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paucity of tracks
Saturday, December 29 2007
I don't often walk the dogs these days, but Gretchen was in the City so today the job fell to me.
There's still several crunchy inches of snow in the forest, enough to make walking through it difficult. But long stretches of the Stick Trail are clear of snow, making hikes along it fairly easy. This lack of snow on the trail is an unforseen consequence of my having placed sticks along either side of it. The sticks tend to trap humps of leaves, which are effective barrier to surface water runoff and become more so as they trap more and more layers of leaves, which in turn support accumulations of soil and networks of tree and plant roots. As a result, the for long stretches the trail has become a temporary stream. This can be inconvenient in rainy weather but is a blessing in snowy weather, since snow has difficulty lingering in a stream bed.
A warm air mass was moving into the area today, and as it crossed the cold snow-covered ground it produced a layer of gorgeous fog a couple feet thick.
About two thirds of a mile down the Stick Trail I took a detour to the west into parts of the forest I rarely venture through. I was struck (as I often am in snowy weather) by the relative paucity of tracks in the snow. It wasn't just that there were no human footprints; through long stretches of forest there were no footprints of any size whatsoever on snow that is now nearly two weeks old. This either indicates that animal populations in the forest are generally low or that animals do not move around much when there is snow on the ground.
Eventually I came upon a thick grove of hemlock which was full of deer tracks and droppings; evidently they seek shelter in such places in the winter.
With sunny conditions and temperatures in the mid-40s, today was the first day I could work on my solar panels since buying sheets of glass for reglazing my largest panel, the handmade 60 square foot monster. Today I used hoses to route around that panel, drained it of fluid, and then I removed some of the plastic sheeting so I could resolder a tiny but persistent leak in one its solder joints. I also discovered that a leak had recently developed in a solder joint in one of my panel-to-panel connecting pipes. Time has shown me that copper plumbing is not as idiot-proof as it had seemed at first.
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