tamarack

Had >20" pack when that blast hit, so the mice and voles were snuggling and making babies underneath. Bare ground, cold wx and lots of raptors are the best tick medicine.

I looked on G.E. to compare Black to Titcomb Hill in Farmington, but they are very different, with Black offering a bit over 1,000' vertical compared to Titcomb's 300'. Despite its modest size, Titcomb keeps the Mt. Blue HS Alpine/Nordic teams very competitive.

Ken Allen, who for decades wrote hunting and fishing columns for the Waterville and Augusta papers, recounted 2 possible mountain lion sightings. One came as he was driving south from Greenville at dusk with light rain. The animal crossed right to left in front of him, so he braked and backed up for a better look. There at the mouth of an old road was a big golden retriever. The other gave Ken a good look, with cat face and long tail visible. Two conclusions: There are valid lion sightings, and even experts can be fooled.

Never heard of an albino marten before, but most mammals produce very rare albino offspring so it's certainly possible. A long-tailed weasel is about 2/3 the size of a marten and always turns white, just like it's much smaller short-tailed weasel. I think both species are called ermine when white.

I don't know if Maine ever held elk, but it never fully extirpated lynx or marten, as peak forest-to-farm clearing was much less than elsewhere in New England. Currently the state has a large marten population and the greatest lower-48 population of lynx, by far. The much less dramatic population swings of snowshoe hare compared to those in true Boreal forests has helped. The biologists here are pondering whether they should petition to have lynx removed from its current Threatened listing. (If they do, they would be called every name but their own by preservationists.)

I've read (and seen on the tube) that mountain lions try to cover their kills after a meal, something that no other North American predator does often, if at all. Also, lions will rake off some of the hair from a deer, another unique practice on this continent. With probably 10s of thousand game cams out there in NNE, a significant lion population would not long be a secret. The last lion shot in Maine was just prior to WW2, near Lac Frontiere, PQ. The only* confirmed non-captive lion in Maine since then, AFAIK, was ID'ed by hair DNA in Cape Elizabeth, not the place one might expect. Obviously a released pet. *DEW wild animal sanctuary in Mt. Vernon has a couple, or did when we visited the place 3 years ago.

On July 31, 1978 in Fort Kent, we had a light frost that damaged our cucurbits and wrecked the beans next door. Last was first? (Or were the frosts on June 16 last and August 24 first?) Clouds beginning to spoil the pure blue.

My earliest "snow awareness" (qualitive only) came during the early 1950s, a 6-winter stretch in which NYC never had a 20"+ winter (longest such streak in their 154-year POR) and NNJ wasn't much better. We had a very small shrub, about 6", below the picture window, and during those winters it was fully covered just once. March 1956 was a real revelation. Bluebird morning here after a low 20s min. Might sneak in some frozen this week, though nothing serious. (Other than for drivers - Franklin County Sheriffs and towing companies were out straight in last Monday's slush.)

When I lived in northern Maine, most of my deer came through still hunting, would take an hour to go 250 yards. About half those deer were looking at me, unsure of what I was, when the trigger was pulled. Farther south where I now live, the deer are a bit spookier, the leaves more crackly (and so are my knees).

Sunday River and Sugarloaf also face in that general direction, Pleasant Mt as well. Saddleback is the outlier, looking to the northwest; probably catches beaucoup upslope. Slowly getting there on the Oak forest. Hopefully mainly all down over next 10 -14 days or so . Your oaks look similar to the 2 big ones a couple hundred feet from the house. I was sitting near those trees and also near 2 buck scrapes yesterday afternoon, hoping the wind would quit, but it continued to rustle those crispy brown things until after legal hunting time. Other species are 99.99% sticks.

Maine can allow keeping of some species of wild animals if the keeper obtains a special permit, which I suspect is not issued lightly. Two towns from my place, in Mount Vernon, one can visit DEW Animal Kingdom during the milder seasons, and can see everything from big cats, tropical birds, monkeys and domestic sheep. The owners obviously have the requisite permits and also receive some roadkill deer/moose when the carcass is unfit for human consumption but not dangerous to the carnivorous critters. (DEW stands for domestic/exotic/wild. Almost all of the animals and birds are either seized from unpermitted folks or otherwise unable to be rewilded.)

No matter how tame it looks, it's still a wild animal. Many years ago, when I was a forester in northwest Maine, the game warden posted on the border across from St.-Pamphile, PQ had obtained 2 coyote kits while their eyes had not yet opened and raised them to adulthood. When we'd stay at the nearby Seven Islands camp, we'd often hear them howling. They seemed utterly tame but were imprinted on the warden. One day the warden's wife went to feed them and one slashed her for about 20 stitches, the warden thinking that it was jealousy (the warden is mine!!). He realized that the coyotes were still wild at heart and a danger to his wife and others, so sadly, he put them down.

Dozen donuts in a culvert trap and they wouldn't even need to sedate the critter, unless they wanted to do a health check. Drive the critter into the Berks away from birdfeeders aaand away it goes.

Hit or miss around here. There are some loaded pines in the area but the ones on our woodlot, some of which are 120 feet tall, have very few. The mild January plus the frigid blast in early February may have killed some of the overwintering 1st-year conelets. (We've not had much if any of the needlecast fungus here.) Trying to outguess tree seed production can be frustrating, except for balsam fir that seems always to have a bumper crop every 2nd year. Way back in 1980 during the spruce budworm outbreak, I prescribed a shelterwood harvest on T14R13, one town east from where the Big Black joins the St. John. All the moth-eaten fir was to go and also the worst-looking spruce, with healthier spruce and all of the superstory pine retained. In July I saw a couple of those pines had been cut as part of roadbuilding, and they were stiff with 1/2" conelets, a great sign. Then came the record February thaw - CAR temps nearly 15° AN - followed by cold and a mid-month blizzard in March. Only a handful of those conelets survived and we postponed the harvest, switching to stands with little pine.

21 here, a tic above yesterday but just as frosty. 2020 and 2021 were very good Decembers from a snow standoint, but both were marred by ugly cutters ....at least 2019 did have a smaller snow event around 12/18 to give us a white Xmas. Both well below average here. Last December had the 1st AN snow since 2017, with 95% of the total coming in the mid-month dump.

20° this morning with nearly 1/2" on the washtub under the eaves. October numbers" Avg temp: 50.0 +4.7 2nd mildest here (51.1 in 2017) Avg max: 58.8 +3.3 Warmest, 79 on 3&4. Warmest Oct day here is 80. Avg min: 41.1 +6.1 Coldest, 26 on the 31st. That was the weakest for Oct coldest by 2°, and the avg min is the only 40°+. Precip" 4.74" -0.89" Wettest, 1.32" on the 22nd had some IP/SN mix on the 30th. October had 19 cloudy days, tops by 3, and the 26% of available sun is 5% less than the 2nd gloomiest.

Maybe, if one wants to split the whole pile in one day. I've split my wood with a maul since we moved into our first house in 1977, in Fort Kent. Most times I'd swing for 30 minutes then do something else for a while. After 4 sunny days to start the month, we've had none since. Can today end the CL/PC run? (I expect some Cu this afternoon, but it's been solidly blue so far.)

Woods were fairly quiet this morning, except in open areas where it sounded like I was walking thru 6" of potato chips. Jays and squirrels active but no recent sign of deer.

And the post from PF noting how late it was with no freeze and contrasting it with much colder temps 1500+ miles to the southwest started the angry/disgusted/whatever posts that seemed to brand we NNE folk as climate change deniers. We just like pointing out anomalous wx phenomena, with my favorite being during our 1st December in Maine (1973) and seeing 56° at BGR while my parents in NNJ had 15° (and western CT was in a major ice storm). Sill mid 30s RA here with occasional IP incursions. Today will be just the 2nd with BN temps since 10/15 and the month will be 2nd mildest of 26. My parsing of a number of Maine co-ops show warming since the 1960s-70s cooldown, with the steepest climb since 2000. Also with increased snowfall this century, as predicted by many climate models.

Double bust here, not in the good way. I don't remember the forecast for 11/27-28/2002 (we had 0.2" here) but the Christmas night storm was progged for 8-12 here. It verified with 1.0" while GYX, 55 miles south, recorded 18.0", at the time their biggest. SIL in east Augusta had 15" and Belgrade Village, 12 miles to our SE, had 8". Sharp cutoff, anyone. That entire winter was suppression city here, with only the 7" in mid-November and 13.8" in early January being notable. Total was nearly 2 feet BN and ranks 19th of 25 winters. (The DJFM period in 02-03 was our driest and 3rd coldest, with the dozen mornings in the minus 20s showing decisively than I can't grow peaches here.)

Another IP/SN burst about 11:45, put a tenth on the canoe bottom but didn't stick anywhere else.

Had 15 minutes of IP ending with some fat flakes about 9:30. Now it's back to RA with temp mid 30s. First October frozen since 2020, makes 16 of 26 here with at least a trace, though only 7 with measurable snow. 1989 there was a biggie around Thanks Giving, but that one may have been a more full latitude type of storm genesis That was a good event for SNE while we had only flurries in Gardiner. Our turn had come 2 days earlier with 8.5" and winds gusting 50+ along with thunder.

I think you know the answer. Trees cycle carbon, with some entering the atmosphere as dead wood decays, and some is added to the duff layer that helps to grow the next generation of trees that then remove atmospheric carbon. In very old forests - several hundred years - carbon sequestering is near zero but by then the total carbon storage is huge, both above and below the ground. Using wood to replace fossil fuel, for domestic heat or for replacing heavy carbon footprint building materials, are benefits from managed forests. No magic trees, just the many good things from forests.

How about the carbon footprint of golf in the US. (If you've done that calculation in the golf thread, which I never peruse, please let me know.)

Low 70s here, as clouds announcing the approaching CF cut off the sun about 1 PM, with W/NW breezes following.