Island engineering

There's a lot of ingenuity involved when anything gets built or repaired on the island. You want to use what you already have on hand, and avoid having to get materials from the mainland. This approach cuts down on time and effort not to mention the cost of the project. 

When Skipper and Radar restored our old wharf two summers ago they used logs from the forest and lumber they milled on the island. The dock sits on four huge rock-filled log cribs.  The cribs are connected by joists that run along the top of them and are bolted together and supported by log pilons from beneath. It's a really old way to build a dock, and it's as good as it ever was:

Our dock is not very protected from the waves and chop of the harbour. We have had several big storms since the dock was built, and last fall it began to lose some pilons on the outer side. The planking of the dock began to sag. I sidled along the far inner side to keep away from the sagging place. 

It isn't completely repaired yet. That will take some very low tide when Skipper and Radar can get down beneath it and replace the missing supports. But until then Skipper has come up with an ingenious solution. He put two big stumps on either end of the damaged part. Then he laid a very long log  from one stump to the other, making a timber bridge that rests on the stumps. 

In the middle of the dock's sag he drilled a hole through the planking. On top of the timber bridge he placed a car jack. Then he ran a chain down through the hole around the support timber up over the timber bridge and over the car jack, and joined the chain back to itself, like clasping a necklace. Then he took the car jack crank and cranked, until the planking was pulled up level.  In essence he created a mini-suspension bridge. And there it sits until they can come back to rebuild the underneath support.  What clever island engineering!

Sheep behaving oddly

For the past couple of days we have observed two sheep wandering about without the rest of the flock. This is unusual behaviour.  This morning one of them is resting alone beside the lower road. The other is standing about fifty metres away.  When sheep are about to give birth they spend more time lying down, and they separate themselves from the rest of the flock.  So we may be about to have an early lamb or two. I don't know why the two sheep are together. Maybe they are mother and daughter. 

Last year we first heard lambs bleating in early April. The sounds came from the woods between the road and Indian Point. On April 11th the mother and her two lambs appeared in the yard. They were born six or seven weeks before the rest of the lambs. And they survived and did quite well. We could distinguish them until the others caught up to their weight and size, late in the summer. 

Since there are three or four flocks throughout the island I imagine this same thing has happened in the other flocks too. The rams were taken off the island at the end of October last year, but not before they managed to impregnant a few ewes for a second time in their happy sojourn here. What fond memories they must have. 

Rare sighting of a moose on the island

It is an extremely rare occurrence when a moose is sighted on the island. For one thing, there are very few moose in western Nova Scotia at all, and those are, for the most part, within the vast forested wilderness interior.

The moose must have swum to the island at a low tide. It is well known that moose can and do swim. And there's really no other way it could have gotten here. We heard it crashing through the dead forest north of the house very early this morning, before the sun was up. It sounded like, well, a moose. But we couldn't imagine that it actually was. We peered out the window and saw an enormous creature behind the shed where we keep the rotor-tiller and the extra chairs.

We waited anxiously until it was light enough to take a picture of this amazing event. The moose may have been tired from the exertion of its swim across the harbour, because it remained quietly near the house, where finally we were able to take a picture. It did not seem particularly pleased to have its picture taken, and later wandered off to some other part of the island.