17 Year Cicadas

We are surrounded by the noise from thousands of these special insects.  See 17 Year Cicadas. This web site explains them much better than I can.  The noise from them can be heard over the tractor engine.

The Week Here So Far

Sunday we drove the van to Cherokee to celebrate Kath and Don's 50th anniversary with them.  We enjoyed to time with them and were surprised (and so were they) by how many of Don's family came.  I hadn't seen many of them since their wedding.  Many new faces and names to try to learn.  We drove back Sunday night.  Most of the rangers here are supposed to be gone this week, so they gave us the week off.  However, this only lasted for a day and they called us back in.  Angela and her kiddos are in town this week with our old motorhome.  They are parked at Sarah's house.  We all got together on Monday and cooked fajitas at Andrea's house for supper. Tuesday was back to my volunteer job here.
My "office" here on many days is this Polaris Ranger that we use on the trails.

Today we had an interesting project here.  One of the ponds here has been holding walleye fry from the fish hatchery.  After the grow to about and inch and a half, the water is drained from the pond into the lake through this "fish kettle".  They were catching the fish and counting them by their weight.

 You can see a few of them in this bucket.

They are loaded into the tanks on this trailer with oxygen bubbling through the water.  They estimated that they had about 55,000 fish in the tanks when they were dont.

The pond, almost drained.

A not so friendly looking snapping turtle was left behind when the pond drained.

One of the fields that we planted today for the deer and birds had this killdeer nest in it, can you spot the egg?

Still at Saylorville Lake

We have decided to stay here until the 26th or 27th of June for a variety of reasons.  I have been very lax about keeping up the blog lately, it seems like when we are staying in one place for awhile that it is more like day to day life without the interesting things of travel.  Work here is still very interesting and enjoyable.  Something different every day and mostly outdoor work that I enjoy.  The rangers here are great to work with and are very good at sharing their knowledge of nature with the volunteers.  Janice has been doing a little sewing this week and is still enjoying watching the birds on the feeders outside the window.  There was a foot race from the dam here to downtown Des Moines on Saturday morning.  I think that they were expecting about 4000 runners.  I had to take a few pictures of the porta potties that they set up here for the race.  There were about 30 to the left of this picture that I didn't get in the picture.  This long row across the parking lot...

Around the corner.....

And about 50 more down this street across from the parking lot.

I am sure now that some of my daughters will have comments about me posting pictures of  porta-potties.

Janice and I are trying a new tradition of having date night on Friday nights.  Due to not having done this in such a long time, it didn't work out very well on Friday night, but we called "do over" on Saturday afternoon and went to a movie and ate at a great bbq place here called Jethro's. We both enjoyed it and look forward to doing it again.  Warm weather is here finally and as you can see in the pictures, everything is turning green.  While I am writing this, we are getting another nice rain.