A few nice animal jobs images I found:
Swift Creek Stewardship and Recovery Act Project
Image by Forest Service - Northern Region
(script included at the end)
This video highlights a project on the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana funded by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act aimed to getting work done on the ground and provide jobs that support the local economy. This project was also funded and supported by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation because it involves providing critical habitat for elk.
This 200 acre project is on the Sula Ranger District of the Bitterroot National Forest. The project involves thinning and experimental soil subsoiling of terraced lands. A local contractor was awarded the project contract.
Work got underway in the summer of 2010.
-SCRIPT-
The purpose of this particular project the reason it actually came about was the Recovery Act and that the jobs created here are local. We have local operators here. They're spending the dollars in our community and putting lots of people back to work.
You know, this is the county that we live in and all of our employees live in. And the majority of the money we spend stays here. So it means a lot to us and the community.
It's very expensive to use machinery to do that type of work, and without the recovery dollars, this project wouldn't have been possible. We had to build the subsoiler shank for the decompaction, and we had to modify some things on the head.
We actually bought the disc mulcher head for this job and modified it to take the shank on it so that we could do both tasks with one pass through the woods.
We worked to create a 200-acre project of terraced plantation thinning, and it's a research project where we are going in and masticating some of the trees in sort of a--almost a commercial thinning stage, because they're fairly large-diameter, from 8 to 16 inches. However, there isn't much of a market for that type of tree currently on the market, so we decided we would work on a research project to thin 200 acres to prevent mountain pine beetle infestation. So we have a masticator on-site thinning the trees down and putting wood chips on-site. We have a soil masticator which rips the terraced lands, which allows decompaction. And we were also able to put a local business back to work under the Recovery Act. So we're very excited about this project. We have 13,000 acres of these terraced stands. And we hope that in the future, if this project works and the stand responds well and it reduces the mountain pine beetle infestation because we've allowed these trees to become more resilient, that as we move into the future, we'll be able to thin more stands. It's also an exciting project because we've partnered with Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
And what we hope to see the project accomplish is improvements of habitat for elk and other wildlife species, mainly in terms of increases of both quantity and quality of the native browse species. Just think that's just a wonderful way for us to greatly increase our capacity to get work done. It's--because we have an agreement with them and they oversee a lot of the particulars, it's real positive for us, and they are getting some meaningful work done for the foundation in terms of improving some elk habitat, calving area. We've got an elk herd of approximately 200 animals in that area.
We're looking forward to more projects like this in the future. This is the type of stuff we like being involved in.
The Bedgemog Rolls In Money
Image by Dalboz17
He successfully finished scoring "Atonement" and was given lots of one-dollar bills for the job.
Detail
Image by Lauren Close
We got a new mirror at the weekend; really makes the room seem bigger.
