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!

A May Post

No time this morning for a story so here are two photos I took in the middle of May.

Of insects and wildfires

July has been fairly warm in our locale (Yes V., I'm glad I brought my summer clothes!) and The Man has been keeping busy flitting about the countryside in helicopters, boats and pickup trucks. He took these photos last week while training some firefighters and keeping tabs on the wildfire situation:

(Yes, that IS snow in that last one on the right. The permafrost is pretty close to the surface although it was 27C here the other day, so I can't imagine much snow is now left.)

And closer to the (unburned) ground, here are a few photos snapped while I spent a morning with The Man and a large bottle of DEET. In order of appearance by common name and latin name, respectively: Indian Paintbrush -Castilleja raupii, Northern Labrador Tea -Ledum decumbens, Labrador Lousewort -Pedicularis labradorica, WomanNorth -Dousedindeetum fewbitesum.

I really do need to have a look at YouTube one of these days in order to show you the video associated with this last photo which I clipped from the digital video, if only for the deafening buzz of the hundreds of mosquitos risking imminent squishing by getting fresh with me. In situations like this, I have nothing but good things to say about insect repellants that contain 98% DEET although they have melted little holes in the plastic coating of my binoculars where my fingers rest and I hate putting repellant on my face. I think that concentrations this high are now illegal for current manufactured repellants, and probably for very good health reasons, but we happened to have a few bottles of the old powerful stuff stashed with our gear. The stuff worked well, although the headnets did come out for a little while until the sun climbed a bit higher and the insect numbers dropped in the heat.

Thankfully, the constant winds have been keeping the insect numbers quite tolerable in town so I can leave my mosquito netting at home when I walk to get our mail.

However, a recent walk around this lake

just behind our apartment (and bordering town) was quite tolerable only after patronizing the makers of DeepWoods Off! and downing my mosquito head net.