Monday 29 May 2017

Windigo's journey from inception to present

After the waterfowl lake, Windigo, was excavated, we breached the berm to drain it so that the dump trucks could drive to the compost piles and be loaded. This left an empty lake area that needed to refill with the fall rains. In anticipation of a new life, we also left several inches of clay and detritus on the bottom to hopefully cultivate a weed food source for the birds and protection for the minnows and frogs, etc.



Of course, we also left the little islands as nesting sites for the ducks and safe areas for does to have their fawns in the spring, where they could hopefully escape the omnipresent coyotes.



When the water began to refill the lake, the grasses and cattails appeared along the berm. Not knowing if there would be a weed cover as a food source for the ducks, in the previous fall I purchased and cast 100 pounds of wild rice throughout the lake. In the spring the ducks ate the rice shoots up so fast that there were none left intact to reseed itself in the fall -- thus a failed experiment, and an additional disappointment for me cause I was planning on harvesting some wild rice myself!



However, a lovely delicate weed appeared spontaneously and completely covered the bottom of the lake, and the ducks love it!



Even the rare Blandings turtles found it a good place, under water in the weeds, to consumate their mating ritual.



The Blandings turtles look a little different when they are walking across your lawn. Note below  the bright yellow color of the throat and chest. The majority of turtles in the lake, however, are of the painted variety.



In the second season, the lake was full of blue and green winged teal, mallards and a 'resident' pair of geese. The wood ducks had not yet shown up, largely because I had not yet build nesting boxes for them (a different posting).



The most successful of the nesting birds were the mallards. The hen that laid these eggs has been here every year for the last five seasons. She is easily recognized because she limps on her left leg, Which doesn't seem to bother her consort at all. But then we know about the minimal requirement for males 😏.



That same season the lake was worked steadily by six black terns. I had never seen one before. As seen in the picture below with terns flying in the foreground (Find Waldo!), they flew endlessly around the lake during daylight hours catching insects. Life was good.



But then the summer of 2012 arrived. When the drought began, the water level in the lake dropped, and eventually dried up completely (along with all the marsh-land south of Windigo). As it did so, the animal life became intensely concentrated, and the hunting opportunity for the wading birds became wonderful. That year during the water recession, for several weeks we had 6 full time great blue herons a variety of others, like night herons and American bitterns, but amazingly 14 great white egrets. This is the only place in Canada where they show up -- just a little spot west of Ottawa, shown in Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to Birds of Eastern and Central North America.  We had another 4-month drought in 2016, but we didn't see egrets or herons that year, for some reason, like poor recovery of the minnow population.



Once the food was gone, these wading predators all left too. I read that 'draining' a pond every few years is good for it, as it rejuvenates the weed growth in the coming year. However, it sure is tough on the minnows, frogs and water insects that were in the lake since they all have to start again in the next season, if they can!

The various droughts, however, did not seriously impact our trout pond, even though the water levels there dropped by about 6 -8 feet.



And despite the drastic drop in water level with a concomitant raising of water temperature, beautiful trout were still available to be invited for dinner. Here we see one brook trout and a similar size rainbow trout, which I periodically take when required for a meal.



When Windigo dries down, you get to see who is cruising the area by the tracks they leave in the mud. In this case, a good sized black bear has been through, who often makes a mess of the neighbor's corn fields. In such cases, it too can be invited for dinner.



This year, with the vast quantity of rain that we have experienced lately (see my fourth posting), the odds of a drought occurring is very slim -- thankfully. But that doesn't mean that Mother Nature can't still throw us a curve. After all, June is still a couple of days away.

Thursday 18 May 2017

Constructing Windigo lake

While the trout pond was being cleaned of its stone by a contractor from Smiths Falls, I had my neighbor, Danny O'Grady, begin developing the adjacent marsh area to become our wild waterbird lake, Windigo. This was an operation that was almost exclusively accomplished with an excavator. First, I defined the boundaries of the lake, mostly based on the distribution of cattails, marsh grass and variegated dogwood up to where they encroached on the surrounding wooded area seen in the background below.


 Second, I then put the boys onto the removal and 'composting' of this organic material in the marsh. In addition to making compost piles of the clay/silt/cattails/wood, they made a berm surrounding the future 'lake' with the same kind of material to help keep the spring water level at its maximum height (~3 feet) going into the summer. And so it began ...


Note the depth of the water is at the top of the excavator's track, which is consistent throughout the lake area, thus allowing the machine to be driven around fearlessly on the limestone plate beneath it. The compost piles were formed in the center area as it was cleared, while the berm piles surrounding the lake were made next to the new shoreline.


The detritus piles were then left in the lake to decompose for the first year,


When the lake iced over the first winter, many fun tracks were evident in the ice from muskrats and beaver (viewed by daughter #1 Jenifer and daughter #2 Tobi's husband Peter), and the skating was great until the snow arrived!



The next summer, we breached the shoreline berm at its natural outflow end at the south end and drained the lake. This allowed a dump truck to drive on the lake's lime stone plate to the many compost piles where they were loaded by the excavator, which was followed by dumping the material onto the two adjacent small fields (1 and 2 acres).


The dumped compost ultimately filled both fields.


The plan was to decompose this material one more year, and then separate and extract the dried silt and clay from the woody material, where the former would become our topsoil for the new house yard and the extra material be added to the native soil of those same two fields. The woody material would be deposited on the outer edge of the fields and be allowed to continue composting for the rest of its days.  The material composting in the fields was quite lovely as future topsoil, minus the woody material.



While the machines were still in the lake, they additionally constructed a peninsula extending from the east shore berm to the center of the lake, so I could access that center area from the berm either by foot or ATV.  Currently, twice a summer, I mow the approach from the berm to the willow seen below at the end of peninsula



Throughout this period, I was keeping a close eye on the project 😊.


As the shoreline was being constructed, we were getting lots of unwanted help with the arboreal landscaping on the surround berm. This, of course, was easily solved with a conibear trap (not shown) 😔.



The over-wintering piles in the fields created an interesting landscape that second winter. Now what to do with this huge volume of material from the two fields, where the field in this picture is the smaller of the two!


This led to much anticipation of how to proceed in the spring with that material. The material in this field was put through a sifter or seine to separate the 'soil' from the wood/stone. Here Danny sits on one of the compost aggregate piles in the excavator and shovels it onto the agitating sifter screen.



The agitation of the screen allows the soil to fall through the screen, but retains the woody material and stone, which is dumped off to the side, and includes lots of roots seen in both pictures.



On the other side of the sifter, it is open underneath, and accessible to the front-end loader, where Jeff scoops up the offerings every few minutes and dumps them in the big yellow dump trailer.


It was a very efficient operation that resulted in a large amount of soil in a relatively short time.


From here the material was strategically distributed around the yard using the tractor and dump trailer. The many piles in the yard ultimately were spread with a bulldozer and planted with special fescue seeds called  "ecolawn" that was a gift from my post-doc Krista Gilby and several of my graduate students. The lawn today is great!


We laid about 18 inches of the material over the 1.5 acres that I intended to be the house yard, which was all the area I wanted to groom. I began with a push mower, but after the first try with that (and Nancy's insistence) we bought a riding mower for the rest of the year, and on to the present!!  The adjacent fields get mowed twice a summer with my very old Massey Ferguson 65 tractor and the PTO brush hog. This keeps the growth there renewed but moderately deep, thus attractive to the many critters looking for the clovers and grasses that they enjoy.


As this post is getting lengthy, I will describe how Windigo Lake has fared since its inception in the next posting.

Monday 8 May 2017

Excessive rain

I was going to start the next post on the construction of Windigo lake, but because our weather has been so bizarre lately, I thought you might be interested in its impact on our local environment. As I mentioned in an earlier post, spring last year began with a drought that extended into September.  The trout pond looked like this in August 2016. It was down 8 feet from spring time high levels. You can see the bottom of the pond in the picture at the 6 foot level at the back of the pond.




This spring began the same way with 35°C, which is pathologically warm for April. I suspect, however, that someone with a significant influence on Mother Nature must have been doing a rain dance or sacrificed a goat to prevent a repeat of last year's pattern (and overdid it), because the weather suddenly changed to endless rain and cold days (highs of 6-7°C). Tonight and tomorrow night it is supposed to freeze, and its May 7th. The volume of rain and its unrelenting daily occurrence has been unreal. For example, we have had over 5 inches of rain in the past 5 days, and the people "down stream" from us are in big do-do. Apparently those near the flood plains of the Rideau and Ottawa rivers cannot find enough sand bags to save their homes. This is obviously not a new occurrence around the world when you watch the weather channel, but is very rare in this part of Ontario. Manitoba gets it all the time on the Red River, so Canada knows about it too, but not us in the 50 years I have been in south eastern Ontario.

Nancy and I live in a privileged area here in Due North as we are located at the height of land, so the surface rain water moves horizontally very slowly both to the north and south of us. Actually the land appears nearly flat when  you look around, but it is not. If we were downstream of higher elevations, we might expect things like big time hydrostatic pressure from differential elevation, but we are not. Thus the water moves away from us at a fairly slow pace. But then look at the video of our well-head yesterday, where the capped 6 inch pipe is artesian!!




Can you imagine the pressure that is necessary to push water up that 6" pipe to its capped top, which is 4 feet above the ground (I said 3 feet in the video, but it is actually 4'), when there is NO land higher than us within 50 miles! Very impressive. Needless to say, it quickly refilled Emerald pond (seen below) and then some, so that the 4" overflow pipe in Emerald Pond was shooting water like a garden hose into Windigo Lake for a distance of about 4 feet before landing.




I suspect that rototilling the various gardens around the yard won't happen for a few more weeks, since the vegetable garden is still surrounded by water. And the west field in which that garden resides in largely under water. This doesn't seem to be bothering the pair of geese and wood ducks though, as they swim, feed and groom in that saturated field.




Later in the evening last night, in the field above, there were 5 turkeys waiting for the right time to roost in the adjacent poplars, 3 black vultures feeding on an old raccoon carcass, 2 pairs of wood ducks feeding, a pair of geese, 1 hooded merganser just hanging out and 3 deer at the corn hopper. Wouldn't Walt Disney be excited at the filming opportunity. It was a little too dark for a picture though. Next time maybe. 

The title on this morning's (May 8th) Ottawa Citizen newspaper was the "War Against Water," much as I described briefly above.  Today it is snowing....😞.  The next day (May 9th),  the paper heading is "The 100-year Flood ... This is Historic". Apparently several people have died. Ugh. Enough about our new 'water world', although I may have seen Kevin Costner go sailing by on the Rideau river near Kemptville at noon.

In the next post, I promise I will describe the construction of Windigo. Have a good day.


Tuesday 2 May 2017

Building the trout pond

Our trout pond is about 0.75 acres in surface area.  It was not a natural pond, but one that we created. When we first bought the property in 2005, the idea was to obtain a place large and diverse enough to amuse me with ecological challenges in my retirement. When I found the property, Nancy was singularly unimpressed, but accepting of my vision for what could be done there. We settled on a potential location for the house that we were designing, which was near some wet depressions and an old grown over marshy area of about 10 acres. The following pictures will give you an indication of the evolution this project. As we first looked at the property in the winter, and the 10 acre marshy area had very little open water/area, with the odd beaver channel through the cattails seen below.




The area I envisioned for the trout pond, however, was adjacent to the marsh and was a snow covered channel, just south of where we considered building the house. What was under that snow and ice at this location we did not know.




When spring arrived, we could see that there was some water there after the melt, but is was very shallow at about 2 feet of depth. Still, I was pleased that some water had accumulated there, which gave me hope for ultimately making a pond in that location. The reason for this area holding some water was because years earlier, when the road engineers were building the highway along the west boundary of our property, they stripped ours and all of the neighboring properties of their shale for making the road bed. This involved pushing the shallow top soil off to the side from those shale areas, forming a berm to the right side of this picture, and then extracting the 2 feet depth of small shale stones that lay beneath the shallow soil (left by the glacial activity 10,000 years ago).  Apparently the original 'real' deep topsoil from our area at that earlier time was pushed to Syracuse, New York by the glacier!




By mid-July, the water had largely disappeared, but earlier there had been enough water to support cattails.




This outcome was sufficiently encouraging to help me decide that I would chance the project and dynamite a 'pond' at that location. By September, it was completely dry, but I was not deterred.  Note the berm at the right side of the area, which is about 4 feet above the limestone plate that forms the base of that previously wet area.




At this point I hired my neighbor, Danny O'Grady, who has big equipment, to begin to prepare the pond area that I had outlined, so that the blasting company could hopefully create a real pond, and not just a gravel pit!!! In the picture below you see Danny beginning to level up the berm. Then he started cleaning up the area below the berm at the shale-limestone surface.


                                                                   (before)

At this time, the limestone surface largely has been prepared for the blasting folks.

                                                                    (after)
                                                                 

To achieve the desired outcome, the blasters drilled holes to the various depths in the limestone according to my pond plan. The south one third of the pond was to be 6 feet deep, while the north end nearest to the ultimate house location was to be 20 feet deep. I felt 20 feet in depth should give the pond sufficient depth to create a thermocline (temperature break), where the trout could survive a hot summer by living on the cooler bottom below the thermocline, and survive the winter months by having a large aerated volume of water to endure about 5 months without much new aerated water -- at least that was the plan. Below you see a drilled hole that was stuffed with dynamite, and then capped (in the next picture).







Below, you can see from the mounds of limestone dust from the hole drilling how closely they were placed to achieve the desired explosive outcome to completely dislodge the limestone at the appropriate depth. All the dynamite was interconnected with wires that were then triggered to to explode simultaneously.  At the very bottom of the picture, you can see broken limestone where they had previously blasted the south end of the area.  I am standing on the top of that blasted pile to take the picture.  The car and the open area at the top of the picture is the beginning of a yard where the house will be built.




A similar view in the opposite direction shows the drilling dust piles leading up to the giant mound of stone on which I was previously standing to take the last picture. What I had not anticipated, nor had anyone else not familiar with blasting, is how much limestone will be generated by a 20 foot deep explosion. Apparently (and obviously true), if you blast 20 feet of solid stone, you will end up with ~20 more feet of stone above that surface level. Interestingly, the blasted stone does not end up flying all over the country side, but rather goes straight up and straight back down. It is 20 feet above the ground surface because of the air and space that now is associated with the dislodged stone. But still, a very concentrated stone pile.



As the final blast was at the north end near to-be the house location, the 'road' you can see to the blast area now runs right to the edge of the stone pile and stops.




How would you like to remove this stone by hand - like the builders of the Rideau canal had to do ~200 years ago? This is just another view of the pile from up close.




The stones are beautiful and well designed to be used for building, if that was your thing. My thing, however, was to remove the stone as soon as possible to see what we had achieved. The picture below shows how the dynamited limestone often breaks away leaving smooth and relatively straight walls -- but not always.




We had to engage a very large excavator to remove the stone and load it on trucks. To do this we found a contractor that needed a large amount of stone for building new roads in a subdivision, where the ground was quite soft and badly needed to be stabilized. Apparently this stone was going to be good for that purpose.



First of all they had to get the top half of the stone pile on the north end removed to create a level surface from which to work, and on which the trucks could drive to reach the south end of the 'pond'. In the picture above, they are just beginning to remove stone on the north end, next to the future house location.

An arsenal of trucks were engaged in the stone removal. I was told that there were 22 trucks involved at one stage of the project. Unfortunately they parked all over the place waiting for their turn to be loaded, which included all of the areas where I had just planted wild flowers! Oh well.  The loading went quite fast as the monster loader only took 4 full shovels to fill each truck. But there were a lot of rocks to scoop up and trucks to fill.



The excavator completely removed the stone from the shallow, 6-foot deep south end of the pond, and was about to start on the north 20-foot deep end at the transition point (you can see a little puddle there).



Here you can see that they have made good progress on the east half of the deep end, but have a lot more to do. Note also, when they are stirring up the water that is oozing into the pond, it is quite milky from mixing with the powered limestone, similar to water draining from a melting glacier.




However, this is what the water looks like when it comes into the pond without being agitated by the high hoe. It is very emerald colored (and so we call the new pond Emerald Pond). The emerald color is a result of being exposed to marl, the combination of limestone and clay. It means the water is very clean, almost sterile, much like the Bahamas and the Caribbean. As there is no creek flowing into or out of the pond area, the majority of the water to the pond oozes through the marl cracks in the limestone plates and fills the pond.




Finally, the stone removal did end, after 1.5 years. I was told originally that it would only take about a month. I learned valuable lessons about some contractors and working without a contract - just a hand shake. I believe some contractors must have been trained as politicians. Obviously I live in a different world - that ivory tower world - where a contract wasn't necessary, just a decent honest memory.  But that, too, is another story.

Below is the final day of stone removal at the north or house end of the pond. That is a one deep hole. Just look at the fearful posture of the excavator driver examining what's left to do. I don't know if I would be getting back into that machine in that position.




The BIG question now was would the hole fill with water, or did I now own a rock quarry?  What would be the quality of the water?  Would it support much life or would it be just a swimming hole? ETC....




Happily it filled nicely by the next spring, and it actually overflows for a few weeks every spring through a special pipe in the berm near the surface into the neighboring duck/goose lake that we call Windigo. The amazing thing to me was the speed in which life found it's way into the pond. Many insect species, of course, and stickleback minnows from God knows where. Indeed the turtles showed up almost immediately, as indicated by the painted turtle below. You can see that the turtle is bringing a blood sucker with it attached to it's shell. The trout find that blood suckers are a real edible treat!  I suspect many arrivals to the pond had carriers like this.






This spring (2017) we have had a tremendous amount of rain, so that in May, the water level in the pond is again back to the spring thaw run-off levels. In addition, we have been told that we will have 6 more days of rain this next week in early May. How that will play out for the rest of season is hard to forecast, but is very different from last year's unrelenting drought that began in April and extended through August. As you can see, however, the birds are not minding the high water levels and are hanging out and feeding on the grass in the yard!






As the water level today (May 3, 2017) in the pond is over-flowing into our neighboring lake, Windigo, I think that in the next blog, I will describe to you and show you pictures involving the construction of Windigo.