Project: One photo a day (but not necessarily every day)

[j44ke]

Jorn, this has probably come up before, but I don't remember the answer:

Are beavers active in your area, and if so, do you have any on your land? That would be neat.

About 7 years ago now, local history* says that someone came through the area and trapped all the beavers in the town. Friends remember it as an over-night operation. One morning they woke up, and the beavers on their pond were gone.

Our property has a large wetland on its southeast edge where the stream in the photo begins. A beaver family of about 7 or 8 individuals (according to a neighbor) is one of the groups that disappeared during the trapping event. Those beavers built a very large house which has since subsided, and a dam that is about 150' long in a big arc across the corner of the wetlands that drains into the stream. The dam is impressive and supports plenty of weight, including the deer who use it as a short cut from our neighbor's property to ours. I've tried putting a game camera on it, but it is too covered with alders now to get any sort of clear line of sight.

However, in December, this showed up on the game camera placed about where the photo above was taken.

https://flic.kr/p/2pnz2Zn

We've since found pruned alder and birch stems and a couple piles of beaver poop and new sticks on the dam, so we're hopeful they are coming back. Would be a nice return to the ecosystem.

* I've since learned from the local biologists that beavers will up and move from an area if food sources decrease or if threats increase. So maybe it was trapping or maybe it was lack of willows and birches and other things beavers depend on for sustenance. Or maybe a combination. Beavers are not beloved by many people. They cut down trees and flood fields, along with being just generally obsessive compulsive dam builders and wood chewers. One of the books I have on my iPad is Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. I'm looking forward to reading it.

[Tom]

I read that book recently. It is very good, you'll enjoy it.

[rwsaunders]

[one60]

IMG_0190.jpg

[TonyP]

Is that a cigarette butt on the floor? If so musta used a pants cuff for the ashes.

[rwsaunders]

[TMB]

Playing at the park with my girls this morning …..

1EB1ED71-5144-4F74-B644-389FFAE6C198.jpg



(I apologize, I have no idea how to rotate those photos to right side up, nor do I know how to delete the two lazy thumbnails ….)

[rwsaunders]

[j44ke]

One of my favorite places. We'd go there fairly frequently when I was a kid and stay in the Appalachian Trail club's house. I'd spend most of my time in the water.

[rwsaunders]

^ yes, we like to visit here and do bits of the trail, tour the sites and learn more about the history of the region. We drive to Charlottesville to visit Tommy J. at Monticello and UVA, worked our way to Harper’s Ferry, spent some time in Shepherdstown, then a sobering tour of Antietam. Nice weather and off-season crowds. Everyone should tour a battlefield or two, or three…to help remind one that war doesn’t make sense.

[robin3mj]

Love visiting Harper's Ferry.
I've got a half baked plan to bike out there and take the train back the next day at some point.

[j44ke]

[rwsaunders]

[Tom]

Noodling around museums while Karen learns how to grade stones over at the GIA.

At the Met

That place is worse than the British Museum. Go through a door and there's a whole other wing full of stuff unlike anything in any of the other wings. I need to go back when I'm fresh and the stuff that didn't register because my brain was full I can see.

[j44ke]

Jorn, this has probably come up before, but I don't remember the answer:

Are beavers active in your area, and if so, do you have any on your land? That would be neat.

Water level in the creek was still strong but narrower (?) this morning - not my expectation after periodic rain/snow last 3-4 days. Then I thought to go check the old beaver dam, and someone's upped their game. New topper of sticks on the old dam and two new sub-dams perpendicular to the old one to manage water flow. Beaver engineering. Really interesting to watch.

[robin3mj]

That beaver is like the guys I worked with on the Public Works dept in college.
3:30pm end of shift whistle blows and they drop everything and head back to base, no matter the project status.

"That's a tomorrow problem"

[rwsaunders]

Hard to believe that such serene settings were once sites of a horrible battle in the Civil War.



https://www.nps.gov/anti/learn/photo...unken-road.htm



https://www.nps.gov/anti/learn/photo...ide-bridge.htm

[Tom]

Karen passed the class. 98 and 100 out of 100, test stones were a sapphire cut for weight and a nice orange grossular garnet.

After dinner

[j44ke]

When I was a kid in Virginia, they were still finding buried bodies (and I am sure they still do,) sometimes in areas well away from what was considered the main battlefield. As the front line moved back and forth, one side's dead would suddenly be behind the other side's lines and vice versa. The intent was to recover the bodies at some point later, but sometimes that never happened. There was also the burial of weapons & ammunition so they wouldn't fall into the wrong hands. These too got caught on one or the other side and no one there to remember where exactly they were buried. So sometimes it was a farmer plowing some area long fallow or recently cleared, and something would appear behind the plow. I think the American Civil War contained a lot of firsts in modern warfare, and one of those was a particular type of exploding shell. Occasionally a tractor would plow up one of those. Usually a bomb squad took care of it, but I remember one wrecking the tractor. Virginia is the state with the most battles fought within its boundaries, so there was no shortage of war's effects left behind.

[echappist]

Karen passed the class. 98 and 100 out of 100, test stones were a sapphire cut for weight and a nice orange grossular garnet.

After dinner

What building is this? And would this be NYC by chance (looking northwest, with Hudson River in the background)?

At first, I thought this might be Philly City Hall, which is also somewhat surrounded by skyscrapers, but there's no statue of William Penn in sight.