Deer cam report

Camera is posted in the salt lick clearing, in front of the tree stand, looking onto the trail coming in from the water puddle.

Saw 1 deer on the Monday the 24th at 12:45am

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Saw one deer on Wednesday the 26th at 12:40 am

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Saw one deer on Thursday the 27th at 5:20 pm

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Saw one deer on Friday the 28th at 6pm

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Saw one deer on Saturday the 29th at 7:42am

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Burning off cedars

Spent the weekend burning off piles of cedars. It seems like a never ending task. However, I'm getting pretty good at it. I can get them started and burned completely to ash in a couple hours.

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Seth and Michael worked hard dragging logs to the fire.

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Clearing Cedars

Our schedules finally worked out to where my friend Kent could bring his tractor out to test how hard it would be to pull down cedars in the moist soil.

I have to report that I'm ruined for doing any clearing manually any more. The tractor worked spectacularlly. We were pulling 20-30ft cedars and large stumps with ease.

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In a matter of 2-3 hours, we were able to clear more than I was able to do in a couple weeks with my chainsaw and burn method. Plus the kicker..none of the hated stumps left behind.

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My job was to be the chain man. I'd pick the trees to pull and wrap 'em up and Kent would yank them.

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Now the big decision will be whether to rent a Cat and just clear everything in a day or two, or use a tractor and do it by chain. I think I'm going to go the Cat route if I can find a good deal.

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Trail cam results for 1/15/11-1/22/11

This week I placed the trail cam facing directly North into the clearing where the salt lick is and where the tree stand looks into. For some reason, it looks like Sunday the 16th was a busy day. There are three separate photo groups from that day and one from Thursday (which is inconclusive)

From 2011-01-22

From 2011-01-22

From 2011-01-22

From 2011-01-22

For the current week, I've keep the trailcam in the same clearing but moved it to a main trail leading in.

Trail cam results for 1/9/11-1/15/11

The cam was positioned on the trail that branches northeast from the tree stand, looking back towards the perimeter trail. It looks like 3-4 deer passed through around 9am on 1/9

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The next location is the clearing I cut directly north of the treestand. Looking forward to what it shows.

Clearing the cabin area

The weather was pretty bad this weekend, so I had to hustle to get an abbreviated work session in down at the property on Saturday. I barely made it to noon, when the rain really started coming down.

With such a short amount of time, it was tough to figure out what to work on, so I ended up doing what I always do when time is short...cut down trees.

The picture below shows three of my most important tools. A quad, a chain saw and a big gas can.

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I've decided a good place to start clearing is over by the cabin. Partly because it's mostly filled with smaller saplings, which are much easier to clear and partly because I'm thinking that this is some of the best land, since that's where the old timers settled. If anyone knew the lay of the land, it would've been them.

It's tough to take a picture that shows depth when clearing things out, but this one kind of gives an idea of how the thinning is going.

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I have a new land clearing technique that I'm experimenting with. I hook the bushhog up to quad and start driving through the woods.

I dodge the big trees and if any small (5-6" or less) ones get in the way, I cut them down and let the bushhog chop up anything left behind. It seems to work well, although the path gets pretty serpentine. It doesn't address the problem of really big trees, but it works great for thinning things out.

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Pulling stumps

A friend of mine told about a great new tool for pulling stumps. It's a scissor grip with teeth that bite deeply into the stump when it gets pulled tight. The picture below shows Seth holding it up.

Since I don't have a tractor yet, we used a Honda Foreman quad to do the heavy work. The weight wasn't heavy enough to just power through, so we had to use the "flying start" method.

We would do this by tightening the chain to make sure it was tightly set, then back up a little bit and goose the throttle. This would be good enough to yank the smaller stuff, but the bigger stumps would take several tries. Once we got the hang of it, we could get 4" stumps with only a few pulls.

Toward the end of the day, we started experimenting with pulling small trees. It worked great. We ran out time before we could try any bigger ones, but am looking forward to see what we can do against the oceans of 3-4 " cedars that need to be cleared.