much future in its location.   Turns out it has been struggling to survive for a long time.... it was 80 years old.  

I split the log, ran it through the bandsaw and tablesaw, and two hours from leaving the house to get a tree, I had a pile of 3/8" square pieces ready for the steam box.

With the stringers on the forms and glued to the stems, its time to bend the ribs.

  

The Steam box is just a hotplate, an old pot, a funnel, and a length of PVC pipe.

I needed a lot of little clamps so I cut a whole lot of rings off a scrap 2" pvc, then split the ring and voila....

Now I need to wait a few days for the ribs to dry out a bit before the next stage which is sanding and gluing in the ribs, then removing the forms.  Then   kevlar roving....  I'll explain later.

New and Improved Purple Martin House

We have tried to attract Purple Martins here a couple of times. We didn't try overly hard and we didn't have any success in the several locations where we set up standard Martin houses that had been given to us.

Having seen the success of the Martin houses at Montezuma, I figured I'd go the extra mile this year. New designs feature deeper boxes that prevent predators from reaching in to extract the young, and also the SREH (starling resistant entrance holes). I looked at the units at Montezuma and they had little trays so that inspection of the nests is simpler and a short barrier to owls reaching into the nests. Their units had 14 total nest boxes per house and were probably designed to break down for shipping. Mine has 16 nest boxes, and is one monolithic structure.

I have many materials still around from my days in construction, so it was mainly a recycling project. The doors ended up being Black Walnut because I didn't want to use plywood there, and I have lots of lumber that we have cut from the farm. Nails, screws, plywood, insulation for the attic, trim coil for roofing, angle iron, and even the winch were items that I had stored (stashed, hoarded) around. I found a straight 4x4 Ash pole that I had cut a couple years ago when the sawyer was here. No planned purpose at that time, but perfect for this project. The perches on the top of the pole are from TV antennas off the house, which this project finally motivated me to get around to removing. The support poles dug into the ground are 3x5 creosote treated gifts from NYSEG, and they are bolted to the ash pole with 5/8"x14" hot dipped galvanized bolts courtesy of the telephone company. (thats another story). The cable is new and the pulley at the top is new because I couldn't find something the size and durability needed. Its very important not to have 60# of birdhouse land on your head because of some equipment failure.

Now to attract the birds in when they return from the south in a couple of weeks.

Winter of 2012

This winter is bizarre.   I have started the snowblower twice and that was for the same snowstorm, and I probably could have skipped that, but it needs to be used once in while just to keep it lubricated.  I just hope this is not entirely due to global warming, because if it is, and this is the new norm, we are in big trouble.

Jack the ripper revisited

Tried the afore mentioned Buckthorn puller on some honeysuckle (another invasive shrub).  It was effortless... well except for carrying the puller around.  Its a bit of a beast.  I tried it on a 2" Black walnut tree and that tap root proved to be pretty solid which was not surprising.  

My 'Jack the Ripper' Buckthorn destroyer

A while back I heard about a tool called a Weed Wrench.  There are other brands, but their use is to pull small trees and shrubs out by the roots.   So it seemed like a good project to build my own.   Some old parts from an old cultivator, and a corn planter and Voila!   We have lots of the invasive shrub Buckthorn so this may assist in the reduction of their numbers.  The above buckthorn was 1.5" diameter....  so what is the upper limit?   The jaws open over 3", but that seems a bit ambitious.

Game Cam

I got a game camera for my birthday...  its fun to see whats out and about when I'm not around.   Lots of deer and a fox yesterday.