Day 359
While I work to improve every aspect of the farm, I know that this work will pay off. Like I said, the goal of our improvement is to not only make our residence a wonderful place to make memories for our family, but to have Craneview on Plainview be a great place for the community. Lost in all of this is a completely different goal which actually ties in to the others.
We want to improve and strengthen the ecosystem for the plants and animals that call this place home. After all, it is their home just as much as ours, if not much, much more.
We wouldn't be spending a great deal of our own money to restore the land if we didn't care about this passionately.
We wouldn’t dedicate tons of time to research vegetable garden design, native plant identification, chicken caretaking, invasive wetland plants, and so much more if we didn't have a thirst for knowledge.
We wouldn’t be joining various groups and learn about multiple funding opportunities if we knew this wasn't something we could do on our own.
It truly is a community effort. And that’s exactly what we want Craneview on Plainview to be: a community.
Before we can make it a community of people, we want to make it a community for plants and animals. With all the work we have been doing, it has been inspiring to see more and more animals around as it comes back to the diverse and unique atmosphere it should be.
We have seen such diversity in our trail camera. While the vast majority of our captures are white-tailed deer, we have seen lots of new friends. Squirrels, sandhill cranes, coyotes, raccoons, turkeys, geese, and opossums are some of our latest visitors.
With our continual improvements, we hope this will bring in even more guests. Besides the trail camera we have placed as part of Snapshot Wisconsin, a citizen science project through Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources, we have a few other cameras we can place at various locations around the land.
Even if we don't catch these animal friends on the cameras, we do collect evidence that they have been there.
