BEAR'S SURPRISE

Bear the Labrador secretly brings something home from our walk. 
The video tells the tale this time.

FALL IS YELLOW

Fall is yellow here at PFHQ.
The swamp sunflowers grow slowly taller all summer long signaling, as they grow, the return to school and the fall. These are short ones in the photo.
 I've had them grow 12 feet tall in the garden soil.

Coreopsis blooms mostly down by the pond, but this lone wolf was living in the sandy, dry highlands in the back.

Some of the yellows signal the end of a long hot summer of rampant growth, like this wild muscadine leaf.
"I'm done here, hope you enjoyed the grapes..."

The Golden Orb Weavers, the big girls, are mostly gone or barely hanging on. Their personal yellows have faded, but the web still glows golden in the fall light.

The real yellow stars here at PFHQ are the Golden Asters, a native wildflower that grows thicker and with more blossoms than any plant nursery product I've planted here.
... and they do it in white, semi-sterile, almost beach sand.

Huge sprays and rampant clusters of these asters line the trail that Coquina, Bear, and I use multiple times a day.
We'll miss them when they are all done.
They are tall and therefore great to pee on if you are a dog, and as for me, I just enjoy the sight of them.

The Cow Lily, or Spatterdock that lives in the cattle trough garden pond has poked a bizarre yellow flower up into the air where the pollinators work.
No honey bees of course, but the natives are still here.
We natives hang on.

Only yellow for a short time, and already fading, this baby gopher tortoise was being nose snuffled like a scaly hockey puck by Bear and Coquina before I rescued it.
No harm done.
This yellow is more a sign of pleasant work done last spring than a sign of fall, but it is yellowish, it is fall, ... so it counts.
I held it just long enough to take a few photos and then ushered the tiny tortoise over to the welcoming dark safety of an active gopher burrow.

                   A little tap and this bit of yellow went dark.

That seems fitting, because as yellow Fall fades here in North Florida,  Blue-Purple Fall will take over.

I see signs of it along the roadsides and here at PFHQ.

Another story soon enough ...

GoPro BurrowCam

On these 10 wooded acres that we call home, there are somewhere between 7 and 10 gopher tortoises that also call "our" place home.

They have been here since the last ice age and we, well, our St. Augustine rooted family brags about being in Florida for the past 250 years ... which always seems pretty impressive until the gophers drop their ... "since the last ice age" bombshell.

That always ends the discussion ... I try not to bring up generational timelines anymore when I am chatting up a gopher tortoise.

It's a dead end street.

Speaking of dead ends ...  consider the scene below.

In the photo above, we see a gopher burrow that has been dug into by some nongopher critter.
The entrance, which should be a nice semi-circular, domed opening barely bigger than the gopher who made it, has been dramatically enlarged.
Also, at 3 places along the length of the burrow, the ceiling has been breached by holes that break through to the tunnel below.

The day before I took this photo, all was well. It was a perfectly normal, active gopher burrow.

When I discovered this dramatic change, it was late in the day, but a dead gopher not too far away from this disturbed burrow got me wondering about what was inside that burrow now, and how were the other gophers on our property doing?

The unfortunate dead gopher was a mystery, young, maybe only 3 years or so, with hardly a mark on him except for a puncture through his carapace.
A puncture about the size of a canine tooth.
While demons from hell neighbor's cats do cross PFHQ, uninvited dog traffic is nil and Bear walks on a leash with me, so I doubt a domestic dog got this gopher.

I did suspect coyotes though.
They are abundant here, yipping like crazed hyenas on moonful nights ... this past week was loaded with moonful nights.

It seemed to me that I should be able to take a little looksee in that burrow.
After all, I had a 3.5 pound human brain on me, a GoPro video camera in the house, and a workshop full of odds and ends.

With all of the possibilities bouncing around in my brain like a pack of coyotes on an electrified trampoline, I headed to the workshop.

I pondered a moment and then quickly rigged up a "burrowcam" which I christened, "EXPLORER 1".
To a 10 foot piece of schedule 40, 1 inch PVC pipe, I attached a small block of 1"x2" wood.
Next, I took one of my extra GoPro adhesive camera mounts and adhered it to the wooden block.
After that, I ziptied a small, but bright flashlight to the device.

With no view finder, my AWESOME little GoPro Hero camera couldn't tell me what it was seeing in real time. That would have to wait until I could hook the camera up to my laptop.

At least I could peek in the burrows and see if the gophers were okay.
Or, would I see the green glow of coyote eyes staring back at me?

Only time would tell.

Gopher burrows are fairly straight affairs, which is a good thing since the one inch PVC pipe was not going to turn any corners.
My goal was to get in and out pretty quickly, with minimal disturbance to the burrow occupants.

Once the camera and light hit a wall, a curve, or a dead end, I would just retrieve EXPLORER 1 and move on.

Sliding the camera into the burrow was a bit of a "deja vu" moment for me.
Substitute a bamboo pole for the PVC pipe and a large wire hook for the camera, and you would have a gopher pulling pole.
Growing up in St. Augustine in the 1960's and 70's, a device like that was a common sight in the bed of any pickup truck and the gopher stew it provided was traditional backyard cookout fare.

I like the camera concept much better.

I love my resident gophers and manage the areas around their burrows to keep the forest back and provide the sunshine and forbs they need to remain here. A little meadow burning and tree trimming is all it takes to give them the open space they need for gophrolicking.

I checked 4 burrows with the burrowcam.
The dugout burrow and another had just enough of a curve that the pole dead-ended.
The third burrow sloped down and then up a little and the pole dead-ended again.

Those videos show burrow tunnel and then ... plunk! A sand wall.
Not too exciting.

But the 4th burrow was easily navigated by EXPLORER 1 and it contained a healthy, fat gopher.

EXPLORER 1 came back from it's mission in great shape.
Just a little sand here and there.

I see great potential for this little prototype "stick it where you don't want to go or can't fit" camera setup.

I'm thinking "culvert cam", "dark scary hole cam", "big scary toothy fish cam", "rattlesnake cam",  ... the possibilities are mind boggling.


Here's the burrowcam video that bore fruit ...