Monday brought a feeling of Spring to West Lothian, with spells of nice sunshine with some genuine warmth to it. The night had been cold again, below zero celsius, so the ground was frozen.
As were the hosepipes. It has become a daily chore now to check if any taps are working around the Scottish Owl Centre site before I can begin to clean the aviaries. Nope, all frozen, so I formed a plan to wait until the temperature rose above zero – around lunchtime, and try again.
Until then I occupied myself with sourcing more felled trees for use as perches in the aviaries that are still to be completed. We have been quite fortunate that the council have been felling trees in an area they intend to make a new yard for their vehicles etcetera (having been made homeless by the Scottish Owl Centre moving into their old yard). We have been able to purchase some of the trees and have them delivered to the nearest gate to where our pens will be.
I was pleased with the negotiations with the woodcutter contractors, then with the council’s own woodcutter, and with some advice and discussion amongst ourselves we found some decent sized sections of tree. Next task of course was to get them into the aviaries…
As you can see from the picture, these sections of tree are pretty heavy, and as we can’t get heavy machinery onto the site any more the joiners had to band together to move the wood for us. (I wanted to caption the picture ‘and the other three dwarfs are just out of shot’ but thought better of it!).
With the trees inside the aviaries the joiners could proceed to finish off putting mesh on the frames. We are expecting the ground worker contractors to come in, maybe next week, to complete paths, dig holes for (live!) trees, and to cement these sections moved today into place in the pens.
And this pretty much took up my day, other than feeding the owls of course! Tomorrow I plan to get back to training some of the display team so I should have some more owly talk and pictures for you!
Til then, gnite!
