Roger and Laurel spend a lot of time on their knees....
It's been raining so much lately it's been hard to make much progress, but Roger and Laurel have been doing everything they can. A couple of days when it DIDN'T rain they pulled CAT 5 wires through sections of PVC pipe to lay in the trench that runs from the cages to the house. Ace Communications Group donated 1500' of CAT 5 wiring and an 8-switch box for the security camera setup we'll be using to monitor the owls. The guys strung three strands of wire plus a pull wire into the tubes, glued the tubes together, and buried it all in the trench. Only one strand of CAT 5 is needed between the cages and house, but built in redundancy is a good thing because you never know what might go wrong! Now that the trenches are all filled in it's going to be a lot easier to mow the lawn.
Tim and Craig Nelson spreading rock on the cage floor.
In between rain showers Tim Nelson and son Craig came back to spread the rock on the cage floor. They did the initial dozer work to level the site, and this time they were moving yards and yards and yards and yards of rock. They spread 2" rock first to help with drainage, then covered it with a good layer of pea gravel. This surface will be good for the bird's feet, plus it's relatively easy to clean. The rock is spread on top of a layer of shade cloth (donated by Houston Hoedown Days) which serves as a weed barrier.
The cool part is about to begin!
There has been sooooooooooooooo much ground work that has gone into this project, but it's not as dramatic as seeing the walls go up. Today they're starting to move lumber from my yard back to the cage site to get things ready to go on Monday. As you can see, it's still a sloppy mess back there. They're trying to work around the mud as much as possible. There's still rain in the forecast, but I've decided that we've had enough rain now and it should dry out instead.
