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.