Caretaker -Volume 4- The Caribou Visit
Hi everyone. It’s time for the first update of my stay up here at the main lodge.
The warmer than normal weather has made doing things much easier although we have a cold spell coming. I’ve been fishing a fair bit with some success, but nothing of any size. Just average pike and lake trout coming top side. Egenolf holds some monster whitefish, and I’ve been trying to figure them out. So far no luck, but there’s still four weeks of time left for me to accomplish that.
The wolves that usually hang around in years past have been hiding. A pack came through two weeks in, but they didn’t stick around. However, there’s been a neat little critter that some of the eco guests might know hanging around. A northern hawk owl has decided that the camp is a perfect place to live near, and encounters with it have been numerous. I’ve rolled shutters a few times on him, and even got to watch from inside the cabin as he ate a mouse he caught. He’ll show himself quite often when I go outside, and I think it’s because I’ll stir up his prey with my activities.
Ten years ago I was involved in TV production, and this winter I brought my old video camera up to shoot some of the sights and sounds of the sub arctic. For the first four weeks I shot video of an arctic hare, pine martin and a few clips of caribou in the distance. One of my goals was to get some close up footage of caribou inside the timber and not just out on the lake, and today I finally got that during my morning walk. I saw two different groups in the timber as I snuck along, but the footage wasn’t the best due to how thick the trees were. At the halfway point I looked ahead and noticed a half dozen caribou using the same packed path I was on. So I hunkered down and fired up the camera. They came within 60 yards and provided some golden content. The smile hasn’t left my face all day, it was a great encounter that not many can say they’ve experienced.
The warmer weather has been a blessing in ways, but have also included many cloudy nights. This has limited my aurora watching. There does seem to be a break in the cloudy weather in the forecast, fingers crossed I get to shoot some photos of the amazing auroras we experience here.
