Burning willow

With such nice weather today (20 Celsius and sunny), I took the advantage and worked to burn up all the willow I cut over the weekend as well as the some of the trimmed fir (hahahah), some rotting pallet-wood, and chunks of wet logs that were lying in the fire pit through the winter.

The embers are now all dying, but in the meantime, I found out why the Japanese used willow-wood in manufacturing samurai swords - the embers really burn warm and for a long time, even though the wood itself burns relatively quickly (of course, since I only used willow no thicker than 2 centimeters, that's not much of a surprise).

In addition, today I saw the "frog man"; Prof. Keith Berven from Oakland University. He's been coming out to Saginaw Forest for - he tells me - 25 years (!), and he was out here today setting up for this year's observations. He also told me to look forward to tree frogs in about a week, followed by spring peepers, and then gray frogs. I have weeks of frog choruses ahead of me. I am looking forward to it with anxiousness and trepidation both. Who knows, maybe I'll even be able to post some audio.