Not a deer trail but a super highway

Rush hour on my bush trail that I keep clear of snow.

It will be interesting to see how wildlife populations on our property react this spring and summer to what so far has been a near-total absence of canine predators. This has been the first winter in probably 15 years that timber wolves haven't scoured our land each night in search of whitetail deer.
By this time we normally have a half-dozen deer kills right near my walking trails. This year there hasn't been a track of the big predators.
Nor has their been any sign of red foxes. They typically whip around the property every few days and have proven remarkably adept at catching ruffed grouse while they slept beneath the snow. In fact one time I saw evidence of where a fox went after a group of five partridge that were hanging around the house. The fox got a bird each night for five consecutive nights. In an intriguing display of animal behaviour, it left half of the last partridge near our front step, seemingly as a present to our black Lab, Bud. The fox then left and I didn't see a sign of it for weeks. Bud, of course, accepted the gift.
The coyote photographed a few posting back isn't a regular visitor. I would say he swings through about once a week. He seems most interested in mice.
Someone must have shown my post about the absence of some animals this winter to the red squirrels because the very next day a couple showed up for the first time at the bird feeders. There suddenly are lots of tracks from them around the trails too. I suspect they had put away a ton of green balsam and spruce cones last summer and have been munching on them rather than ones still on the trees. Apparently the store has now run empty.

Deer are really thin now. They have been losing weight every day since last summer.

Feb. 22 in Nolalu, Ont. +10C (50F)

There is still lots of snow but the temperature is WAY above freezing

10C outside, 28 C inside

My goodness! The temperature shot up to 10 C or 50 F today. Just a few nights ago it was -28 C.
The snow is sliding off the metal roofs.
I'm breaking out the BBQ.

Snow has slid off our old root cellar

Friendly neighbourhood coyote visits

It was a beautiful sunny day today, although a bit cold, and it brought out a lovely coyote who walked right across the middle of the field in front of our house.
The snow has compacted now and that toughens it enough to let animals like the coyote stay relatively afloat. The total depth of snow is over 30 inches.

See conditions on entire Earth right now

Visible Earth

Temperature

NASA has a great website and app that lets you see climatic conditions on the entire planet at once. Called NASA Earth Now, it tells you either current or the latest readings for things like cloud cover, temperature, carbon dioxide, soil moisture, gravity and much more.
I have downloaded their app to my smartphone and it works wonderfully.
It is great to see the big picture, not just get snippets of weather and climate information. You can rotate the globe to see any place on Earth. You can also see the orbits of NASA satellites.
I have made screenshots of just a couple of the views here.

Some birds and creatures are AWOL

Here at our home in Nolalu we are blessed to have a bunch of friendly birds and animals to cheer us up through the winter. The four deer in the video visit our bird feeders every couple of hours. We also have several ruffed grouse or partridge that feed on the birch catkins right outside the windows. Then there are all the songbirds: bluejays, Canada jays, hairy woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, goldfinches, chickadees, juncos, and pine siskins. Although not at the feeders I have also seen redbreasted nuthatches and white-winged crossbills.
But there are some birds and creatures missing this year. No one has seen a pine grosbeak in the entire region. The Christmas Bird Count for all the towns in the Northwest didn't record a single bird. There were a few found east of Lake Superior. There aren't any evening grosbeaks being seen either but that is not as unusual as they are known as an irruptive species. Pine grosbeaks, however, are dependable winter birds at feeders and their total absence is a mystery.
When it comes to creatures, I have not seen a sign of a wolf or a fox on our land in Nolalu. Last year the only fox we saw were grey foxes, a new species here. I have a couple of trailcam photos of a coyote this winter. Only a few miles east of here coyotes are known to run in packs but here at our home, which is in a more-forested area, all coyotes seen are singles.
Something also seems to have happened to red squirrels. There are none at the feeder where in the past we could have 14 at a time. I have seen a few squirrel tracks but, incredibly, I have only seen a single animal.
Is all of this somehow due to the big seed crop produced by trees last summer? I don't know but it is the only explanation I can think of. Red squirrels' primary food source are conifer seeds. Trees last summer were so heavy with cones that their tops were bent over.

Is this a cool puzzle or what?

Brenda is a puzzler and just did this great puzzle given to us by South Carolina friends Howard and Millie. I love this artist, Mark Fredrickson. This one is going to have to go up to the cabin!

Will frozen ground melt beneath the snow?

Except for right near the surface, the ground and rock in this region stay the same temperature the year-around. It is about 45 F or 7 C. It is like this for thousands of feet. That is similar to the temperature in your fridge. The approved method of thawing frozen meat from your freezer is to place it in the fridge. It will be thawed in less than a day.
A heavy blanket of snow, such as we have here in the Nolalu area, southwest of Thunder Bay, makes good insulation. It is well known that snow can prevent the ground from freezing if the snow comes early in the winter. Even if it comes later it stops the frostline from going any deeper. I don't think anybody would dispute this.
However, once the snow has fallen and is insulating the ground from more freezing, my question is does the ground start thawing from the bottom-up? It should be the same as thawing meat in the fridge.
Our ground was frozen probably a foot or more before the heavy snows started coming in January. Now we have at least 30 inches and more is sure to follow. When April comes around and the snow melts, will there be unfrozen ground beneath?
I have another question, why is the ground so cold to begin with? The outer core of the Earth is 5430 C or 9806 F. I would expect the ground, and rock beneath, to get warmer every inch that you go deeper, at least once you get away from the top 10 feet or so that is influenced by surface temperatures. Yet, in the gold mines at Red Lake miners had to wear wool long underwear when they were underground to about 5,000 feet deep. When the Goldcorp mine went 5,000 feet deeper the conditions were hot. I get it why it would be hot 10,000 feet deep. I just don't understand why it wasn't also somewhat hot at 5,000 feet.
Despite my research on the Internet I can't find a clear answer to this question. Anyone know?
I have a theory. I think the Earth and rock might still be cold from the last ice age.
Here's another quandary to ponder, this from my old Bow Narrows blog. What is a shadow?

We have turned the corner on winter

This winter has been easy on the woodpile and wildlife

Everyone is realizing that the deepest part of winter is behind us and we have only had a few days and nights of bitter cold. December, January and February are the months that we can experience -40 C cold, with or without the windchill. There is only February left now and here in Nolalu I think we have only had a couple of nights in the -30s. Incredibly, January saw nightime temperatures in the single negatives and daytime highs just below freezing.
The forecast for the next two weeks shows cooler weather but still remarkably warm for this time of year.
On the downside, it has been cloudy most of the time. That has been hard on those folks relying on solar. We have friends who live off the grid and they report using their generator to charge their batteries a record number of times.
Incidentally, they also have exciting animal news. They have seen wolverine tracks near their home which is in a lightly-inhabited area southwest of Thunder Bay, almost on the Minnesota border.
That is the farthest south I have heard of a wolverine in Northwestern Ontario. These largest members of the weasel family are making a comeback in the province, starting in the area around and north of Red Lake. They cover immense territories. I wouldn't be surprised to next hear the same animal has been spotted half-way to Duluth, Minn.

🎶 Macho, macho man, I wanna be...🎶

"Rugged individualism, derived from 'individualism', is a term that indicates the ideal whereby an individual is totally self-reliant and independent from outside, usually state or government assistance." -- Wikipedia.
So you're a big, tough guy, right? You don't need no stinkin' help from anybody, do you? You pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, went to the School of Hard Knocks, forged your identity, blazed your own trail. You are one self-made, righteous dude!
That is the image many North Americans see when they look in the mirror. And it's an utter fairy tale.
Those of us driving big honkin' pickup trucks, racing fast cars and scorching the pavement on choppers and hawgs can get no farther on our own than our umbilical cord to Mama Oil will allow.
We are babies nursing at the gas teat.
Do you really want to be on your own? Then cut mommy's apron strings and get yourself an electric vehicle. Get your own solar system. Make your own power.  I repeat: YOUR OWN power.
Suck it up, Buttercup. It's time to be a man.

Update on local climate change issues

It has been a warm, snowy winter so far

The City of Thunder Bay joined 470 other Canadian cities and declared a climate emergency. The move signals the importance the cities place on climate action and is meant to spur-on federal and provincial initiatives. The climate emergency declaration was something Thunder Bay high school students had asked for during their weekly Friday climate strikes.
A spokesman for Thunder Bay noted that the city started a greenhouse gas reduction program 12 years ago and since that time has saved $13.5 million.
This is a recurring theme: what does reducing greenhouse gas cost? Nothing; it saves money.
Meanwhile provincially, Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford's government is actually tearing down wind turbines and dismantling solar energy sites. That move is costing Ontario taxpayers $230 million this year alone. Oh yeah, he also ripped out EV charging stations already installed at Toronto GoTrain parking lots.
My take? Unrelenting stupidity. What's next? Book-burning?
In other regional happenings, Tesla has also installed multiple charging stations in Dryden and Nipigon. I reported earlier that the electric vehicle company had also installed chargers in Thunder Bay. Without any fanfare Tesla seems to be doing this across Canada.

On the trail of a most-destructive beast

White-footed deer mouse track showing distinctive tail drag mark

With the heavy snow cover we now have here in Nolalu, 50 km southwest of Thunder Bay, Ont., there is little sign of animals. They are hunkering down for the duration, waiting until spring and the 30-plus inches of snow melts, or forms a crust that allows them to walk on top. However, there are suddenly footprints of a creature that wreaks havoc everywhere it encounters human beings: the white-footed deer mouse.
Just today Brenda had to get a deer mouse nest removed from the heater system of her car. In October, I had the same thing done with my pickup truck. Brenda's car was invaded while parked here in our Nolalu driveway. My truck was hit while parked in Red Lake Marine's parking lot in Red Lake. In addition, I had to remove a huge mouse nest from my tractor in Nolalu.
They are incredibly fast at their dirty work. Brenda uses her vehicle every day so they had only 12 hours to work on it before it started rolling again. I had used my truck two days before I turned on the fan only to find it made a loud racket. I had used my tractor all day long the day before its engine began running incorrectly and overheating. I opened the hood to find a small muskrat house-size nest beneath.
Brenda's car just had the nest in the heater. It cost $130 to remove.
My truck had 12 dead mice inside. It set me back $200.
There was no cost on the tractor.
When we owned the camp we had continuous destruction from white-footed mice. They are adept at slipping into the cabins and ruining people's food. In the lodge, it seemed the mice checked for an opening every night, perhaps a door not tightly shut or a window screen out of position. One time they gnawed a hole through the ceiling during the winter, and ruined hundreds of dollars worth of t-shirts and caps that we were to sell the next summer.
I have had them ruin all sorts of possessions and clothing.
It's important not to tar all mice with the same brush. In the 56 years that my family owned and operated the camp and in the 35 years that we have lived in Nolalu we have never had a single problem with any other mouse species. Meadow mice (voles), red-backed voles, jumping mice, star-nosed moles and shrews have caused us no problems whatsoever.
We were at a New Year's gathering at a friend's house out here in the country and every person there had virtually the same experience with white-footed mice, including with vehicles and machines. In fact the conversation started when our host revealed he had just paid $700 to repair his generator after white-footed mice had burrowed into the air cleaner and sent particles through the engine.
Many of us had also come up with the same type of wholesale mouse trap: a 5-gallon bucket. One fellow said he always has one such trap in his workshop. While you can fiddle around with ingenious gizmos for the mice to climb across before plummeting into the trap, you really don't need anything: just place a regular bucket against a wall with some bait in the bottom, like sunflower seeds, and the next day you will have one or more mice inside. It's up to you what to do from there.
I prefer to place a few inches of water in the bottom, then rig a bait over the top, something like a chunk of bacon. I only place such traps inside, of course, usually after the mice have destroyed something.
With such a widespread pest you would expect to see them all the time. In fact, just the opposite is the case. I haven't seen a single live deer mouse in the wild for years. They are that elusive. I see meadow mice and red-backed voles -- the woods version of the short-tailed mouse set -- frequently, any time I mow the fields with the tractor or just walk in the bush. Meadow mice are the dark, plump, short-tailed creatures that eat seeds from plants that grow in the fields. Red-backed voles do exactly the same thing but in the bush. I've always been impressed at how segregated they keep themselves. Two feet into the bush around a field there are zero meadow mice, just red-backs. Two feet into the field there are no red-backs, just meadow mice.
On our snowshoe walk today we discovered that the last heavy snow knocked a lot of maple wings (seed cases) off mountain maple shrubs. It must be a favorite with the white-footed mice because their tracks were everywhere. Their tracks are distinctive because they show the creature's long tail dragging through the snow.
Other than signs of the mice, we found one grouse den, a few rabbit tracks (snowshoe hare) and deer trails. Deer are wandering beneath the white cedars, feeding on branches weighed down by snow. It's a struggle for them to get through the snow but on the good side, there is somewhat less snow beneath the conifers.

Grouse plunked into snow, spent the night, then flew out the other side

Enormous track of the snowshoe hare

I cleared this trail through part of our bush

Beautiful winter weather here in Nolalu

Perfect for outdoor activities like snowshoeing and cross-country skiing

I almost canceled my planned snowshoe walk today because the thermometer showed it was -20C (4 below zero F). I thought it might be too cold for our dog, Cork, to stay outside for the 45-minute trail loop. It looked windy too and that is always what makes it feel bitter. Then we went outside to get the mail and realized the wind was only an issue in the wide open spaces. And there wasn't a cloud in the sky. The sun, reflecting off the snow was absolutely brilliant and warm. So I strapped on the snowshoes and we took off.  It was wonderful.
Four inches of snow had fallen since we last traversed this trail three days ago and that is like nothing to repack with the 'shoes. Back in the shelter of the trees there was no wind at all. I was glad I had ditched my heavy parka that I had worn down to the mailbox. I just wore a flannel shirt with a light weight parka.
We found fresh lynx tracks and my heart quickened when I realized the cat was headed toward one of my cameras. Alas, the elusive critter did what they usually do, walked right up to the camera but on the wrong side of the tree. Anyway, a group of four deer showed up on the camera card. One of them had spotted the camera and came up for a close inspection.
Chickadees serenaded us all along the way. There is nothing cheerier or braver than the tiny chickadee, my pick for Canada's national bird.
I moved one of my trail cameras to another spot that showed today's lynx tracks. I had seen tracks there the last time I was on this trail so I figure there is a chance for a pic.
Yesterday was a major firewood cutting day for me and Cork. We brought in four toboggan loads of dry balsam (about a week's worth), working up a good sweat in the process. Cork and I work as a team; I cut down the trees and saw them into four-foot lengths and Cork chews up all the branches that I cut off.
We're expecting another six inches of snow on Friday evening. Snowfalls are coming every few days now. I have what I consider the perfect machine to deal with snow, a Kubota tractor with a front-mounted snowblower. It beats a plow which gets stymied when there is no longer anywhere to push the snow, a situation that already exists. So in addition to our 200-yard drive, I also do three of the neighbours. It just takes a couple of hours to clean out all of our drives.

"What's this funny thing tied to the tree?"

Cutting and hauling out dry balsam is a great workout for me

A canoe adventure that boggles the mind

To commemorate Canada's 150th birthday in 2017, Ontario resident Adam Shoalts, decided to make a canoe trip that had never been done before: to paddle 4,000 kilometers from the Yukon to Hudson Bay across Canada's Arctic. There were just a few problems: there are no river systems that run east and west in that region; the area is ice-free for only four months; and he had no one to go with him. He did it anyway in what was one of the most grueling, incredible feats of human endurance. Then he wrote a book about the experience -- Beyond the Trees, A Journey Alone Across Canada's Arctic.

He set out in early May near Eagle Plains, Yukon Territory, walking along the Dempster Highway that runs from Dawson City to the Beaufort Sea. Almost immediately he was charged by a grizzly bear, the first of many grizzlies he was to encounter in the next four months. It pulled up short -- a bluff charge. A good thing because Shoalts had no weapon other than bear spray for the entire trip.
He had chosen this spot to get dropped off along the road because it was the crossing of the Arctic Circle -- the latitude where the sun never sets on the Spring Solstice and never rises on the Winter Solstice. He then walked to where the road encounters the Mackenzie River and had to wait a bit because the river was plugged with ice sheets rushing downstream. It wasn't long before he took off anyway, only he didn't go downstream, he went upstream in currents too strong to paddle. So he poled his canoe along, dodging ice floes and wading up rapids.
He traveled almost all of the North's big, rushing rivers this way -- in the wrong direction, upstream -- for weeks on end, because they flowed toward the northwest and he needed to go east, even if the rivers only angled that way. Shoalts would portage from one river system to another with no trails to follow, making seven trips over each divide to haul his canoe, backpack and two waterproof barrels.
Why did he go in this direction and not the reverse, east to west? Because spring comes to the West earlier. If he had waited for ice-out in the East, he would have been caught by winter before he could complete the trip. Time was of the essence and it became a drumbeat for Shoalts.
Eventually he reached Great Bear Lake, the eighth-largest lake in the world, larger than Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. It was still plugged with ice but he couldn't wait for it to fully melt, so he paddled in and around inland icebergs, through massive waves and against ferocious winds. He crossed the lake in just 11 days.
He then had to make a long portage from the Great Bear watershed to the Dismal Lakes of the Coppermine River drainage. No trail and as always, he had to do it seven times to get his stuff across. All told, he had to travel 40 kilometers. It took him just two days!
Obviously, Shoalts was no greenhorn when it came to wilderness canoeing. In fact he has been called Canada's greatest living explorer. He is also an archaeologist, geographer and historian. The year after this trip he was named Explorer-in-Residence of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
So-driven by time on his trip, Shoalts never once stopped to drop a hook overboard although he would paddle amidst schools of enormous northern pike and lake trout.
For months the only creatures he met were belligerent muskox, curious wolves, bears and birds. As a reader, I wondered if perhaps he didn't eventually become "bushed." It's a term used here in the North to describe someone who spends so much time alone in the bush he shuns other human company. Lost persons, for example, have been known to run and hide from their rescuers.
The incident that made me wonder about this was a time near the end of July when Shoalts, after another tortuous day of wading up whitewater, dragging his canoe behind and driven nearly to madness by the hordes of blackflies and mosquitoes, had just turned into his tent for the night when a voice called out. It was a group of five female canoeists from Minnesota traveling downstream, of course. They were incredulous, also of course, that Shoalts was going the other way -- upstream -- and that he had been doing this for months.
Shoalts spoke to the party from the inside of his tent, explaining he had just killed all the blackflies inside. He mentioned that he had passed a better camping spot a mile downstream. The ladies took the hint and left.
On Sept. 4 he reached Baker Lake, a fjord-like water body with direct access to Hudson Bay and frequented by beluga whales and seals. His hair was long and wild, his beard enormous and he was scarecrow thin. But his incredible journey was over.

Thumbs-up on new Faber snowshoes

My first new snowshoes in more than 50 years

I got new style snowshoes for my birthday and I've been using them exclusively this winter for trail walking and cutting firewood. With 30 inches of snow now snowshoes are a must.
My 'shoes are made by Faber, a Canadian company based in Quebec. They are called hybrid 'shoes since they have a wooden frame but synthetic webbing.
Brenda has the same model of snowshoes, just a smaller size than mine. I'm a big guy and when getting snowshoes I always think about a customer of ours who was a woodcutter from Fort Frances, Ont., an area of Northwestern Ontario that often gets deep snow. I asked him one time what type of snowshoes he wore. "The biggest ones I can find," he said.
Mine are 11 inches in width and 40 inches long and are rated for someone up to 350 pounds. I am more than 100 pounds less than that.
I find they don't sink as much as the traditional snowshoes in new powder, probably no more than six inches.
They have a great harness system that allows you to ratchet the strap tight to your boot. The harness also pivots through the toe-hole and has a sharp cleat on the bottom that digs into packed snow when climbing hills.
They do have a different feel to them compared to my old traditional 'shoes, something that had me do a couple of face-plants at first, but now I have grown used to their shape.
Faber has come out with an intriguing model called the S-Line which stands for sliding step snowshoes. They are a hybrid between snowshoes and cross-country skis and could be a blast for people who have mostly open, hilly country to navigate.
For me though, confined by the dense Boreal Forest, the hybrid 'shoes are a better fit.

Gritty details about attracting winter birds

Goldfinches love nyger seed

I shovel off a space to allow birds access to the sand

Our friends tell us that we have more birds coming to our feeders than they do and wonder why.
One reason might be the attraction in front of our tractor shed. When we built the shed a few years ago we had a couple of dump truck loads of coarse sand delivered. The sand was used as the base for the shed and also for a drive that leads up to the door. It seems ideal as bird grit. Each morning all the birds flock to an area I keep cleared of snow and pick up grit before visiting the bird feeders. Interestingly the list of birds visiting the sand each day includes a couple of ruffed grouse.
I suppose this bird feeding tip only applies to areas like ours that have continuous snow cover in the winter.
There is sand at intersections of roads too, but the closest spot is about 300 yards away from our feeders.
Speaking of birds, our chocolate Lab, Cork, seems to have gotten the wrong idea about what it is to be a bird dog. Every time he goes outside he beetles over to beneath the feeders and cleans up any seeds or seed hulls that have fallen to the ground. The seeds seem to have a laxative effect on him which means every hour he needs to hurriedly go back outside. Then while he is out there it dawns on him there might be more seeds to gobble. And the cycle is repeated.

What else would you expect a bird dog to eat?

It appears lots really do read this blog

Four blog readers commented in just a couple of hours so I can figure the actual number is quite substantial.
Thank you!
I didn't think those tiny Google diagnostic figures were correct. Anyway, I will continue advancing into the blogosphere.
Again, thank you all.
Dan

Does anybody read this?

It seems to me, from what I can determine from Google's blog diagnostics, that perhaps I am blogging to only a handful of people. If so, there probably is no reason to continue.
If you read the blog, could you drop me a comment saying so? You don't have to leave your name, if you don't want. Thanks.
Dan

Say 'Cheese,' Mr. Lynx

Check out the size of those hind feet

Yesterday I moved two of my trail cameras to a new location in search of Canada lynx. Then today I went to pick up my third camera from the old spot when I noticed lynx tracks right in front of it. Sure enough, I got a single photo of a mature lynx.
Meanwhile we saw three lynx from the sunroom today and they were headed in the general direction of where I placed the other two cameras. So maybe there will be more lynx pictures tomorrow.
It appeared to be a mother with two half-grown kittens.

Deer appreciate my snowshoe trails

It's tough walking in 30 inches of snow

Doe hoists herself up to my packed trail

There is about 30 inches of snow in the bush here now and that is making life difficult for the deer.
The snow is up to their chests and makes them leap rather than walk to get through it. They gladly follow my packed snowshoe trails where their sharp hooves still sink but only a couple of inches. I also have cleared one of our main trails with the snowblower and that has become a deer thoroughfare. I clear this trail with the tractor's snowblower just so I can get in there later this winter and skid out white birches. These will be pulled down to our new woodshed where they will be split, stacked and dried for next year.

The snow is starting to pile up

We got a big dump of snow a couple days ago and turned everything into a Winter Wonderland.
My guess is we now have 2-3 feet of the stuff in the bush.