February
11, 2018 - Opie's Diary of Daily Doings
at Rikki's Refuge
Can
you find the peacocks?
This
is their favorite place to sit up high when they've finally had enough of the
rain.
Beauty can't stand to be inside .... she opts for a warm spring bath !
Beauty can't stand to be inside .... she opts for a warm spring bath !
Obie
looks out trying to decide if it's worth getting wet to make the rounds
Volvo
is having a snack in the window, he gave up on roaming today
Orphan
feral kittens in the cage, get to make multi species friends early in life.
Nope,
says Obie .....
not
going out there .... I'm about sick of
all this rain.
I
found a nice dry place to sit and still get to feel the fresh warm air
!!!!
Can't
you make it stop, pleaz ?
Beauty
follows the hoomans on their rounds despite the rain. She enjoys some warm rain ....
but this is really just too much !
The
rivers flow long after the rain has stopped
The
land runs gradually down hill from the time you leave rt 20 .... the mile down
to our gate .... the next mile to the 9th life center .... and for another mile
down to the creeks ..... it digs out
channels as it flows .... it will run slower and slower meandering on for days
after so much rain.
Even
the Life Center driveway is deep in puddles
It's
got a good solid base of gravel and so you don't sink down into the mud like
you do at Rikki's.
The
long road to Rikki's is closed
it's
a running river and deep deep mud now.
Passage is no longer safe for visitors.
It will take a couple thousand dollars of gravel to restore the road for
our visitors to walk from the fields of the Life Center to the Sanctuary to
visit the animals on tours.
To give the roads at the sanctuary a deep enough gravel base that they didn't turn to mud would cost many many tens of thousands of gravel. Those rocks are expensive !!! It's about $400 for a giant truck load full, and that only fills in pot holes in an area with a good gravel base. To build up a solid gravel base would take about a truck full every 50 feet .... yikes !!!! Over the years as we fill in where we can and add a load in the worst areas, it will build up, as have parts of the necessary paths.
Evens scheduled for the Life Center .... like the Easter Egg Hunt will go on. Tours and other events at the Refuge will be closed until a couple weeks after the spring rains have stopped. This is not uncommon at the end of winter. The rains come for days and days, weeks and weeks .... mom calls it our monsoon season .... and it soaks deep into our Virginia clay making awful slippery sliding mud.
To give the roads at the sanctuary a deep enough gravel base that they didn't turn to mud would cost many many tens of thousands of gravel. Those rocks are expensive !!! It's about $400 for a giant truck load full, and that only fills in pot holes in an area with a good gravel base. To build up a solid gravel base would take about a truck full every 50 feet .... yikes !!!! Over the years as we fill in where we can and add a load in the worst areas, it will build up, as have parts of the necessary paths.
Evens scheduled for the Life Center .... like the Easter Egg Hunt will go on. Tours and other events at the Refuge will be closed until a couple weeks after the spring rains have stopped. This is not uncommon at the end of winter. The rains come for days and days, weeks and weeks .... mom calls it our monsoon season .... and it soaks deep into our Virginia clay making awful slippery sliding mud.
All
work will be done on foot now ... too
bad the hoomans only have two ....
carting all those heavy grain bags and all that cat litter is a lot
easier when you can drive a truck where ever you need to take it.
Ohhh
what happened to those beautiful run sunsets we'd been having ?
It
was 48 warm degrees this morning with heavy rain .... light rain ... more rain
.... heavy rain .... and on and on up to 65 in afternoon with rain finally
letting up for bits here and there ....
nice and warm till about dark when the rain tapered off and the temps started
to fall ..... I hope it doesn't freeze
over night and we wake to a world of ice.
Love, Opie
thank
you for making it all possible !
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