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Petra, Maine Wildlife

Discussion in 'Pets & Critters' started by Ken Anderson, Jun 28, 2015.

  1. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    In this thread, I'll post some of the photos that I have taken on our land up north, which we call Petra. It is actually in St. Agatha, Maine, however.

    Much of our land was in potato production thirty years ago. We still have about seven acres in production, out of the hundred acres we have, but the rest has grown into a woodland. We have a beaver pond on one end of the property, where a brook forms one border of our land. On the other end, we have a cedar swamp where moose winter, since the cedars are so thick that the ground remains reasonably snow free.

    There are also a lot of small clearings, which had been grown in partly with saplings and other plant life. I want to keep clearings throughout the land, in part because it's good for wildlife, and also because I plant on planting perennial food crops in these areas.

    In clearing land for our camp, as well as clearings throughout the woods, I have created brush piles with animal habitat beneath them. I have two of them now, and each house a pair of snowshoe rabbits, year-round, and a bear hibernated in one of them the winter before last. The brush pile itself creates shelter for small wildlife, such as the hares, but I built an enclosure to the dimensions preferred by bears, coving it with brush.

    I'll start out with this strange creature.

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    This dangerous looking creature was captured by one of my wildlife cameras that I had set up. It's me with my machete, preparing to create a clearing.

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    I am sure that I took photos of it as well, but I couldn't find any of the floor. Each of my enclosures include a wood floor, placing it about a foot and a half off of ground level, figuring that small animals, such as rodents could make a home beneath the floor, while larger ones like bears would be off the ground. This one actually has a ceramic floor, using the many pieces that I broke while learning to lay tile in my cabin.

    I began by simply piling logs on top of one another. Some of them are somewhat notched but I didn't want to get too fancy. I hadn't piled any brush yet, at this point, but I didn't do a lot of de-limbing.

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    I nailed scrap lumber to the logs in order to keep them in place. It doesn't look pretty, but it was soon to be covered, and never to be uncovered.

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    Next, I nailed some tar paper (not pictured) to the skeleton of the structure, and attached a couple of tarps to the top of that, leaving an 18"x18" entrance, to which I had nailed strips of scrap denim material. Yes, big bears can get through comparatively small entrances, and they prefer that, as small entrances keep the heat in.

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    I placed the entrance up against a growing evergreen tree so that it would be hidden.

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    Then I covered the whole thing up with cut trees, brush, and branches, to which I add to every year. In the winter, the snow accumulates on top of it, insulating the inside, and making it look more like a hill than a brush pile.

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    This moose shows up regularly on my land, and he's a pretty good sized bull. You can see the brush pile in the background.
     
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  2. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    [​IMG]
    Here, we see a bear passing through. this particular bear shows up on my cameras no matter where I place them on my land, so I gather that our land is a base for his domain.

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    This is the only whitetail deer that I've seen on camera. Our land is near the Canadian border, an area where whitetail deer are fairly scarce, while moose are more common.

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    This photo was taken at my other brush pile. That small birch tree to the right of the bear is a marking tree. During mating season, several bears come through, sniffing, scratching, rubbing, and urinating on this tree. This particular bear naps in this clearing often. He hibernated in the brush pile just behind him one winter.

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    I am pretty sure that this is a different bear

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    This female actually had three cubs last year. The third is probably trailing just behind the second one you see here. Three is unusual for a black bear, but I have other photos that clearly show all three of them. Later in the year, however, one of them was missing. The bear is walking down the trail that leads to the clearing that was in the photos showing the building of it. Our camp is only about twenty feet from the tree that this wildlife camera was mounted on, but I don't tell my wife that.

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    This is the male bear coming back down from the clearing toward our camp, taken a week or so after the one showing the mom with the cubs.
     
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  3. Jenn Windey

    Jenn Windey Supreme Member
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    That is so very COOL! your own moose! and to think I get excited when the duck returns or the robin has a nest. Don't the smaller animals like the mice and rabbits go into burrows? i have left falls for some of the birds, they really do like to use them in the winter months, but never would have thought of this for the other creatures. Do you worry the bears will try and get in your cabin?

    You seem to have a fair amount of good sized timber available would you use that for the walls in the cabin, could be nice and has it's own insulation properties. Although available and free the price comes in making it ready via labor time. I would be splitting up some of that woods for sure.
     
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  4. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    We also have cow moose that show up often. For a couple of years, we would see one cow moose with her calf. The calf looked to be a second-year calf the first year we saw it, and had grown to near the size of her mom the following year. Last year, however, the mom had a new calf and had apparently run the older one off. She still shows up once in a while, but alone and looking lost. The females will share part of their range with other females, so her older calf (no longer a calf) probably still shares a portion of the range, but has extended to another area as well, sort of like in interlocking circles. The whitetail deer shows up on camera all the time, but I think it's the always the same one.

    I haven't seen any rabbits on our land yet, but the snowshoe hares live in brush piles, mostly. We also have Canadian lynx, who feed almost entirely on snowshoe hares, so the brush piles come in handy there. I have a few other brush piles around the property but only two that I have built in structures beneath. Every brush pile seems to house a pair of hares, though.

    The added trouble is that we have no utilities so anything that I did with the lumber would have to be done with gasoline-powered or hand tools. The shell, metal roof, and windows of our cabin were built by the Amish. Prior to deciding to go that way, I had priced harvesting the lumber from our land and having it milled, buying the lumber outright, and buying one of the kits that are available for cabins and the Amish offered a price that beat all the other options, including the delivery charge, and I didn't have to put it together. I put the door in and laid the ceramic floor, and I will have to insulate and do any other interior work, but otherwise, the Amish built it.
     
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  5. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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  6. Jenn Windey

    Jenn Windey Supreme Member
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    @Ken Anderson it is just a thought but there are manual wood splitters that you should be able to use easily. The cost is not that high and as a tool it is something you will be glad you have when it comes to using that stove. For cooking you really will need pieces of wood that are uniform (more or less) so that you can gauge what the effects are heat wise. Why have such a nice stove with the ability to bake if you are not going to follow thru and use it.

    I was pondering the thought of leaving a portion of the walls open so you can enlarge, it might be possible if you were going to use the cabin in the fall and earlier spring to devise a wood frame that was removal able to increase the level of insulation but easily get it out of the way when you want to expand. We do this over our windows for the winter months. It really does make a huge difference and it is easy enough to do. Simply make a frame and you can either attach wood , plastic or straight bat insulation with one side foiled (insulation has fibers so you always need to think about covering it up. There is a lighter insulation that looks like all foil, it is used in chicken coups and garages. If it was going to be awhile before you bump out a wall some latex caulk would help keep things air tight, you can cut thru that with a box cutter and it cleans up real easy off the frame. It was just a random thought that I had.
     
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  7. Hannah Davis

    Hannah Davis Veteran Member
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    Wow, the wildlife that you have come in contact with or at least manage to get a photo of. I have never seen wildlife up that close and I don't know how I would react if I did. I know for a fact if I saw those bears coming toward my campsite I would probably take off running. I am impressed at how you seem to be at one with nature and the wild life around you. I would not be so at ease in such an envronment I will admit that out loud. Great photos and video, and thank you for sharing them all with us.
     
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  8. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    The moose are far more dangerous than the bear. Moose are more likely to attack a human being than a black bear would be. If you look, you'll be able to find several videos of bears running from house cats. Eighty-five percent of a black bear's diet consists of plants, and the bulk of the meat protein that it eats are insects and animals that were dead before the bear got there. They can smell a dead animal from fifty miles away, and head to it. Their digestive system is able to digest animals that have been dead for quite a while. The most likely result of an encounter with a black bear in the woods is that the bear will retreat, usually before you're even aware that it is there. Despite reputations to the contrary, even mother bears will usually abandon their cubs rather than risk an encounter with a human being. Generations of being hunted have taught black bears to fear humans.
     
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  9. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    I picked up my cameras from the woods yesterday. Amazingly, three of the four cameras still had good batteries and were taking pictures, after having been attached to trees in the woods for nine months. Here are a couple that one of my cameras took over the winter.

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    I have several other photos that were taken of this moose. It's not standing up. The snow is deep, but not that deep. It just decided to lay down in the snow, and it stayed there for several hours before moving on. By the way, that's one of my brush piles in the background, covered in snow.

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    Here kitty, kitty, kitty...

    This Canadian Lynx is coming down from another of my brush piles. The Canadian Lynx lives almost entirely on a diet of snowshoe hares, and my woods is abundant with them, each brush pile housing at least a couple. The size of the lynx's paws serve as snow shoes, allowing it to walk on top of snow, as long as it isn't too soft.
     
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    Last edited: Jul 8, 2015
  10. Corie Henson

    Corie Henson Veteran Member
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    Huh, I am speechless, honest, I don't know what to say. Considering that you have your cabin in that wild place, oh, it's amusing and scary as well. The bear can hurt you and even kill you. We go on camp outs here but not in those places where wild animals can harm us. Those photos are breath-taking and much more the videos, they are for real. Great, really great shots you have there.

    Please continue posting with photos and stories. This is way more interesting than the NatGeo features.
     
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  11. Allison Schuck

    Allison Schuck Veteran Member
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    Do you live here Ken? Among those wild animals? These shots are really good. Thanks for sharing. I would be so terrified if I saw one of those animals....and you have pictures, you must be brave.
     
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  12. Allison Schuck

    Allison Schuck Veteran Member
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    I love that video of the bear scratching his back on the tree. He is so tall.
     
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  13. Diane Lane

    Diane Lane Veteran Member
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    I can't believe this is the first time I've seen this thread. I love all the nature pictures. It looks like a piece of paradise, with all the critters roaming around.
     
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  14. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    I do feel more comfortable carrying a gun when I am walking through my woods but, realistically, I know that the chances of anything attacking me are minuscule. A bear could kill me easily, but they far prefer to hide from people. I've only actually seen the bear twice, and only for a moment, as he would slink off into the brush. He follows me around sometimes because I often leave apples on the ground around my cameras, since that encourages better photos, and bears love apples. People who bait bears for the purpose of hunting them usually use old donuts and sweets because they love that stuff too but, although it might sound crazy, I don't want to leave anything that isn't good for him, so I leave apples, and sometimes a whole chicken. Somewhere I have a video of one climbing a tree for a chicken that I had hoisted up on a rope slung over a branch.

    I think I mentioned that moose are more apt to be dangerous than bears but that's mostly because they generally walk predetermined paths, and don't like it when people are in their way. Moose don't wander through the woods aimlessly; rather, they follow a fairly consistent route, so if someone is walking up a trail that they are coming down, there could be a problem. But if the person simply steps well off the trail so that the moose doesn't have to walk past them in order to get to where he's going, he's not going to chase him through the woods.

    I may have mentioned it earlier, but only one person has ever been killed by a black bear in Maine. That was someone who owned a gas station and kept a bear in a cage at his station to encourage people to stop in the 1930s. Apparently believing that the bear was tame, he went into the cage one day and was killed. I know someone who raises bears who have been orphaned, with the intention of release at some point. She is able to get up close and personal with her bears but she has raised those bears, and they have developed a relationship. Shutting a captured bear up into a cage so that gasoline customers can gawk at him does not make for a true relationship, apparently.

    While I always root for my bear and my moose to make it through hunting season, they are not pets and they aren't actually mine. Their range does extend beyond my land onto land where they may be hunted. The large male bear generally disappears from the cameras during hunting season so I am thinking that he goes deeper into the woods. Hunters don't generally walk too far off a road to hunt large animals because they would have to drag them out if successful.

    I don't hunt, and I don't allow hunting on my land, but I'm not opposed to hunting as long as it's done responsibly. If they weren't hunted, black bears would very likely become very dangerous animals. I am sure that they are well aware that they are superior to people as far as physical attributes are concerned but generations of being hunted have resulted in bears being afraid of people, even fat old people like myself.
     
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  15. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    Unless something comes up to prevent it, tomorrow I'll be driving up to our land up north, where I want to spend at least one night in our cabin alone, and probably I will get a hotel room somewhere nearby for the second night, so that I can get some Internet time.

    Probably tomorrow, you won't see me here except maybe for a little bit in the morning, if I get up early enough. I just had my chainsaw serviced, so I will be picking it up at the STIHL shop on my way there. I need to mow the grass in front, and I have several trails and clearing that need to be cleared of saplings and weeds since they've grown out quite a lot over the spring and summer. There are a few trees that I think I'll want to cut near the cabin, in order to lessen the chances of one of them falling down on our cabin during a storm; that's what the chainsaw is for. If I have time, and it's not too wet, I would like to explore a portion of our land that I haven't been to. It's a hundred wooded acres so I haven't seen it all yet. I may want to make another couple of clearings, as well. Otherwise, I'll just clear out a few trees that are growing too close together.

    Plus, I need to set up my wildlife cameras again. I picked them up a few weeks ago and have cleaned them and replaced the batteries and the disks, so they are ready to be placed on trees again. I just ordered a fifth camera but I won't have that for another few days.

    So if you don't see me tomorrow, or possibly the next day as well, I hope to come back to find all sorts of interesting posts and threads to catch up on. Don't do anything I wouldn't do.
     
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