November at the Lodge

Well, I'm not doing too well on my goal of posting to this blog on a weekly basis. Maybe it will be a New Year's resolution and I'll improve after the first of the year.
November started out as a very wet month. We had 23 inches of rain in the first 15 days.Every fall, it seems like the big storms combine heavy rain with super high tides and waves from Chatham Strait to float the boardwalks. We've learned to make sure the boardwalks are tied down when we get here in the fall to prevent them from floating away.

We also had several windstorms which blew spray off the wavetops in our normally protected bay.

Of course, working on the firewood couldn't wait for good weather.

Although it hasn't been a big snow year yet, November did give us a few dustings that necessitated getting the snow shovels and snow blowers out. In December, I can't wear slippers when I do snow removal.

Something strange happened in the last half of the month. We had 10 days in a row of clear, dry weather.

We got outside projects done around the lodge and finished up our boat projects.

The tarps came off the wood shed and wood pile to get the firewood as dry as possible.

Jen and I even got in a little kayaking.

Kayaking in front of Baranof Falls.

Headed home.....that's the lodge in the background.

MORE WILDLIFE

This belted Kingfisher lives around the lodge and is usually found on top of the barbeque on the boat when we go down to the dock.

We have a large group of river otters that hangs out around the lodge. We often see as many as 8 of them swimming around, hauling out on the dock, or sliding on the snow.

This otter got a shrimp somewhere under the dock.

We had a lot of Varied Thrushes hanging out this fall. This one was eating stink currants.

This female merganser got a nice sculpin for breakfast.

Feral Bueller continues to prowl the grass looking for field mice and shrews.

She was such a good sport about wearing her "moose mount" when we found her infested with fleas. She was pulling all the fur out of her tail and hindquarters, so we would slap the mount on her as soon as she started to scratch.

It was tough for a while, but we ended up getting some flea medicine and flea foggers flown into a hatchery 14 miles up Chatham Strait and the flea problem finally seems to be gone. See our post, "Fleas in Paradise".
Feral, normally not a big fan of being held, got used to tolerating it as we would do a"flea search".
She loves it now that the snow is back.

And she still has the best scratching post in the world!