Buffalo Dan's Bison

We rented a two-man auger and decided that we'd be best off using a one-man auger.  Using a two-man auger requires two people and a lot of coordination.  If you don't coordinate well with the other person you will be exhausted.  We were able to dig a few holes, but decided not to pursue it further with the two-man auger. The important thing is that I was able to try it out and make a decision about what I need to do the job.  I've ordered a Stihl BT 130 Earth Auger through a local dealer and expect it to arrive this coming Monday.   I spent the remaining part of the weekend driving the 10 foot t-posts and pulling stumps.   I was able to drive about 25 or 30 before I strained my left arm and decided to give it a rest.  I also noticed that some of the welds holding the extended handles to the t-post driver had cracked and needed to be rewelded.    While driving the posts I noticed that driving posts in the field area was about three times more difficult than driving

We've got whip-poor-wills on our property.  I first noticed them singing early in the morning before dawn a few weeks ago.  For those of you who haven't heard of it, a whip-poor-will is a robin-sized nocturnal bird.  It gets its name from the loud call it makes at night to attract a mate, which sounds like it's shouting "whip poor will."  It repeats this over and over again for long periods of time. I can remember when I was a child growing up in rural Wisconsin the whip-poor-will was a fixture of our warm summer nights.  Back then we didn't have any air conditioning, so we would sleep with the windows open.  The whip-poor-wills would start up at dusk and continue for what felt like hours.  One whip-poor-will in particular seemed to have claimed our backyard as a part of his territory.  He would start singing in one area of the backyard and, then, after about five minutes, he would stop singing briefly and relocate to another part of the yard about 100 yards

The theme for this past weekend could be described as "efficiency," but I find that word irritating in this context, so, instead, I'm going to describe it as a "period-of-discovery-of-multiple-time-saving-technologies weekend."  Though excessively long and also somewhat irritating, this description more effectively captures the level of "out-of-the-box" thinking and willingness to try something new that was required to achieve the initially proposed "efficiency."  The normal 30 lbs post driver on the left and the super heavy driver on the right.  One area in which we realized technological advancement was in our fencing endeavors.  Our estimated time-line for installing the approximately 500 ten-foot t-posts for the bison fencing became a lot shorter this past weekend after Jess and I were able to test the modified t-post drivers I had fabricated earlier.  I based the drivers on a design I found in a document released by the US Forest S

Went down to the ranch yesterday afternoon to check on the newly installed bee packages.  When you order a package of bees, they come in a screen box the size of a shoe box.  Inside the box all of the worker bees are crawling around in a big cluster.  In the center of the cluster is a smaller screen cage the size of a D cell battery with a queen in it.  They are separated at this point because the bees are not familiar with the queen and are under stress.  In such a scenario the bees could very easily regard her as an intruder and kill her.  When you install the bees in the hive, you open the package, and shake the bees out of the package so they fall into the hive.  You then hang the queen cage from one of the top bars, close up the hive, and leave them alone for a few days.  There is a piece of sugar candy plugging a hole at one end of the queen's cage, which the bees will eat until its gone.  The hope is that by the time they've eaten through the candy they will have grown a

This weekend we picked up and installed the honeybees and received the order of fencing materials.  The bee packages loaded into the back of our car.  The drive back with these bees is always lots of fun.  We didn't get back to the ranch until the evening and it was getting quite cold, so we spent the night with the bees in the scamp.  The four hives after a long day of installation.  66 rolls of high-tensile woven-wire fence 315 ten foot wooden posts (they'll be bringing in the other two bundles on Monday) 500 ten-foot t-posts And now, various animal and plant photos.  Toad eggs.  Toads lay their eggs as long tubes or stands, while frogs lay their eggs in large clumps.  Frog eggs.  Eastern Cricket Frog (Acris crepitans).  Eastern Cricket Frog (Acris crepitans). A Water Strider.  Amelanchier in bloom. Some sort of tiny bird-foot violet that carpets the pasture. An unknown flower also in the pasture.