10-22-09 Visit

I went to the farm today to check on things, my son wanted me to set up a camera on a scrape to see if I could get some good pictures of some bucks. Got that done, got some pictures of the colorful trees, hoed the weeds in the iris garden, cleaned the radiator on the tractor and fished a little. Also downloaded a one weeks worth of pictures from cameras.

Here are some pictures from cameras

Oak grove camera

Pond camera

I moved the two cameras that were at the oak grove and at the pond, both are now on scrapes. One has a scrape dripper on it so it will be refreshed each day. The other one is on a trail that has a couple of scrapes on it. Hopefully we should get some good pictures from both of these.

Here are some pictures of the fall colors

Here are some scrapes

I saw more deer sign at the farm than I have seen all year. They have gotten all the corn out on the neighboring farms and most of the soy beans. The deer will have to eat acorns now so hopefully the larger bucks will start showing up. The persimmon trees should be loaded this year with the rain and as soon as we have a couple more frost they will start dropping and there are a bunch of those on the farm. When they start dropping I will move one of the cameras to that area.

10-15-09

Made a trip to the farm today, went by myself to check things out. We hadn't been there for two weeks. Everything looked good when I got there, I did have to hoe the weeds out of the area behind the barn where we planted the iris's and they are looking good. With the onset of colder weather it will help getting rid of a lot of these weeds.

When I opened the barn door there were two lizards underneath it. The one took off running across the concrete floor, he stopped about 5' out on the floor. I went back to the blazer to get the camera to take some pictures of him. He sat right there and let me take some, I tried to get closer and closer and at one point I realized that the cold from the concrete floor had slowed him down so much he could barely move. It was what you call a fence lizard and here are some pictures of him. When I went to put him back onto the grass I took a picture of the other one that was there.

I next went out and planted the lilly's a neighbor had given me, had quite a few of them and planted them with the phlox up under the loblolly pines.

I then went and down loaded all the pictures from the game cameras. I may have to find another tree to put the one camera on, it seems that when it is windy the movement of the tree trunk will set the camera off and I have a bunch of pictures without any animals in it. You can tell it is the wind as you move from one picture to the next you can see the movement of things in front of the camera. We did have a variety of pictures from each camera, although the one at the pond needed to be moved a little to better catch the animals. One of the pictures from the camera under the oak trees you will really enjoy as the deer stuck its head right down in front of the lens.

These next pictures are from the pond

this picture shows how deep the mineral lick is getting

I next went exploring, I had never gone back into the timber down by fern gully (as we call it). It is amazing all the ferns that are growing on the northern hillside. Now is the time to do this kind of walking and exploring as the snakes will be slowed down and should be trying to get somewhere where they can get some sunshine or get warm. I can't say I found anything unusual or exciting. It was just nice to be back in there, I did scare some deer out, couldn't see how many or what they were, bucks or does. I did find an area where there were several rubs, one of which was on a tree that was 4-6" across. See picture

Next I went fishing, I can now say I have caught the largest catfish out of the south pond, of course I am the only person who has caught a catfish out of the south pond. I wasn't fishing for catfish as I had a bass lure on. He hit it anyway and he ended up being about a 3.5 lb catfish. As you can see from the picture he is almost as long as a machete. The only other thing I caught was a small crappie. The important thing was it was fun.