This is gun hunting week, so we’ve been mostly staying inside and keeping our heads down.

We’ve found two walks we can take without worrying about stray bullets. One is out to the road, and the other is back through 3 Finger Valley. The valley is surrounded by our own land, and we’re careful to stay below the level of the hilltops. It’s a nice walk, but I’m glad hunting only lasts a week.

We got our first real snow on Saturday. It wasn’t enough to help the hunters, but it did look pretty for an hour or two until it melted.

The next day it got warmer and all the moisture changed into mist.

I worked a little on a few of my hillside projects – in places that are safe from the hunters. One is an area below Ragwort Opening. It’s mostly Prickly Ash and Sumac, but below the brush are plenty of prairie species. The bushes are scattered fairly far apart, so I can make lots of progress in a short time. This is one area that I cleared of brush.

I also worked a little on the very steep west-facing slope of Indian Grass Prairie. The brush there is tangled with vines of Wild Grape and American Bittersweet, so it takes a while to untangle everything and remove just the species we don’t want. This is part of the hillside before clearing.

The cleared hillside with big clumps of Prairie Dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis), Prairie Satingrass (Muhlenbergia cuspidata), and Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium).