A weekend of seed collecting and lots of night creatures.

It was a beautiful weekend, so I did lots of seed collecting on the farm, and along some of the roadsides nearby. I’ve found that when I keep seeds in the basement, I have to spread them out or they get mouldy. So now my side of the basement is nearly full of drying piles of seeds.

I have lots of wetland seeds, so I can plant the areas where I sprayed the Reed Canary Grass.

It was a good weekend for nighttime activity. There was a Great Horned Owl in the trees right behind the house, and another calling in Three Finger Valley. It was the first time I had actually see a Great Horned Owl here – usually we just hear them.

We also heard screech owls, and the coyotes were howling again. We heard the coyotes howl when we were walking on the high fields just before dusk one evening, but they were around the corner, in the next field, so we couldn’t see them.

I checked the bat house, and there’s still one bat left. It had it’s eyes open when I first shone the flashlight in, and they gleamed in the light. Then it closed its eyes – it probably doesn’t feel good to have a bright light shining right at them.

Mike tried out a skidsteer this weekend, hoping we could use it to thin the trees on our hills. But he drove it up the slope in Center Valley, across from the house, and it started sliding sideways down the hill. Even driving straight up, he couldn’t get it to go to the top of the slope. And that’s not one of the steepest slopes. So we’ll have to look at other solutions.