The big early freeze is currently moving through the Mid-western states with snow and way below normal temperatures. Some places have already received over a foot of snow…it won’t be long before it’s here.
It has been fairly normal here this week with freezing temperatures in the morning and up into the forties during the day.
We only got a dusting of snow one morning, but some places in the state got tracking snow.
This past weekend was the first weekend of the Project Feeder Watch Bird Count and both my feeder and net were very active.
I had 24 slate colored juncos all over the ground along with nine turkeys that showed up for breakfast. I also had a couple white throated sparrows and a tree sparrow which are now wearing bands.
I did get a neat recovery of one of my banded birds. A white throated sparrow that I banded here was found dead from a window hit in Georgia five days later.
Must be it didn’t stop at too many motels along the way. Its short wings must have just been a’ flappin’.
I tried for saw whets several nights but had no luck. They must be past us to the south.
I ended up with 24 of the little gals—no males. Maybe the males got past me before I started trying to catch them. I will have the nets up earlier next year for sure as it was good the first few nights but went downhill quickly.
The following story merits recognition though it is a year old. The staff at Limekiln Campsite was given an award as the most courteous large campsite in New York State.
Caretaker Debbie Rice and her staff do a great job running one of the largest campsites in the Adirondacks.
The campsite staff may be the only people that many of our visitors encounter on their visit to the Adirondacks so their impression may determine whether these folks return or not.
Some campers and day users are only passing through the area and others return year after year when they find a place they like.
The campsite staff is hired locally with many college students working outdoors throughout the summer fighting the bugs, cleaning bathrooms, sorting garbage, raking leaves and mowing lawns.
There is a campsite located near almost every village in the Adirondack Park.
Limekiln was one of the last campsites allowed to be built in the park.
It was laid out very well with the campsites further apart than most of the earlier built campsites.
During the week I went up to the Adirondack Hatchery on Little Clear Pond where all of the Landlocked Salmon are raised for stocking state waters.
Little Clear Pond has a wild population where no fishing is allowed and the hatchery tanks have a captive population of mostly female salmon.
Taking the spawn from both populations is a four-day operation. The first and third days the wild population is trap-netted and spawn (eggs) is taken from these fish.
On the second and fourth days, spawn (eggs) are taken from the salmon in the inside tanks but sperm is used from the wild population from both lakes to fertilize the eggs.
Adirondack Hatchery Manager Matt Jackson, who has been running this hatchery for four years, oversees this operation and hopes to take 1.2 million eggs over these four days.
I was there Wednesday for the first day of the wild fish take. Matt had help from two Rome Hatchery staff, three from his facility and two hatchery staff from the USGS Tunison Lab Research Center for the Great Lakes in Cortland.
There were also two fishery techs from the Ray Brook Office who measured and weighed each of the wild fish taken.
It was a pretty nice day. Some said there have been days when they had to shovel snow off the docks to do the egg take.
A boat went out and collected wild fish from seven trap nets. When they were brought back the males and females were placed in separate tanks at the dock.
Two men were stripping eggs from the females and two others were netting fish, supplying both females and males to them as the egg take continued.
Over two hundred fish were processed in about two hours. After the fish were stripped they were weighed and measured. These fish are so active that they are put in water with a sedative to calm them down so they can be handled more easily.
Despite all the handling they never lost a fish.
They are put in holding tanks for a calm down period to recover before they are released back into the lake.
Salmon raised from this egg take supply about 300,000 salmon for hatchery breeders and for stocking across the state next year.
The USGS Tunison Lab in Cortland, but that’s another story. See ya.