• Song of the Wood Thrush

    We have birds singing in our yard and the surrounding woods year-round, though it is awfully quiet in the winter in comparison to late spring and early summer when migratory songbirds fill our woods.

    The slowly changing song of the wood thrush is enchanting. They’ve been singing for about a month now. For a week or two, one would serenade me from a tree close by while I worked in the shop. Usually they’re more reclusive and not that readily seen.

    I’ve used our video camera to record a wood thrush singing in early evening. This one was high in a tree in the woods just west of our home. It was windy when I recorded this and it’s impossible to hear other wood thrushes responding, frogs at the small “pond” between our home and the new vegetable garden, or other singing birds.

    The segment here is about 90 seconds long (2.3 MB file size).

    More soon!

  • More YouTube Videos

    We’ve posted two more videos on YouTube for our GasWellStudy channel. The earliest video is titled Natural Gas: Trashing the Surface Owner and is about how operators leave a lot of trash at gas well sites. Some of this trash is from when the well was drilled (such as abandoned portolets) and some is from the production of the well (such as scrap valves and storage tanks). This situation encourages others to leave trash at sites and at one we’ve seen old diapers, tires, bricks, and more dumped.

    The more recent video, Bad Well Bad Well Bad Well, was posted last Friday. It’s about gas wells with condensate storage tanks not having adequate secondary containment as required by law. We looked at three older sites along the Pocatalico River with typical problems. The possibility of contamination of the River by crude petroleum is very real. We had a tank at a well near us overflow a couple of years ago. There was no secondary containment so the oil went down over the hillside toward a creek.

    We’ve done another video, this one about blacksmithing, that’s also up on YouTube, though at a different channel. The video shows the forging of a Suffolk latch bar and gives an idea of the work that we do in our shop.

    We’re loving the video camera though the learning curve has been really steep for the camera and editing software. We think we’re beginning to get a better idea of how to do things. We certainly are a lot more relaxed with the camera.

    More soon! Maybe some cat videos.