Free Ranging Ducks and Chickens - Hide and Seek with Eggs

Geo-caching is a high-tech version of hide and seek, complete with GPS and computer resources.  Our decidedly low-tech version is finding where our free-range ducks hide their eggs every morning.

Waddling home, always single file

During the winter, Mrs and Daylate, our harlequin females, lay their eggs in the nesting boxes of the coop they share with our Rhode Island Red chickens. But as soon as the snow recedes around the roots of trees, they explore options for future nests – waddling under overturned root balls and digging their bills into rotted trees and surrounding earth to assess softness. When the top several inches of a desirable location has warmed up, we no longer find eggs in the coop and start our morning game.

Citizen Scientists Monitor Lakes in Alaska

Once a month from May to October, Laura and Bryan Emerson squeeze into their blue tandem kayak surrounded by $4600 worth of scientific equipment and paddle out to the deepest section of their remote lake to measure water quality. An hour or so later, they fly the samples and notes via their 1954 Piper PA-20 to a staff member of the Mat-Su Borough Volunteer Lake Monitoring program, who meets them at a roadside lake in order to whisk the time sensitive samples to a lab near Palmer.

Kayaking out to test the lake water
photo by Howard Feldman

To date, the Emersons are the only volunteers monitoring an off-road lake, and the program coordinator, Melanie Trost, would like to recruit additional flyers for the summer of 2015.  “Even people who cannot do monthly water sampling can help with occasional observations,” says Melanie. “We welcome reports of dumping, pollution, and invasive plants in our lakes and rivers. One concern is old polystyrene docks, which beavers and muskrats chew and burrow into, and the sun deteriorates, releasing the little foam beads into the watershed where it looks like food to birds, fish, and mammals. Pilots can tell us what they see on a particular time and day at a lake they visit.”

Float Plane Differences from Wheeled Planes

Are you a wheeled plane pilots who says, “One of these days, I'll get rated on floats?” Or perhaps you are a traveler who watches seaplanes take off and land?  Either way, below is a primer about some differences between planes on floats vs wheels.  (Our Piper has skis, floats, and wheels). 

Undercarriage:

Sleeping under the summer midnight moon

The most distinctive aspect of a seaplane (or float plane) is obviously the undercarriage. The floats (or pontoons) look like huge, bloated, Ronald McDonald shoes compared to puffy tundra tires and dainty tarmac tires. On our little Piper PA-20, the float assembly weighs 150 pounds more than wheels – the weight of an adult, cutting down on payload and fuel efficiency, and introducing additional drag. Other, less obvious differences are that floats are mounted directly to the fuselage with no suspension system, and that float planes have no brakes. They can rely on the friction of the water to slow down and stop.

Pre-flight:

Pre-flight checks of the floats underscore the fact that they are designed to function like boats, so many of the terms and design features are similar. In fact, we secure our float plane to an angled dock with a boat winch. In this position, most of each float is elevated above the water line, so we can inspect the keel (the bottom of the float) before sliding the plane down into the water and maneuvering it with a tow rope over to the adjacent boat dock, where we conduct the other pre-flight checks. Internally, the floats' bulkheads are divided into six watertight compartments, which must be “sumped out” with a portable bilge pump to remove any accumulated water (rain from above or seepage from below). Another chore is to check the retractable water rudder at the stern of each float. Some float planes also have a fin added under their tails for extra stability.

The ducks coming out to say "good morning"
to their floating friend

Communications Devices Can Save Your Life

Each week, Alaskans (and others around the world) read news reports of someone trapped for hours or days by bad weather, an avalanche, or an accident. The following devices could save them time, money, and possibly, lives. Many are the size of a deck of cards and not much heavier. The following recommendations come from Bryan Emerson, a member of Alaska Airmen Association, Willow CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) and Civil Air Patrol (search and rescue operations).  Below the article are resource links and purchase/use recommendations.  

Communications technology transmits information either one-way or two way. Both are useful.

UNILATERAL COMMUNICATIONS DEVICES:

Weather radio: (Advertised prices range from $20 – 100.) A weather radio is the size of a portable AM/FM radio, and, in fact, many portable and installed AM/FM radios include a local weather band that relays continuous loops of repeated and updated weather information for a target area. Dedicated weather radios offer multiple weather frequencies so that a traveler in remote locations can usually tune in to one or more. (In our part of the Alaska bush, we can hear two stations). Some devices allow for an external antenna that boosts reception. With this in mind, many prudent backpackers traveling through river valleys or the back side of mountains carry a lightweight coil of copper wire that they can plug into the radio and hand up on a tree.  Travelers can see the weather station frequencies for various locations on NOAA.gov.  Consider enrolling in a free online SKYWARN Spotter class.

APRS.fi: (free) This website program enables someone to track a traveler for free, on the website,

www.aprs.fi (FI for Finland) as long as the traveler carries a GPS equipped amateur radio (like a Kenwood) and has registered the radio call sign on the website. To work, the person with the transmitter needs to be within line of sight of (radio) repeater towers. (There are two in Anchorage). We have found it easy to follow the progress of a traveler on foot, car, or airplane throughout large swaths of the Mat-Su Valley, too. However, it cannot capture travel in river bottoms or the far side a mountain undetected by a repeater tower.

Housing Winter Rabbits in Cold Climates

Here in Alaska, we raise rabbits, ducks, and chickens for food. By mid-February, we had more animals than housing, but, for various reasons (like age, body heat, and pregnant rabbits), we did not want to “dispatch” any. This prompted some new housing ideas for the rabbits that worked out exceptionally well, in, of all places, in the chicken coop and greenhouse.

Rabbits in the chicken coop:

Because we know a woman who houses her menagerie of goats, poultry and rabbits in the

Zen (the rabbit) is on watch while the ducks nap
(note their heads tucked in, feeling safe) 

same enclosure, we decided to install two of the female rabbits in the coop with our harlequin ducks and Rhode Island Red chickens. One ran away the next day when we opened the run for “duck recess.” Her distinctive foot prints traveled extensively throughout the snowy yard. She successfully evaded predators (including an owl that killed one of the ducks). Ultimately, she settled under the hutches of the other rabbits, where she created a snug, straw filled burrow under their raised building. I hear her banging around as I tend to the other rabbits. When I feed them, she waits below their wire floors, much as my dog used to sit below my children's highchairs, assured of bits and pieces, sure to fall below. She looks healthy and content and has never chosen to return to the coop.

The other rabbit remained with the poultry. She has such equanimity that I named her Zen. At first it was startling (and delightful) to open the lid of the nesting boxes and see not only laying hens but a rabbit – popping her head up to look around! Clearly, though, she is “one of the guys.” She eats and drinks out the same bowls as the birds, and enjoys many of the same snacks, like green peas and birdseed. The rabbit and chickens will gather round me to eat out of my hand. During cold weather, she enjoyed a quiet siesta inside the coop, in a soft depression that she skootched into the straw, while the noisy ducks are outside, hoovering up the snow and digging into rotted tree roots. On sunny afternoons, I raise the nesting box lid, and each box is occupied by a duck, a chicken, or a rabbit, enjoying the sun on their face and the wind-blocking boxes around them. They look like commuters on a train, or kids in a school bus.. As the snow starts to recede and lay bare tempting patches of brown around the trees, Zen follows the ducks' peregrinations, ultimately spending most of the day with them - they guarding her or she guarding them!  She is not the far flung explorer that her erstwhile rabbit companion turned out to be. Zen is more of a companionable homebody.