Deerhill Farm

Star and Jazz looking forward to another great season up at the Deerhill farm.

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Through our association with Skeena Meadows Wildlife Preserve, we were introduced to Clio Smeeton and Ken Weagle from the Cochrane Ecological Institute in early April. CEI was established and implemented a wildlife rehabilitation and release program in 1971. They operate as a non-profit on 140+ acres and are not open to the public.

Ken had heard that we owned 320 acres of prime lynx territory in northern Alberta and inquired about the possibility of releasing two orphaned and rehabilitated lynx they had taken in a couple of years previously. Without hesitation, we said yes and a week later we met Ken and Clio up at the farm for the release.

They had transported the pair of male lynx from Cochrane in dog kennels. As our road in wasn't graveled to any extent, we loaded the two kennels along with Lee and an exchange student from Germany into our ATV trailer. Ken, Clio and myself climbed aboard the Polaris side-by-side and away we went. We made our way to the north end of our property and down the cutline towards our west meadow before we found a suitable release site. Once there, is was a simple matter of setting the crates on the ground and opening them up. Both lynx were initially reluctant to come out but finally bolted. Hope they survive and thrive.

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Opened up in mid-May. The first order of business was to let the dogs get their exercise. There was no limit as to how long they'd chase that ball. They were always disappointed when we would have to shut down the ball-throwing because we'd tire out.

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Our 2009 Polaris Ranger 700 side-by-side, truck and ATV trailer.

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One of our projects for this year was to set up a water and electrical supply for our trailer. After trenching for the water line and the electrical cable, we hooked up a 100 gal tank in the shed and installed the necessary electrical. Now we could fill our trailer fresh water tank by pumping from the shed tank. We still had to fill the shed tank by hand with 5 gallon jerry cans but it was way better than trying to empty those cans directly into the trailer tank. For power, we could now run our generator behind the shed rather than beside the trailer and all the cable was underground. As well, we ran our cable from the satellite dish in the same trench.

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We had disassembled our wall tent platform last fall as we were no longer using it. Our plan was to re-purpose the materials for our trailer deck. Building the frame on raised deck blocks, it was a simple matter to level everything and lay down the decking. We also had to build two trailer step platforms and steps up to the deck. Once that was done, Lee painted the whole thing and we had our trailer deck.