Picking a fight with hornets and trees

Rut has officially begun!  What is rut exactly?  Basically it is the time of year when the animals are breeding.  The elk are the coolest animal to watch this time of year.  Not only do they shed their velvet over night basically; the soft material that covers their antlers while growing,  but they also start to get very aggressive.  

The females are on the left.  In the wild one bull elk has a group of females called a Harem.

In order to control the safety of the herd we actually separate the younger bulls from the dominant bull.  If we were to leave them all together that bull would end up picking the younger bulls off one by one.

Surprisingly this isn't even the dominant bull!

 The black bears sure have been enjoying their daily portions of salmon at 4 pm.
Uli almost 100% of the time picks up a piece and walks to this spot on the rock and puts on a nice show of chowing down for the public.
All of our salmon is donated from locals that need to make room for this year's salmon.
I for one have a freezer full of silver salmon to get me through the winter.

Devin, my boyfriend, was visiting again and he loves feeding the black bears.  It's my favorite daily task as well.  I wouldn't even call it a task.  I get to feed bears everyday!!!!!
I like this picture because you can see how patiently Uli is waiting for her next filet.
Our animals eat better than we do!

                                            A closer look of Uli awaiting her next meal......

I also like to throw in a bag of hooligan every now and then.  Kuma loves the hooligan.  I blogged about the hooligan back in may when we were dip netting for them.  This is some of that batch that we caught and donated to the bears and eagle.....I wouldn't dare eat that nasty oily fish.
However, a lot of people do like to fry them up.





Speaking of nasty fish I heard that if you want to get rid of a hornet's nest a good way to do it is by hanging a fish head on a stick over a bucket of water.  The hornets will eat so much of the fish that they get full and fall in the bucket.  Yeah my mind was blown too!

and can you believe that it actually worked!  However, I did discover that I should have used a filet so that there was more for the hornets to eat.  So unfortunately there will be a round two of this hornet nest adventure.

Here was that hornet nest that I got to play exterminator with......

viewer discretion advised on this next photo

So about that tree that I was fighting with......

well I DEFINITELY lost this round.  I was cutting branches for the moose when I decided I wanted to climb a tree for some top notch branches that were out of reach.

Tree 1 Erin 0

Don't fall out of a tree and land with a branch sticking in your leg.  It is a little uncomfortable and results in 10 internal stitches and 15 outside stitches.

On that lovely note I will say....

Goodnight Lower 48,

Erin