Unfortunately the bees that like my place are bald face hornets and yellow jackets. I am sure they help the ecosystem, but I would rather they do it on another property.
www.allaboutbirds.org
We have a bat population that lives in the cabin roof during the late spring and summer months. To bad the bees aren't out at night.Swallows are excellent at controlling the local "bee" population. If you set up nesting sites they will come and hunt all manner of buzzing insect out of the skies. It is amazing to watch them hunt. The problem is that good swallow homes are also good European House Sparrow homes, and those guys are bad news. Sure they are cute enough to people, and many people unwittingly foster these little bastards, but they are nasty to the indigenous birds here. They take over nesting sites, kill competition and can turn entire habitats into near bird monocultures. I will not put up nesting boxes for the year unless I can commit to killing all the European Sparrows that enter my domain.
House Sparrow Overview, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology
You can find House Sparrows most places where there are houses (or other buildings), and few places where there aren’t. Along with two other introduced species, the European Starling and the Rock Pigeon, these are some of our most common birds. Their constant presence outside our doors makes...
Yep, now pretend you are on a deadline because someone has a delivery of livestock due in tomorrow morning, because that is how it always gets scheduled. . .
On my way to property, I passed a crew putting up barbed wire and they were using an ATV that had 5 spools of wire being laid out simultaneously. Pretty cool set up.
I have a bunch of 1.5 ID pipe at the property and some spare buckets, so I created my own version of this frog tube idea.
Yeah that would have been nice. The guy I did part time work for did lots of ranch-hands things and fencing was only part of it so he did not have a swanky setup. you would run one spool down at a time, try not to tangle anything and then pull it all tight once you laid it all out on the ground. It really sicked because inevitably you needed a tool that you left at the other end of the fence. I swear you could put in ten miles of walking just fetching tools.
I did a lot of walking that day. I had already set most of the post on previous trips so most of that 11 hours was spent hanging 9 different strands of wire. I had to do some vegetation removal first to have a clear path for the wire. I learned on the first strand not to let slack back in the wire. If I had to stop for whatever reason I tied the wire off at the nearest post. I still have tension wire to install on the rear h-braces and then the fencing will be complete until a tree falls on it.
What do you mean, an African or European swallow?Swallows are excellent at controlling the local "bee" population. If you set up nesting sites they will come and hunt all manner of buzzing insect out of the skies. It is amazing to watch them hunt. The problem is that good swallow homes are also good European House Sparrow homes, and those guys are bad news. Sure they are cute enough to people, and many people unwittingly foster these little bastards, but they are nasty to the indigenous birds here. They take over nesting sites, kill competition and can turn entire habitats into near bird monocultures. I will not put up nesting boxes for the year unless I can commit to killing all the European Sparrows that enter my domain.
House Sparrow Overview, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology
You can find House Sparrows most places where there are houses (or other buildings), and few places where there aren’t. Along with two other introduced species, the European Starling and the Rock Pigeon, these are some of our most common birds. Their constant presence outside our doors makes...
Ain't that always the way. If you do wind up having to fix it I recommend getting some. . . wire clamps I guess? I actually am not sure what they are called, but they grip onto the wire in the middle so you can pull it tight (to close a break, for example). The tighter you pull the harder they grip (and if you pull too tight the wire will likely break right at the grip point). I will see if I can dig up what they are called so I can make a more actionable recommendation.
I will likely use these if I get a break or lose a lot of the tension in the wire.
orchardvalleysupply.com
