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osprey with a fish
Sunday, August 4 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Whatever was wrong with me last night was no longer a problem by the time I woke up this morning. Again we did Spelling Bee out in the screened-in porch. While we were doing that, some of the presumably-hungover celebrants from Mel's rager stumbled out of whever they'd crashed and started firing guns in the monotonous way that gun people do. Again, it was apparently just more of Mel's ongoing rager, a thing not to be begrudged no matter how annoying it got. Fortunately, the shooting didn't go on for much longer. Perhaps someone with an especially bad hangover beseeched the shooter(s) to please for the love of God stop.
After Spelling Bee, my first task was to do some straightening up under the screened-in porch, where I've been trying to lower the landscape to open up more headroom for out-of-the-rain storage (and perhaps other uses). There was an old detached piece of stairway with three steps that I temporarily put against the retaining wall to help me get up and down it. But there are also pieces of cardboard and big stack of no trespassing signs that came with the property. Once I got most of that out of the way, I could attack the sand, which needs to go elsewhere to give me the headroom that I want. Fortunately, I never run out of places to put the extra sand. Today I carried four or five five-gallon buckets of it to various places along the Mossy Rock Trail (though never farther than a couple hundred feet from the cabin) to fill in voids in my various causeways (or places where I'd removed extractable rocks, leaving a pit I didn't want to step in).
In our cabin kitchen, we have cheap countertops made of some sort of tough plastic laminate on some sort of cheap wood-adjacent product made of compressed sawdust. In recent months, I noticed that water had been getting through a joint in the laminate and finding its way into the sawdust material, where it was (as one would expect) causing it to expand, thereby further widening the joint and allowing more water in. I'd cautioned Gretchen to keep this area dry so the material could dry out and "heal" and I could eventually treat it with some sort of waterproofing. Today I finally got around to doing that part. I decided to use Gorilla Glue, since it's basically just foaming polyurethane and is an effective water sealant. The resulting foam is unattractive, but that can be trimmed away. To make future trimming easier, I first used masking tape to mask off most of the laminate, exposing only the seams where the glue needed to go. I glurped it in as best I could, even prying the laminate up a little so I could work the glue in under it. Then I clamped everything tightly together using both a clamp and targeted weights.
Later I went down to the dock (where Gretchen was already reading a book) and had a good soak in the other water-hammock, which had had a leak that I'd successfully fixed with Gorilla Glue, which is good for lots of things. (At this point, leaks in the air bladders of both water hammocks have been patched with it.) When I'd had enough of that, I walked along the shore to the new tree dock with Charlotte and made some little fixes of it it. What it really needs to be perfect is some more rock, but there are no pieces of loose rock anywhere near it, so it's looking like I'll have to ship some in from a rock-rich part of the lake using a canoe.
I went back to the cabin briefly but soon returned to the lake after realizing I'd left my nice camera in the big water-proof box we store things in there. I ended up paddling out again to the new tree dock with the folding saw so I could trim branches from a second log I'd lain beside it (which, as it happens, didn't really improve it much). Then I returned to the dock and sat for awhile by myself (Gretchen had gone back to the cabin), trying to get a good picture of Throckmorton the Loon, who was fishing especially close to our dock for some reason. But my SD card was full, and, since deleting photos is a laborious process, I kept getting "memory full" errors. But then I heard a massive splash over near the domed beaver lodge across the lake at the inlet to the swampy arm of the lake in Joel's parcel. I then saw an osprey flying towards me overhead carrying a fairly large fish headfirst in its talons. The fish was some laterally-compressed species like a bluegill sunfish. The osprey landed high in the trees a little south of Ibrahim's dock and proceeded to eat the fish. It was an amazing thing to behold; I'd seen several bald eagles but never an osprey at Woodworth Lake. In a way I was glad my camera had been causing trouble so I didn't spend all my time trying to get a picture instead of just living in the moment and watching.
Back at the cabin, I carried another bucket of sand out to a new place nearby on the Mossy Rock Trail where I was building a causeway across a dip. I'd found a nice round boulder that serving as a stepping stone in the dip, and I used the sand to fill the void that stone left behind after I'd extracted it. But I wanted more than just a single stone there. Fortunately, I found another similar boulder just down the hill, and, after'd I'd prepared the site so the new boulder would end up at about the height of the first one, I found the new boulder fit in as perfectly as another molar. Two step stones in a row was almost enough to bridge across the gap at the elevation of the trail on either side, and the two boulders together gave me so much satisfaction that I would find myself thinking about them later on tonight as I drifted off to sleep.
We left the cabin a little before 6:00pm, driving home via the Middleburgh route. Something weird was happening in the atmosphere as we entered the Hudson Valley, because there were all sorts of tall crazy clouds, some of them with layers that were being blasted by by strong winds. The sun was setting at the time, brightly illuminating them from the west. As Gretchen drove us up Dug Hill Road, we noted all the lush Japanese stiltgrass growing on the shoulders and couldn't help but think it was beautiful, making the landscape look like a place that might be inhabited by hobbits. But this is not to say we are happy that our forests have yet another invasive Asian organism pushing aside the natives. It's a useful coping mechanism to find good hidden (or, in this case, obvious) in the bad.
I stayed up late in the laboratory watching the latest episode of House of the Dragon.
This morning's game of collaborative Spelling Bee on the whiteboard that Gilly from Portland sent us.
Click to enlarge.
The new tree dock today.
Click to enlarge.
Throckmorton the loon shortly before the osprey flew past with a fish.
Click to enlarge.
A cardinal flower Gretchen got from some native plant nursery (with a blurry Gretchen in the background) planted near our cabin's southwest corner. There's also a wild cardinal flower growing along the Woodworth Lake outflow creek.
Click to enlarge.
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