Below are pictures from my game camera of the local wildlife.

Mama, Papa and baby geese

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Mr Fox

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Bullfrog in the barn pond

Buck with antlers just starting to grow

Fawn

Doe and Fawn

Egret poking its head in front of the camera

Two river otters (right side of pic)

Turkey vulture ‘recycling’ groundhog

The winter wheat is coming up strong giving the whole place a very green look.  We’ve received plenty of rain this spring and the grass has responded accordingly, needing to be mowed at least every four days.

Winter wheat

Buttercups on the hill behind the house

Spent a good part of spring break cleaning up the place and also opening the pool.  Me and Patty worked pretty well as a team pulling out bushes, trimming hedges and generally getting the place squared away.

Wife pulling out the bushes decimated by the deer

Trimmed the top of the Leyland Cyprus’

2014 Pool Opening Day

Had two huge piles of brush to burn and it ended up getting a little more interesting then I ever expected. It took two days and nights to completely burn it all and boy were the coyotes howling it up at night. Evidently that time of year is coyote mating season.

Fully ablaze

Went til 2-3am each night

Afterwards

Took stock of the orchard and found that 27 trees had died or were otherwise missing.  Decided to replenish, a much bigger job than I anticipated.  Dug the holes with an auger on a bobcat loader, that ended up being the easy part.

Bought the trees from Stark Bros. nursery online, a mixture of various apple types in a semi-dwarf size.  Planting them ended up being back-breaking work over about 3 weekends.  Then I put up a 5′ diameter fence around all 27 trees to keep the deer out until they grow large enough.  Way more then I had bargained for, but it should be plentiful in a few years.   We now have an orchard that has 55 trees, mostly apple, some peach, pears, and cherry though.

Digging the holes, the easy part

Last tree in, note the rock pile

Uncle Sonny, my Mom, and brother Mark help put up the final cages

The melting snow has really saturated the ground.  In the three years that I’ve owned it I’ve never seen the ground so saturated.  The ponds are all handling it ok, even though none of them were constructed with proper drain pipes and even more problematic overflows.  The picture below is the pond over by the barn.  The overflow is the only way for the water to escape, and it isn’t really low enough because you can see that there is water topping part of the dam…not good.

Water topping the dam

Went down 7 days after the big snow, no one had yet traveled up the driveway as you can see in the shot below.  I originally thought that most of it would have melted on the gravel driveway and the minivan could have made it.  Tom Bledsoe suggested I borrow his 4wd pickup and drive up and down a few times before taking the van over.  Luckily I took his advice as the minivan would have never made it back up the hill to get out.  After driving over it twice in the truck I had a very hard time getting back up the big hill in 2wd.

A foot of snow that had compacted but not been driven on since it fell a week ago

At least big for this area.  A few shots from the security cameras, we received about a foot of snow.

Front door

Looking back from the barn

Surprised to see this guy on the game camera, kinda cool I guess, as long as it doesn’t start eating my guinea hens!

Bobcat on the hunt

Inbound with his prey

Third one! We shot and blew up lots of things, might be why the deer were a little scarce later on. We shot pistols, skeet, and long range rifle shots, which only one person actually hit the target.

Check out the video of Patrick performing the annual pumpkin explosion:

We all got into position by 4pm, very exciting, the ladies were monitoring our texts from the warmth of the kitchen, busy making rum cider. My nephew got a few shots off but missed, Michael came very close to bagging one, and when I was driving the UTV to pickup the hunting parties I ended up running over a small deer, but even it got away. Evidently the ladies were having quite the laugh inside as they received the updates via text messages.