Late Wednesday night (or early Thanksgiving morning) we had a minor snowstorm – by daylight all the snow was gone. But the 1” – 2” of heavy wet snow that did fall was enough to collapse a number of pens on our farm. Our pens are supported like circus tents with 2” X 4” X 12’ prop poles. We intentionally use 2”X 4”’s so that the posts break if the snow load gets too great. Our pen manager, Brian Klein was incredulous to find over 100 prop posts broken when he checked the farm Thanksgiving morning.
Sometimes the prop posts break cleanly and the netting settles down onto the cover with no great harm. Sometimes the posts slice the net open as they break – leaving an open gash for our pheasants to escape. With so many posts broken – there were gashes – and we had hundreds of escaped pheasants roaming the farm. Being Thanksgiving, we only had a skeleton crew – so most of the work of repairing the nets, replacing the props, and catching all the escapee’s is getting done this morning.
The picture above looks so innocuous – but if you look closely you can see that one of the two prop posts in the pen closest to you is broken. Sometimes the prop post stays connected to the net – and often the post will be left at an angle (inclined) – and if that post has one of those gashes I spoke of at the top – the post will resemble an airport runway with jetliners lined up ready to depart on a busy travel day – only instead of jetliners lined up – it’s our pheasants lined up – walking up the prop post and taking off, one by one into the sky. Kind of cool, and at the same time not cool at all!
The whole experience yesterday and today makes me realize again how vulnerable we are here to a major wet snow event. If we had 8” of wet snow – I don’t think I’d be writing in my blog this morning.
