Cosumnes River Wildlife Preserve

The Cosumnes River Wildlife Preserve is a beautiful wetland full of a diverse variety of bird and other wildlife.  Today, Lizzie and I hiked the main fully-accessible trails, seeing sandhill cranes, hawks, geese, ducks, coots, and many many other birds.  Whether we had to halt as a group of coots crossed the trail....

...or were lucky to catch a hawk winging overhead...

Or perhaps only grin at the antics of bottom grazing ducks who went "bottoms up"  at the same time:

From little brown birds to exquisite ducks, the preserve has something for everyone.

These sandhills looked remarkably like their statuary depictions in front of the visitor center:

and the visitor center statues:

This is a place to return to many times again.

Burrow Blocker at Work

The squirrels have burrowed holes the size of Volkswagons (truth!) under the walnut ranch road.  To the rescue:  Burrow Blockers!  This Central Valley firm injects a slurry of sand and water down the enormous burrows of the ground squirrels and fills the burrow with sand, blocking further use of the hole.  Eventually, the squirrels are eliminated (sadly, they are a vermin in the orchard, and destroy trees, the crop, as well as the road).  www.burrowblocker.com

The holes are marked with flags for fillung with sand, then the rig with its sand/water slurry moves along the road, placing th e delivery hose down each open squirrel hole.

As the sands pumps down the hole--which in one case took over 500 gallons, thus the Volkswagon analogy--the voids are filled with the sand which dries and is a blockage to further squirrel activity.  The sand fills the hole all of the way to the top of the hole.