Octaflugeron

 "Few things in life are less efficient than a group of people trying to write a sentence."

 Scott Adams,

 

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

This'll be another hunting video.  Stop reading before you whine at me.  

An Octaflugeron is an unnecessarily complicated aerobatic maneuver.  Rowdy got me into one today.  Kinda like a group of people trying to write a sentence, a lot of things happened at once and none of them made sense. 

He bounced a brood / covey of roughly 5 Ruffed Grouse just across the road from the cabin today.  He just about jumped out of his skin trying to figure out which bird to chase and I swung the shotgun at least three times before this bird flew right over me and I got this Shotkam video.

I was all over the bird on the second shot and you can hear me yelling for Rowdy to heel up at the end of the video.  He reluctantly came over and heeled and we went over to look where I thought the bird might have fallen.

Rowdy, in fact found the bird which jumped up again and flew away.   Rowdy chased it and I let him.  After a couple of minutes he came back with no bird.  So we walked home, messed around for a while and looked at the video.  

Then I want back out with Rowdy where the bird flew off the second time and Rowdy made a pretty exhaustive search of that area.  So, evidently the bird flew between the bee-bees and survived.  

On that note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff
 

Ice

 "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." ~ Ellen Parr

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

I've been up here in NW Wisco at the cabin now for about two weeks.  Rowdy and I have been having a great time goofing off, walking the woods, scaring up Ruffed Grouse and deer.....  Last night I was sitting up against these windows idly reading stuff on the net and I kept hearing the ice singing. 

It was cold out there last night.  Down around 5F at the lowest.  The ice forms rapidly at these temperatures, about an inch of depth a day or so I hear.  As it forms and expands, it stresses itself and cracks and science occurs.  The ice makes sounds that are impossible for your poor correspondent to describe. 

I don't have sound equipment worthy of what I heard.  I got to thinking maybe someone on the interwebs might have found singing ice as interesting as I did, I fired up duck duck go, (screw google) and I found this recording, which is exactly what I heard.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

On that note, I remain,

Dad/Geoff