New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff
Another deluge of rain and leaf stripping winds; Looking a lot like winter woods.
Thursday 11/02/2006
\Wow, have things changed in just a week. How the weather has changed as well as my views. I ran my annual moose checking station at the Region 3 Fish and Game office in Durham. Other than the wind of the opening day on Saturday the 21st, the weather was rather mild with lots of sun. My moose count was way down, at 11 by days end Friday and only one other over the weekend, when the station was operated by the Marine staff. So 12, as opposed to a 4-year average of 23. Of course the moose station allows me to check each moose inside our garage.
Saturday, the opening of our state's muzzle loader season, had me working outside all day in the pouring rain and fierce wind. Even here my usual opening day count of 30 plus deer was not met because I only checked 11. I partially made up for it on Sunday checkering 37 for a total of 48. My rain gauge read 3.2 inches by Sunday morning.
A few observations worth noting over the last weekend:
Friday evening there were several frogs and toads moving in the hard rain, I don't think I can remember frogs being active this late in October before.
By Sunday morning the Suncook River below my house had flooded the lower section of the corn field, yet again.
Sunday evening at sunset a huge flock of grackles and blackbirds began to flow by the check station at the Massabesic Traffic Circle in Manchester. And they kept coming and coming for close to 15 minutes in a long skein across the sky undulating and sometimes sweeping low over my head. It was a sight to behold.
Sunday night my on-in-law Derek and I arrived about 9:30 pm at this year's "Deer Camp", only to find the access road a couple hundred yards from camp flooded. I donned my hip boots to guide Derek across the narrow road that crosses the swamp. There was a good 18 inches of water a couple hundred feet wide to cross in the dark. I really couldn't see the bottom so I just shuffled along feeling my way and motioning Derek along. A foot to either side of the tire tracks would drop a wheel into the deep trench of muck and mire that brackets the road.
In fact by Monday morning we were marooned. The water was up another 8 inches or more, too deep to drive thru. So we hunted the day from the camp using our hip boots to get across the swamp.
How the wind and rain storm of Saturday into Sunday changed the landscape compared to last year. The beeches and oaks usually hold their leaves into mid winter. Not so this year, the forests were stripped naked by the storm. Great visibility, but so much of the ground was covered by the new leaves, that finding deer sign was difficult. Fir and spruce trees were uprooted or broken off and lay scattered throughout the forests.
I really needed a break after nearly three weeks of non-stop working. Derek felt the same so we just took it easy, sleeping in til 7 most mornings and leisurely hunting. It really took until Wednesday to get the wood back to normal.
Much of the day Tuesday I could hear a distant roaring sound, that I guessed to be the machine used to burn the blueberry barrens every two or three years to increase their production. In fact I hiked a bit Tuesday morning over a recently burned field of maybe 30 acres. Even the huge slabs of granite were blacked by the flaming dragon I could hear in the distant.
Wednesday noon, as we were heading back to camp for lunch and packing, I finally caught sight of a couple of the burners. Indeed they looked like fire breathing dragons swaggering backwards across the blueberry barrens. We hunted til dark Wednesday and headed back as Derek had to get back to work.
Neither of us saw a deer, and other sightings were way down for me. Except a couple of flocks of turkeys Wednesday, I only saw one woodcock and not a grouse in three days of hunting. We kept seeing a big cock pheasant on a road into one of our hunting areas. Add a few gray and red squirrels and one porcupine for me and a barred owl hooting in the distance. Wildlife just didn't seem to be on the move this year despite the greater distance I could see. This year everything was looked different, yet familiar, in my old deer haunts. Deer Camp was just about perfect again.