Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 233

Outdoor Adventures vol. 234

Winter keeps trying to put a white coat on our landscape, but it melts the next day. The cloud cover made for some nice sunrise and sunset photos. The waxing moon is just a slice of itself which may be hidden in the clouds tonight. It was beautiful right out our upstairs windows last night.

Don Andrews caught one of those nice sunrises over Old Forge Pond one morning and the night before my grandson Nathan got a super sunset over Utica the night before. That shot will probably be his screen saver for a while until a better one comes. 

While Nathan was here, he got to play with all my computer devices, bird callers and cameras. He must see how they work or make them work if they don’t.  He even got one of my trail cameras working that has been out of commission for a year so those deer better look out or their pictures will be on camera. My little pocket camera that I always had in my pocket no matter where I went wouldn’t accept a camera card ever since the summer wedding. He tried several cards with the same result, but he had some new cards never used and that one was ok. Some of my cards have been downloaded many times, both in cameras and trail cameras so I need to buy some new ones. He brought up a new disc reader as many of my pictures I took for years were stored on them from the old computer, but the new computer had no disc reader. Another gadget he found plugs into the back of the computer and comes out front with plug-ins for other devices and a card reader, so I don’t have to fish behind the computer to find these things. Karen’s laptop is getting slow and probably needs replacing and her tablet had some kinks in it that he took out. She only plays games and does Facebook on those. I still use the laptop for doing power point programs and it has no battery life, so it needs a power source. 

My friend Stacy Robinson was up looking at Snow Geese and other ducks on Lake Champlain north of Plattsburgh this week and there were thousands of them in a couple places. Some of the corn hadn’t been cut but where it had there were lots of geese. The ducks and goose seasons are open so some of them were on the move and spooky at best. 

I walked into the bridge site over Beaver Brook that goes into Shallow Lake one afternoon and saw some lumber sitting beside the trail along the way in. I met a couple of the workers from the camp at Little Tupper who were working on that project. They were moving that lumber into the bridge site to be nailed down next spring. They said the two stringers were in place, but it was quite wet on the trail on the other side. The planks they were taking in were going to be treads on the bridge across the brook. They had to cut them to length on the main trail which is in Wild Forest and carry the pieces into the bridge which is in the Pigeon Lake Wilderness Area. It was quite a project to put those big spruce stringers in place. I built the last bridge there I believe with three tamaracks cut on site and skidded across the old bridge stringers. The beavers have raised the water level a little over these years and they have been just under water for a couple years and hazard to cross. This new bridge will make it safer to get into Shallow Lake which has great fishing, and it also opens a large area of access to hunters back there. This crew earlier this summer dry treaded the main trail going to West Mountain a little further downstream which was also flooded by beavers, those dam beavers.

I did a little trail work myself and then had some help from Don Andrews the second day to lay down 102 feet of planking on the Rock Dam Trail in the Moose River Area. This was all reclaimed 2x12x12’ planks from the snowmobile trail system that went from the Plains to the Sagamore Road. There were moose tracks in the trail the first day I went in but talking to hunters in that area, they hadn’t seen any moose or deer. I flushed a couple grouse while walking the trail and a Pileated Woodpecker was working on a tree not far from the site I was doing on the trail. 

Some new Blue Jays have moved into the feeders so their beechnuts supply must have run out. Several new American Goldfinch are coming in with some Pine Siskins. This afternoon I was just releasing a banded Goldfinch and a Sharp-Shinned Hawk swooped across the backyard chasing a Black Capped Chickadee. I don’t know if he caught the little bird but he sure was trying to get lunch. There wasn’t much activity at the feeder after that chase. 

Looks like there may be some tracking snow on the ground this week but that’s another story so have a Happy Thanksgiving. See ya. 

Photo above: Sunrise Old Forge Pond by Don Andrews