An earlier post describes the EQIP wildlife piles in more detail and has some photos of the first pile, built in 2011 and approved by NRCS as meeting their USDA specifications. Our grant contract stipulates two piles, so we built the second one this weekend.
I felled four tall pines in late June, so we had plenty of material handy. We found a spot to build the wildlife pile near where they lay.
Once again our neighbor Curt brought his backhoe tractor to do the heavy lifting. We used our tractor and logging winch blade to yard the bucked sections up to the backhoe. Here you can see the chain choker and winch cable attached to a log arriving from down the hill.The backhoe will grab it and place it on the pile.
In the above photo the big log on the downhill side is a forked section, which I selected for that spot to keep the pile from migrating downhill. We also placed spacers between logs to keep them from closing up the spaces intended for critters to nest in.
Log tongs made it easy to place the perpendicular logs exactly where I wanted them.
With all the limbs from those pines, we had plenty of brush to top off the pile. Pine limbs are heavy and difficult to handle by hand, but with the backhoe Curt had the pile covered in 20 minutes.
Thanks for your blog, really enjoying reading about your experiences and learning from them.
ReplyDeleteDid the wildlife pile work?
Oh yeah, Gus, they work. There are critter trails in the snow, in and out of and between piles. For that matter every slash pile becomes habitat for squirrels and birds -- and a buffet for raptors.
ReplyDelete