Today was a day full of interesting wild life here in the North Country. It started out with the Jack puppies on the loop that leaves from behind the kennel. There first find baffled me for a moment as a bunch of little brown bombers buzzed up out of the grass on the side of the trail. My first reaction was a that it was a brood of grouse. But then I realized that grouse that size can't fly and would have just hatched. Then I realized what I was looking at. It was a brood of quail that had hatched out from some of the birds that I'd released but had not recalled. They should be fun to find as the summer progresses and are probably not the only brood around. The pups then had a grouse find with the whiter of the Jack pups who we are now calling Sam having an extended absence as she gave hearty chase to the departing bird. It won't be long before she and her sister are going to require individual attention. Awhile after the grouse I noticed that we weren't the only creatures using the trail this morning as this bear track was probably made by the small bear that has wiled out my pigeon coop and has been trying to get into the quail pen. At first we thought the culprit was a raccoon, but the other night something stove up one of the box traps getting the sardines out of it and just dumped the ones in the skunk trap. Tommy put up some bait in one of the apple trees but the bear stayed away for a couple nights. Last night he ate about a half of a 5 gallon bucket of granola and will most likely be back tonight to finish it off.
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| Print from the small bear that ate my pigeons and has been trying to get into the quail pen. |
Tony came over and we headed out to check a couple covers. the woodcock are flying well but the grouse aren't really ready for primetime yet. In the first cover Frankie had a couple of woodcock and a grouse find with Maggie getting in on the act backing and smelling where the birds had been. We saw one grouse on the road on the way out to the cover and another on the way back. We also saw a big bull moose on the way out and a whitetail doe on the way back. In the second cover we worked we moved a woodcock and a grouse that acted like a hen with chicks. We didn't see any chicks but when they're real small the tend to hunker down and blend into the leaf litter on the ground. We got Pete and Trash right out of there when the hen got up.
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| One of the two grouse we saw on the road today. |
This afternoon I worked on bear proofing the quail pen. We have permission from Fish and Game to put out some bait (other then pigeons and quail) and run the bear off. After a couple of times being chased by a pack of hounds from the same spot bears usually don't come back. If he does we'll get a bigger live trap and take care of him that way. In the background of the picture below you can see the electric fence I put up to hopefully keep the bear and other critters out of the quail pen. I put another fence around the pigeon coop and will turn that one on when we get some new pigeons next week.
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