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.

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.