I have no heavy training... Barely Elementary School. Preferred the wilderness, it became my university, but I got muddy boots and experience instead of School knowledge so my English was therefore quite inadequate. This blog is a project to improve my skills in English language.
We all have our own universe, welcome to visit mine.
The heat continues … No winter in sight! Forced to stop work on predator tracking and start with nature reserves again. Never happened before. Weird times!
I tried to work for a few days, but it felt pointless to slip around on icy roads. The snow melted and became heavy and wet to work in and strong winds overturned one and another tree. I took time off instead, went through paragliding equipment, repacked some rescue parachutes and dreamed about coming adventures.
A glass of red, something good to munch on, a nice program on TV and a seductive nice sofa corner … Friday night, not bad … not bad at all!
Happy weekend everyone.
The Christmas weekend offered the first skiing of the season. Lovely in every way. One must take advantage of the few opportunities offered nowadays. It has been 6 plus degrees over the past 24 hours and the forecast for the near future looks anything but wintery.
It is with some trepidation that many of us are waiting for the next decade, what weather do we have to wait for … Now we really must do everything we can to reduce the damage that we have already caused our planet, so hold on, there will probably be a bumpy ride.
2019 has been good and 2020 will probably be even better! That’s at least a good target. Hope you all have a nice ending to the year, that you enjoy the memory of all the good things that happened during the past year and that you have lots of dreams about what you want to experience in the next. I am sending you a thought tonight when I light our candle lantern.
Happy New Year 2020!
A tip, Jan Bergerlind has a fantastic exhibition at the art gallery in the Cultural Center, it runs until 11 January 2020.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!
Today is the shortest day of the year, dark time… and I love it. And now it is turning to brighter times again, and I love it too! It’s magical with seasons and this planet and all its diversity…
Contre la lumière, mes amis!
Plus degrees and the snow is wet so the tracks are impressive big.
The big tracks of mother lynx to the left of the tree, the smaller ones from the kid to the right.
The kid plays a lot with his mother. I find jumps up to five meters long! But after play is often time for rest, the tracks show that they both sat together and enjoyed the view.
Happy weekend to you all!
Beautiful as a postcard, the snow depth still allows you to use a car, at least if it´s tall and a four-wheel drive. Driving is demanding, you don’t want to get stuck. It is very far to the nearest tow truck …
The waterways start to freeze again. Ice sculptures in a water world where the neck is king and otters his companions.
Tracking two wolves that go together, markings indicate that they are a pair. Collects several DNA samples. More work remains to be done before we know what it looks like in this territory this winter.
Today’s tracking ends when the crescent moon rises above the fir tops. It has been a good day!
Advent lighting is installed on our oldest log cabin. Paper stars and Advent candlesticks in windows and on tables, the scent of candles lasting until Christmas. Enjoy the atmosphere during the darkest time of the year. It’s the best time for reflection, good books, blankets and sofa corners!
In a fantastic autumn weather, we wandered around the Päggonätto nature reserve and placed signs to try to curb unauthorized motor vehicle traffic on the marshes. Päggonätto is 620 hectares, so it takes a while to walk around it with heavy signs, iron skewers and sledgehammer.
The week also offered some work with chainsaw. We felled contorta pine in one reserve and cleared the boundary in another.
We saw several moose during the week and had a nice sight of a golden eagle over one of the marshes in Päggonätto. We also saw some northern bird species such as Snow bunting, Bohemian waxwing, Pine grosbeak and Siberian jay. The highlight was nevertheless a brief but fine observation of two wolves. It was in an area that has long been empty on wolves, now it’s just that they manage to avoid the poachers this winter.
The week ended with a free day devoted to bird watching and a visit to Dyrön, one of our county’s southernmost nature reserves. Lovely hike in a different kind of pine forest than we are used to. Observation of a white-tailed eagle instead of a golden eagle, red deer instead of moose and a red fox instead of wolf. But that’s fine too!
The northern bird species were represented by a large group of Smew that hunted together.
The nature reserve ends out in Vänern, Sweden’s largest lake, an inland sea with a lot of coastal feeling. A completely different landscape than we have in the northern part of the county.
The lake is the largest lake in the EU, third largest in Europe, after Ladoga and Onega, and in 26th place in the world.
The record was set on Christmas Eve 2017 when nine squirrels feasted on sunflower seeds. Only eight can be seen in the picture, but the ninth sat in a birch next door and shouted his frustration that the restaurant was full at the moment!
This summer, as I sat in the woods below our cabin, I saw a squirrel digging things out of hiding in the ground that it then ate. It was around to several different places. As I researched the matter, I found shells for sunflower seeds. Squirrels are not only greedy bird food eaters; they also hide food for future needs. Expensive friends, but okay, it’s worth it. They are really entertaining to study.
Our squirrel is the red one, Sciurus vulgaris, also called Eurasian red squirrel. They are members of the squirrel family, Sciuridae, commonly just referred to as “squirrels”. They include over a hundred arboreal species native to all continents except Antarctica and Oceania.
When I was in Geneva, I got to see another type of squirrel that I had never seen before. The Siberian chipmunk, Tamias sibiricus, a species that originally came as pets to parts of Europe in the sixties, but which has subsequently formed viable tribes in forests and parks. (The species is listed as an invasive species of the EU) Squirrels are cute little creatures but like many other species, they pose problems when they settle in areas where they have never been. (The gray squirrel is another example from the UK)
Other squirrels I previously posted on the blog are Gambian Sun squirrel, Malabar giant squirrel and Three striped palm squirrel.
