Steve’s Blog

Dave at Wonder falls on the Big Sandy                From May 2010

Checking out Muddy Crk before the run   From May 2010

Went with a few friends to the Upper Yough, Big Sandy Creek, Cheat canyon, and a new run on a small one… Muddy Creek.  Took in the Cheat Riverfest on Saturday night right next to our campground.  Some good music, locals selling some fine crafts, and vendors selling boats and gear.  Inch and a half of rain Sunday night flooded our tarp site and brought local rivers to flood stage, so we ran a nearby creek with some nice challenging features.   Muddy creek is loaded with coal mine drainage, so it runs with a pH of about 4.5, the water runs orange, and the rocks are all permanently stained orange-yellow.   I hear people pay for a chemical peal of their skin, and we got it for free.

Stayed on Piney Mtn for a couple of nights  From May 2010

Cheatfest                         From May 2010

I’m volunteering to do some data collecting for a study by the Nature conservancy and Audubon.  Trying to match computer models of where migrant birds spend their days.  They have laid out a number of 300 meter transects south of Lake Ontario, and so volunteers are needed to go out at designated times from now through May to see what species are actually showing up. Of course it isn’t supposed to be raining, or too windy, and it should be close to sunrise.   At any rate I walked two transects today.  It was cool and a little windy, so not too spectacular.   But a Blue Headed Vireo was a nice find.   They indicated it might be wet, which was an understatement.   I found out I need a new pair of boots…. fortunately it was a small crack.

Transect 626 Montezuma NWR From April 2010

From April 2010

I put the cattle on pasture yesterday.   They’ve been nibbling at green bits on the winter lot, but now they can stuff themselves at will.   They look happy out there.   I have about 5-6tons of hay left.   Nice buffer for the next season.

With Gerry’s help and the vet present, all of the cattle went through the chute and were weighed, vaccinated, and preg checked.  I’m still learning the ropes.  I need to refine the chute… vet had some good ideas.   And I’d like to get the squeeze chute working at the head gate.  It would prevent a lot of thrashing around.  Future projects…………  Ace isn’t bred.  Not sure why, but I think she may get traveling papers  before long.

Woodcocks are fascinatingly weird.  Linda and I went down the road last evening to listen and watch the male courtship.  In the low light of dusk, the male calls (’peents’) from an open field about 15 times or so and then rockets almost straight up to maybe 150′ circling around making a twittering sound with its wings.  Then with a few chirps, he’s dives back down to the same spot and repeats the whole ritual.  Just irresistible to females I understand.  Linda has better eyes than I , and she managed to see it in flight several times.   I had thought they were non existent around here, but this week I’ve located 5 within a mile of the house.  Jody got me started after she heard one peenting a few days ago while riding her bike in the evening.

9 acres of alfalfa, timothy, clover mix planted.   Well, except for a couple of wet spots that I can deal with in a few weeks.  Disced, dragged, seeded, stones picked, and rolled.   Expecting rain tonight and tomorrow…. Perfect!   When I say stones picked, I have to give a big thank you to my father, and my brother Gerry.  I would estimate that we picked up (and unloaded)  in the neighborhood of 20 tons of stone in the last two days.  Its backbreaking work.  They have mechanical wonders that do this kind of work, but what kind of exercise would that be? The field looks great.

I’m in the process of reworking the farm shop.  The floor had been very rough concrete or bare gravel for many years.  Accumulated stuff had piled up and many of the original iron wood (American Hophornbeam) posts were rotted on the bottom and in need of repair.   So to start I collected, and filtered out debris from about 80 gallons of waste oil and recycled that.  Sorted through a bunch of scrap iron and pushed the rest to one side so I could pour concrete on  about 2/3 of the floor space.   I picked a rather cold day to pour and it took forever for some of it to cure.  I got up every two hours all night long to fire up the power trowel to work it again.   Nice smooth finish in the end.  And now I’m building a partition on the west side to which I will attach shelving and a work bench.  This will allow me to organize the stuff I pushed to one side, and then I can pour the rest of the floor.

From April 2010

Another spring, and Linda and I are participating in the Marsh Monitoring Program again at two local sites.   We split duties.  Linda is the amphibian observer, and I do the birds, on several visits over the next couple of months.  first amphibian count was last night.  We had Spring Peepers out in force, our first Wood Frog, Leopard Frogs,  and American Toads trilling.   A non-amphibian highlight was a fly in Sandhill Crane.

From March 2010

Front tire on the 4400 blew out.  It was just setting there.   Fortunately I wasn’t standing nearby when it happened.  Must have been loud!  When I saw it, I went for a jack and was getting ready to jack the tractor up when my father kindly suggested that I might use the loader to lift the tractor.   Excellent idea which for some reason eluded me at that moment.  I do appreciate that he didn’t wait until I had gone to the trouble of jacking it up, and then point out my foolishness.

From March 2010

The 4400 had a loader frame but no bucket.  Looked into buying one, and then decided that what I needed initially was a manure fork to clean out the barn and yard from a winter’s worth of manure pack, and I could make my own.   Dismantling an old 3 bottom AC plow gave me some seriously heavy iron to make a frame, and some other iron and equipment axles provided the tines.   Tried it yesterday with some success, but one of the hydraulic hoses I had made leaked under pressure so will be getting that fixed today.  I should mention that I had to do some major plumbing of the hydraulic system so that I could have a dump action with the fork.   Now to clean the barn.