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chimpmunk proofing
Sunday, September 29 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
After drinking most of my coffee, I was back under the porch again this morning, further restoring the landscape down there to one it had resembled before I began digging Friday afternoon. Then I carried many five gallon buckets of sand away, mostly to the sandy causeways along the Mossy Rock Trail. But I also carried a few buckets, usually the kind containing traces of unusual soil (nodules of rubbery clay or even clots of the native soil that had occupied the building site before the cabin was built) to places above the north retaining wall that had been plagued by severe erosion in the spring and summer of 2022. That whole area is now thickly populated with a great diversity of plant life and erosion is no longer a problem, but there are a few gullies and even a hole where erosion water somehow excavated a cave big enough for a woodchuck to escape into. Sometimes when I would find nodules of clay or native soil, I would place them aside and then later crumble them over low spots where the soil lapped up against the foundation wall. I figured it was best to cap the soil closest to the the cabin be with a somewhat less-absorbent material (and, indeed, that seemed to have been the thinking of whowever arranged the layers of soil when performing the final grading of the cabin site).
By noon today, I'd removed enough sand that the space beneath the porch was really starting to look like a usable storage place. At around that time, Charlotte came dashing through, slamming on her brakes and skidding in the sand. The loose soil seemed to delight her, and she repeatedly kicked it into the air. She also started barking (and even nipping at) me, as if to say, "Come on, it's long past time for us to go on our wak!" So I got her and Neville to go with me down the Lake Edward Trail, which I only took a little beyond Quarterway Creek before turning northward and then eastward, following a path similar to the one I took back on August 22nd, though maybe 30% closer to the cabin. Along the way through a landscape I'd never seen before, I passed through a vast hemlock grove on a north-facing slope, emerging into a deciduous forest where I found a massive boulder stuck at the bottom of a narrow valley. A temporary creek in that valley had nowhere to go but under the boulder, and I could see a little tunnel it had excavated. Further along, I found a boulder with the tightest bend I'd ever seen in strata; the bend had a radius of about two feet. A bend like that couldn't form except under extremely high temperatures and pressure. Some of the bent layers were now delaminating and separating on the side of the boulder, producing potential flagstones.
Back at the cabin, I got out the telescoping ladder and rigged up the bird feeder so I could raise and lower it from the ground. When I went to fill it with new seed, I found the remains of the small amount of seed that the birds hadn't gotten after I'd filled it last time (well over a year ago) had molded and formed nasty mummy-like residue that had to be scraped away.
Later Charlotte excitedly went with me when I took a beer and some mesh wire down to the dock to block some holes in the lid of the big plastic box that holds our lake gear. The box is nice and weatherproof, but it wasn't, it turned out, varmint-proof. Some creature, probably a chipmunk (since there were no droppings left behind) had moved into the box last winter and destroyed some towels and a hammock we'd kept in there. Looking at the lid, I could see the at grid of rectangular voids along the side didn't seal against the lower part of the box and small varmint could probably wriggle through. To stop them, the plan was to cut bits of wire mesh into rectangles, roll them to a suitable size, stuff them in the rectangular voids, and fill in around each of them with spray foam. (Of course, on my first walk to the lake today, I'd forgotten to bring the spray foam.) It didn't take long to fill all the voids with mesh-reinforced spray foam. But then I had to wait for the foam to cure before I could even close the box. So that sent me back to the cabin for an hour or two to tinker with my local remote, which has been very unreliable of late. Then I could return to the dock, trim away the excess foam, and close the box for the week.
Charlotte had come with me on this second walk down to the dock as well. Because of the other people at the lake experiencing something akin to moral panic about our dogs, I've been nervous about what trouble they've been getting themselves into while I've been concentrating on my projects. So at one point while I was working on chipmunk-proofing the dockside box, I went to see what Charlotte was up to. I found her a little ways away on Shane's parcel at the foot of a tree, staring intently up into it. She was so focused she barely acknowledged me as I came to within about fifty feet of her. I've seen her go into these trances before; perhaps they're the expression of genes from a pointer great grandparent.
After doing the obligatory cabin cleaning jihad, I loaded up the dogs and started the two-hour drive back to Hurley a little before 6:00pm. On the way, I paid attention to the various political messages people were posting in their yards. The guy on Route 122 with the huge FUCK BIDEN banner recently replaced his "FULL SEND" banner (which only hyper-online incels understand) with one showing Donald Trump rising like a ketchup-smeared phoenix from his first assasination attempt. (I'm curious how the neighbors feel about the "FUCK BIDEN" banner, since it seems like it will never be taken down.) Further on, I saw a number of new Harris-Walz yard signs in Trump country. Two had been put in the both front yards of the nice house in the center of the hamlet of Glen that one must drive around to get through (42.89426N, 74.34499W). And there was another one in front of one of the nice houses in the middle of the village of Scoharie.
Back home in Hurley, Gretchen had made a bean, potato, and kale soup which was better than it looked. Instead of eating it while watching teevee, we sat together on the couch and Gretchen told me about her weekend. She'd had good time hanging out with Josh Riley at his fundraiser at Marisa & David's place, where Gretchen had ended up spending the night. It turns out that the Riley-Molinaro battle is the most expensive house race in the country this year. Gretchen also mentioned a huge print of Marilyn Monroe that David bought for $10,000 and has hanging on the wall of his office. It's from a little before she died and she looked, Gretchen said, "too skinny" and "strung out," criticisms that David took a little too personally.
A big rock sitting at the bottom of a small valley on the hike today.
Click to enlarge.
Neville near the rock for scale.
Click to enlarge.
That boulder with the tightly-folded layers. It's probably gneiss.
Click to enlarge.
Fungal shelves looking like bells on the trunk of this tree.
Click to enlarge.
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