Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 388

It was dry at the beginning of the week and then it started raining and nature hates to give up but that’s good as some shallow wells were dry or nearly dry. We had one like that at our house growing up and after we left the nest my dad and a well drilled which I guess is still working. How we watered our big garden all those years was amazing from a dug well in the side yard. The cistern that I mentioned in other articles was the main source of water for washing in the house.

These rains sure helped with the fire situation and most of the leaves are on the ground except for some beech that are still hanging on the trees. I saw Blue Jays still picking some beech nuts from their burrs on the trees and picking them apart for the nut cornel inside. A couple of my crab apple trees are still hanging on their fruit. I have seen the Robins and Turkeys pick them off and eat them. I day I even saw the Blue Jays eating them. Those winter berry bushes are still full of fruit, but I did see a couple of migrating Robins and Cedar Waxwings working on them and some of the local mountain ash trees which are covered with fruit.

I went cranberry picking one day this week as I had seen lots of berries while watching my Loons during the summer. Other wild critters and birds will eat the cranberries. The bog I went to was right on the shoreline of a lake and you could pick some berries right from the canoe but then I went ashore and picked many more. I think the muskrats had dined on a few of these berries also. At Ferd’s Bog there are bog lemmings which I think dine on the smaller berries there. I’ve seen them come up on the boardwalk and eat sunflower seeds left by birders trying to attract the Gray Jays. I picked for about an hour and that was about all the bending that my back could take. While going up the lake I saw an adult Loon in fall plumage who didn’t stick around, and I saw it again coming back down just before dark. There was a family of otters who came over to see what I was doing in their toilet area. There was much of their scat in that area, and they may even eat some of these berries as a snack or dessert. These berries will make for great table fair on the Thanksgiving Giving table. I’ve seen these berries in other years on the shoreline bogs of many of my Loon lakes and I go back and they are all gone. I think bears were big eaters of these. I know they can clean out a black berry patch in one night and for no reason they wouldn’t do the same with the cranberries. I watched coyotes picking black berries one day down on the Cahan’s Farm Road. It let me get close before it ran up into the woods and barked at me for disturbing him.

Many folks to the south of us got more rain than they needed, over twenty inches in many places. My Daughter Erin and her husband just got to their place near Sebring, Florida and it started to rain. She called me and I could hear it coming down on the tin roof. At that time, they had seven inches already and they ended up with twenty-two inches. I asked where it all went two days later when I called to see if they were still above water and they were. She said it went into two lakes on the property which I’m sure were full and overflowing now. Some towns in neighboring states had water up to their windowsills with that same amount of water from the same storms that rolled through the south.

Bucks in the area are starting to rut as I’ve seen rubs on trees and scraps on the ground. Just yesterday I saw a lady with a dog come off her walk on the lake front in Old Forge and one of the eight-point bucks that have been feeding there followed her through the snow fence opening.

Be more alert while driving as these big brown bunnies don’t look good on the hood of your car but that’s another story See ya.

Photo above: Bucket of cranberries