A Year In The Life - Day 52, July 12, 2014

"Brrrrrr, Dad!!!  The water's COLD!..."

A Year In The Life - Day 51, July 11, 2014

Today we return to the garden.  One of the Irises we transplanted from a boating adventure of note has bloomed, and so I figured it was a good time to snap another shot.  Things are coming along, but for some reason everything in the middle bed is moving at a snail's pace...

A Year In The Life - Day 50, July 10, 2014

A shot today of the first in a string of kuspuks that Sarah is working on.  This is Abram's, and I told Sarah now I have to get back to PA to trap coons again so we can put a ruff on that hood... :D  Stay tuned for more kuspuk action, as there will be more of these showing up soon...

A Year In The Life - Day 49, July 9, 2014

I don't think this boat has moved from this spot since Sarah and I first came to Russian Mission - but it still sees use... :)

A Year In The Life - Day 48, July 8, 2014

Today's subject:  A Great Diving Beetle (Dytiscus marginalis) nymph we found in the slough while Sarah was knocking the pike dead with her new 'Pink Panther" fly.  We found another this spring while frog hunting, and both of them were true to their reputation.  In a word: Ferocious.  They will aggressively attack anything that comes near them, rearing up like a scorpion and stabbing down with a pair of jaws as a scorpion might do with its tail barb.  They use the pincers like hypodermic needles when feeding to inject a digestive concoction of enzymes that dissolves the unfortunate organism's tissue into a drinkable soup.  Pleasant thought when handling one for a pic or two.  :)  Anyways, here's a pair of close ups of the mouthparts - first the top view, and then from the underside - and then a shot of the whole beast, roughly all three inches of him.  The macro was used for all three so the last is a bit blurry, of course...

A Year In The Life, Day 47, July 7, 2014

If your 2yr 9 mo. old asks for seconds of beaver meat at dinner - while sitting next to your fleshing board, that hangs on the wall next to the kitchen table - you might live in the bush.  Gotta love it man. :D

The Mountaineering Beaver...has met his end...

A couple weeks ago, I posted about the "Beavers of High Society" - Click Here  It basically was a setting in which a beaver (s) had built a trail going up and over an extremely steep hill for about 50 yards - seen here:

Looks like  a large animal trail, right?  No.  Beaver-sheared branches snipped off close to the ground all the way up and over the other side, and trimmings/branches scattered all over the trail.  Not a moose track or bear track one in the dirt either - was slick as a whistle - from the beavers sliding down it with trees.  No, not just branches - trees.  And just over the top there was a stand of birch that was being decimated.  In that previously mentioned post were a couple pictures of the cutting area.  To avoid too much repetition I will just add one of those again:

I nabbed some of their wood chips for the smoker to do up some Chums! :) The novelty of it was too much to resist. We filled some gallon baggies and there was lots more to spare...

I had never seen beavers doing something quite like this before (there are other birch around), and judging from the distance off the ground that some of these cuttings were, this wasn't just an average beaver.  Sarah and I immediately decided this beaver needed to be caught.  He would be a unique animal and it would be fun to see if we could get him, and see how big he really was.  Two days ago, we went (the whole 4-H Club) and made a set.  W helped me placed the sticks, lure up the mound and splash it with water - his favorite part.  Meanwhile Sarah fed Abram and drove around in the boat to keep the bugs off.  And she snapped this shot:  Castor mound is two feet left of my right boot.

And today we went back.  The short of it is, here are some pics of The Mountaineering Beaver. There is an amusing GoPro video that I will try and get up later this week - bandwidth is getting slim here at the end of the period.

 Yep, this is he.  Only lodge close enough to the trail in either direction with trees looking like they came from the stand of birch - recently.  Oh, and there is the fact that he is clearly the biggest, dominant male of the lodge that CHARGED the castor mound.  He had a truly massive frame, measuring 49 inches from nose to tail.  Check these pics out!

And even in the middle of summer (with no fat on him as I skinned) he weighed 64 pounds!!!  In late fall/early winter I think this would have been a 75 pound beaver.  Unreal...  He needs to be the centerpiece of the blanket we are working on.  He is one we will never forget.