The weather has given us a break for a few days. We had warm rain and fog a couple of days before Christmas that shrunk the snow back. I had been thinking about shoveling the roof and even chipping away at the ice dams on the eves but after only one night of warmth it was all gone. A lot of effort saved! Temperatures are now back to normal highs in the thirties and lows in the twenties with light snow forecast for several days before now and New Years. It is amazing how much a few degrees reduces our firewood consumption. I have a wheeled rack that I use to bring wood into the house from the garage (a very handy device) and it holds between 25 and 30 sticks of firewood. When it is really cold that rack needs to be filled every day and now with the slight warm up it needs to be filled every other day. That will go a long way toward making the wood pile last until spring. Sometime soon the days will start to be noticeably longer which will be very much appreciated.
I have had a bird feeder out and filled with sunflower seed since Thanksgiving but it had not gotten any attention until tow days before Christmas now it has a flock of chickadees, titmice and woodpeckers. All of that attention has emptied the feeder in only a few days.
I have spent part of the last month thinking about where Maine Outdoors is and where I want it to be at the end of the next twenty years. At the same time the Samoset asked that I change some of the packages that we offer together to see if we can do a better job of capturing the nature based tourism that has become a buzz word in Maine tourism for the last five years or so. I am working on changing the canoe trips segment of Maine Outdoors to an “Explore Nature” focus and will add a learn to bird watch trip while reconfiguring several other trips to focus more in a conservation education direction. The research is telling all of us that this is the direction to head in but only time and the market will tell if this is something that people want. I am a little skeptical but excited as these are the type of trips I thought I could succeed with when I started. I am developing the new trips and their write ups this week and hope to have the changes implemented on the web page right after New Years with new brochures to follow soon after that.
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