3-28-10 Beaver Pond

 was doing some yard work yesterday and decided that I would rather be driving the back trails than pulling a rake. I grabbed my Video Camera and headed out to a Beaver Pond and dam I had found a couple years ago. It is in a remote area, very hard to find in the meandering trails.

I finally found it.





After I got home and grabbed the rake again I looked at the sky, it was so nice and sunny but a bit cool and windy. I decided to go for a Scooter Ride. No place special, maybe out near Lake St Helen and see if the Eagles had started nesting yet. There is a nice Eagle Nest in a tree near the lake.

Again I grabbed my camera and took off. It was cold on the scooter but I ignored it and headed out. I drove past the eagle nest area, I was expecting to see some sign of it as I saw an eagle the other day while eating at Houghton Lake but the nest was empty.

There is a big tree, or at least was a big tree, just outside St Helen that the local kids throw their tennis shoes in for some reason that only an adolescent brain can make sense of. You can bet that they don't pay for the shoes. I just hope their values change when they have to work for the money.

Anyways, I headed over there and sure enough, the tree was cut down and the only sign of shoes were the ones that caught on the power lines. I noticed that they had decided to use a tree down the road a ways and it was now loaded with shoes. Not nearly as many as the other tree, nor was the new tree as big.


I continued down the road and off to my right, way out in a field I thought I saw two deer grazing. I looked closer and it was two Sand Hill Cranes. They are huge birds that stand 3-5 ft tall and have up to a 8 ft wing span. They looked so majestic. I got off my scooter and broke out the camera and took some video.

They were a long way off and I had to use the zoom to max and even though I have anti-shake the video was poor so I walked down the road a ways to where I could get over the water filled ditch and leaned the camera against a fence post for some stability. This is the video of the birds I got. I just pitched the first two clips. I was closer but the wind was blowing me all over the place :D