Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Roof Is Going On!


Roger Meyer and Charlie Myhre putting on the first sheet of roofing.

Finally good weather!! Temperatures 80 degrees or less and no rain is a great recipe for getting work done on the owl cages. The guys have been able to work full days this week for the most part. (With the nice weather, Laurel has had to bug out a few hours here and there to rake and bale hay.) Roger and Laurel are also being joined by Charlie Myhre from Fountain this week. And thankfully Charlie is as agile as a monkey, so he's the one running around in and amongst the trusses 12 feet up in the air!

So the framing is done, the trusses are up, and the roof may be entirely on by the end of the day today. It's really starting to look like something!

My big "project" was to figure out where the walls should be covered with slats, where they should be solid, and where they should be covered with chain link. I'm not that great at visualizing things on paper so I went out into the cages and walked around, pretending I was a Great Horned Owl. What is the female sitting on the nest going to want to see or not see? What about an owl taking a bath? Where will they want to sit in the sun? How can you give the youngsters in the flight cage a view without them wanting to fly into the wire? Walking around in the cages helped me to figure this out, so I came up with a plan for Roger. Hopefully the owls will agree with my assessment of what they need for mental health, physical health, and for safety. Time will tell!