Buffalo Dan's Bison

The bison seem to have calmed down quite a bit, though, the above picture is the best I've been able to get of them recently. In order to keep them here more permanently, I've resumed work of the 6.5 foot tall woven wire fence that I hope to eventually encircle the entire property with.  For this project I've divided the effort into three phases which represent different sections of the property.  The current section I am working on is probably a little over 1,000 feet and not directly accessible by any roads or fields.  This means I need to somehow transport all of the posts, wire, and tools into the area.  To assist me with this task I decided to go low-budget and build a hand cart from existing supplies.  The cart is approximately 4'x4' and initially used some bicycle tires I had from a worn-out bicycle I used when I was in graduate school.  Ultimately, after repeated flat tires and an eventual collapse of one of the tire rims, I did switch to solid rubber

I'm starting night shifts after the current break period, so I'm gradually staying up later at night and sleeping later into the day.  Now that we have bison on our property, working during the night time has become a little more complicated.  Like many mammals, bison appear to rely significantly on their ability to see potential threats.  I don't really know how well they can see in the dark, but I do know that they tend to find bright lights fairly distressing.  In particular, they seem to find headlamps very disturbing.  Last week I discovered this when I was walking along the fence-line during the evening hours.  It was getting very dark, so I put on my headlamp and turned it on.  I hadn't realized that the bison had been standing only twenty feet away watching me and when I turned on the headlamp they completely freaked out and ran away in a blind panic.  I found them to have a very similar reaction to vehicle headlights.  The bison don't seem to care about the

It's now their third day here and the ten six-month-old bison appear to have relaxed a little. They are not grouping as closely together and appear to be doing normal bison things. Thus far, normal bison things seem to be eating, pooping, sitting down to sleep, and occasionally enforcing the group pecking order.  When they see me, they reposition to a location uphill but still within sight. That's what they've done in the above photo.

The bison arrived yesterday afternoon just as the sun was about to disappear over the horizon. The deliverers positioned the trailer as close to the pond as we could get, so they could have water if they needed it. When the trailer doors came open the bison stood in the trailer for several minutes. They would move when they were ready, which was fine by us.  I'd rather they move on their own terms with less stress. Jess photographed the next few moments that led up to about an hour of chaos.  After few minutes of standing in the trailer, the first bison came bounding off.  This started a chain reaction with all of the other bison following one at a time.  You can the first bison on the far-right side of this photo. She has reached the electric fence and stopped to investigate it. Now the first bison has recognized the fence as a fence and started running along it toward the water.  So far, things are okay.  The rest of the bison are following her, though, the last ones out

I recently received the 10 Raspberry Pis I ordered from Newark Electronics a few weeks ago.  I needed a small inexpensive computer with very low power consumption, so, at a little over 30 dollars each, the Raspberry Pi is perfect.  Having previously used the Raspberry Pi to capture video from inside one of my beehives , I already have most of the system designed.  Currently, I am in the process of finishing work on the external system housing and constructing a power supply.  I will provide more updates as I progress in this project. 

While waiting for the bison delivery, I've been busying myself working on the remote monitoring system.  A major part of this project has been constructing the weather-proof, climate-controlled housing for the central system server.  All of the aluminum and pvc exterior have been completed and much of the interior insulation and air handling systems (i.e. pvc tubing with a fan and heating element) are installed.  One of the last touches I plan to add to this project is external camouflage.  After all, it is a surveillance system. To make the camouflage at least halfway decent, I did some research on the topic.  Among the plethora of academic and military documents I reviewed, I found the concepts of background matching (specifically color matching) and disruptive camouflage to be most useful in the sense that they were relatively simple and could be implemented systematically.  Given that I am completely inexpert in this very old and well developed field of study, I must apologi