A hawk, at the transfer station.
We have been building a new fence and today, when we finished a section, we decided to drive down to the transfer station to see what the pricing on their turf soil is. We’ve been seeing bags from a company off the North Shore sitting in so many driveways; everyone is doing yard projects since we are all (mostly) home this summer.
I looked at the bagged deliveries online, but the price with delivery….we couldn’t stomach it. We have a truck…and we have shovels…and we’ve moved a lot of soil that way in the past. No sense in getting lazy now when it comes with such a high price tag.
A yard of soil in a bag dropped in your driveway – about $170…give or take.
A yard of soil from the transfer station, or from another local yard material company……$35-40. A yard will take us two trips, the truck can hold a half-yard, but the other company will let us do a spilt load (“if we talk nice to Brenda”…I’m totally fine with talking nice to anyone 😉 )
It’s hard to rationalize the extra money to just have someone drop a bag in the driveway. I get it, it’s neat, it’s tidy, and if you don’t have a pickup truck, or a friend with one…what else are you supposed to do?
Now I usually take a camera most everywhere I go, today, given that we were heading to the transfer station….the gentrified term for the dump, I did not think I needed to grab my camera.
I was wrong, and I learned a lesson. They say that the best camera is the one that you have with you. That’s not really true, but since today all I had was my iPhone…I had to go with that philosophy.
Anyway, at the first stop, the transfer station, while we were waiting for the guy in the front end loader to finish what he was doing and come to talk to us, I saw a guy standing over by a vehicle near the yard waste/compost drop-off. He was wearing a vest and, to his right, was a bird…what I thought was one very ballsy crow.
The man then picked up a bullwhip and walked away from the bird, and that’s when I realized it was a raptor and he and the bird were there to keep the seagulls away. He cracked the whip twice as a few seagulls had started to drift close….they banked off and flew away.
We walked over and had a great conversation with him about the bird – a Harris’s Hawk – which the had been working with for a few years now. We learned a lot about the social nature of this particular species, and about this bird in particular – Golly, short for Goliath, is seven years old and has worked with two handlers.
He was an incredibly calm bird, and both interested in and unconcerned with our close proximity. It’s not every day that one has an opportunity to get this close to such an amazing animal, it was a treat.
11 comments