Trip to Wagner's Sugar Camp

The other day, I was blessed with the opportunity to go to a maple syrup production camp. A couple of the other interns and I took a road trip down to Wagner's Sugar Camp to check it out and pick up some stuff for our Maple Harvest Festival we are holding at Shaver's Creek in a couple of weeks.

We got up early that morning to head out, so the views were incredible with the rising sun.

We actually had to drive into Maryland and then back up into PA. Here is a shot of the skyline in a town in Maryland.

Wagner's sits in Amish country. Below is a picture I snuck of the kids playing in their schoolyard.

The blue tubes on the trees are tubing for collecting sugar maple sap. This tubing goes from tree to tree and gravity or suction brings the sap down the hill and into collection tanks. The trees on our way towards the camp were riddled with this blue tubing like spider webs!! It was really neat to see.

When we arrived, we were greeted by the daughter of the founder of Wagner's. She was really kind and showed us around the camp. She also gave us free sugar cakes and maple sugar covered walnuts and peanuts! :)

These are the different size containers of syrup they have at Wagner's. The gallon size (the biggest one) costs $40!!!

Below are the conversion rates for sap to the products they make out of the sap. It is amazing how much sap is needed to make just one gallon of syrup!

Below is a picture of the collection tanks where the sap is collected before going through those tubes and entering the building where it will be boiled.

Inside, the sap is collected into this mechanism, which filters and then dumps it into a vat leading to the Reverse Osmosis machine and the evaporator.

We where there at the perfect time when the machine dumped out all the sap. This was their first run of the season, which is the reason the sap looks dirty. That is all the residual wood from the tap holes and the tubing. This is actually a really late season, as their first run is usually in mid-February.

Since Wagner's is a family business and has been for a couple of generations now, they have a lot of antiques related to their family history at the camp. All these things were tools, etc., that they made for themselves, since they used to hand make everything they needed for syrup production.

Below is a picture of a slice of a 200 year old tree that used to live on the property. Above it is a list of important world happenings by year during the tree's lifetime.

The big metal pan is the wood burning evaporator they used to use to boil down the sap. The entire room would fill with steam from the boiling sap and make the room warm, no matter how cold it was outside.

This is all I have to share from that trip. I'll keep you all updated on other neat stuff I do throughout the season! :)

Ice Day

Last week we had so much ice that Penn State closed for the first time in over 5 years! I wanted to share with y'all the cool shots I got that day! There was an ice storm the night before and it was a beautiful warm day the next day (somewhere in the 40's). This is the result.

Icy roads make for dangerous travel. Check it out!

Icy roads also make it hard to walk! I almost wiped out quite a few times on this ice. I wiped out pretty badly 3x that week!

These icicles hang off of the lodge at the center. They are about 1 foot or longer.

Below is a picture from the front door of the lodge. The yard is under about 2 feet of snow in this picture. Today, it was only in about 6 inches to a foot of snow. How crazy is that???

This is picture of a random tire that has been stuck in the ice and snow ever since I got here. It's just a good shot that I thought I would share. :)

These pictures show the branches covered in ice. All of the shiny stuff is ice melting off of the branches. It made the most amazing sound when I stood outside quietly. It sounded like rain, dripping into the snow. Since we are in the woods, there were hundreds of trees defrosting around me. At times, bigger ice pieces would just drop off of the shrubs and trees. There were little pieces falling off twigs and making small noises and larger pieces that intimidated me with the noise they made as they crunched through the branches to the ground below. The birds were also really happy that day and were singing everywhere! This has to be one of the most beautiful experiences I've had here in PA so far!

That's all for this post! I hope you liked it! :)

PA Winter Raptor Survey

A couple of weekends ago, we joined the Shaver's Creek Raptor Center team and volunteers on the Pennsylvania Winter Raptor Survey. This is to survey the different raptors within Pennsylvania during the winter months and put it into a database where their populations can be monitored. Many birders across the state participate in the Survey. On our 30 mile trip (which we took at around 15-30 mph), we spotted different raptors like Red-Tail Hawks, a Bald Eagle, a Turkey Vultures, Black Vultures, and a Cooper's Hawk. I spotted a couple of Red-Tails myself! :)

I also enjoy "birdering" (watching birders), so I got a few pictures of our humans. Here are a few shots from that day!

Andy and Colleen enjoy birding.

Red-Tail Hawk

Red-Tail Hawk

Red-Tail Hawk

Red-Tail Hawk

Cooper's Hawk

The Cooper's Hawk flew off pretty quickly, so that is a very bad quality picture of it, but I least I got it! :)

Enjoy and I'll be taking more pictures soon!!

Shaver's Creek Environmental Center

Finally writing my first post! I went out last week to take pictures on Shaver's Creek Environmental Center property and here are some of my captures.

 Above is the Sugar Shack, where Shaver's Creek makes their maple syrup! We took the Lake Trail. The lake and creek were partially frozen over.

 

 Continuing down the trail, we saw the ice melting and the wind blowing the snow off the trees.

Morgan took some really neat pictures of the mushrooms on this tree!

We decided to cross the lake, but it was not completely frozen over, so we had to take a detour.

The detour led us up a steep hill and back near the Center.

There was a project going on that day, which Morgan and I had both been involved in, to burn the ash trees affected by an invasive beetle.

Afterwards, we stopped by the feeders to take pictures of a few birds before ending our day.

I got a few shots of a black capped chickadee and a pine siskin. More pictures to come! The next sequence will be some photos I took during the Winter Raptor Survey!