The pleasures of summer

It's berry picking season in the area around Northern Town and I'm determined to stock up on as many as I have time to gather before the berries start to drop. This weekend after ManNorth unexpectedly left on a two week posting to the south (more blogging to follow), I took the opportunity to share the berrypicking time with other friends from NorthernTown and went picking on Saturday and this evening after work. (It's always a good idea to avoid going out alone, even near town and I'd assured ManNorth that I'd stay safe as bear encounters are rare, but possible in the area. That, and spending time with friends is fun!)

I've found that there is a special technique necessary to be speedy and gentle enough to avoid jarring the bush and knocking off all the fruit in pursuit of an individual berry.

Now, when one (womannorth) isn't particularly good at this technique, the berries are each as small as a pea and there is a limited amount of time to do the picking, one may resort to alternate methodology:

Berry rakes and campfire waterbuckets!

Now this is the way to do it! Simply scoop up the berries, raking the teeth of the scoop through the entire plant. Is this cheating? No, I don't think so. This is an efficient way to collect lots of berries quickly. (Of course, after Saturday's excursion, I found I spent almost an equal amount of time indoors cleaning all the twigs and leaves from the berries that the rake had also collected. However, that was time indoors while seated on a comfortable couch and protected from the myriads of black flies and mosquitos determined to render me a dry carcass. This was a fair exchange, I thought.)

Don't believe me? Here's a horrible 20 second video I took today as an example. (Horrible, because of the poor technique admittedly, but most horrible because of all the bugs. Obviously.)

Now that I've mentioned of the local wildlife, of which I am certain you were simply fascinated by, you miiiiight just be interested in seeing another animal that had also been enjoying the berries. (Actually, there were at least 6-8 of them, but this was the only one that stuck around after I startled them to cluck at us in annoyance and disapproval from a perch atop a spruce tree. )

It's a ptarmigan!

(Can't see it? Look at one of the tree tops near the right hand side of the photo.)

This is how one sneaks up on it to get its photo.

It was on to us.

C'est finite!