Far North Friday: Boring
I suspect we all have been bored at least once. Perhaps that was during the Covid lock down. Or perhaps it was while listening to a presentation that was not too engaging. Maybe you got bored while reading someone reflect on their experiences in the north. But have you woken up to the sound of boring?
Early in my career, we would build our work tables, beds, and any furniture from trees cleared to make space for the tent camp. I made my bed out of black spruce or jack pine logs cut to make the legs and smaller spruce or pine poles to make a sleeping platform. A thick foam mattress smoothed out the pointy bits on the sleeping platform. There were good reasons to sleep 3 feet off the tent floor - visiting mice and skunks was one. Warmth was another. The top half of the tent was always warmer than the tent floor. Sadly, I don’t have a good photo of those bed creations.
If the aircraft was big enough (ie, Otter), we would fly in 4x8 sheets of plywood to use as the sleeping platform, fitted on 3 foot tall spruce or pine legs (Photo 1).
Photo 1: A poor quality image that shows just a small part of the home-made bush bed, in a tent.
There are mysteries associated with sleeping on a bed made of cut logs. I recall waking up in the middle of the night to the mysterious grinding or boring sound. I had never heard that sound before. In the morning, I noticed a pile of sawdust on the floor beside the spruce bed leg. Curious. For many, the sound and the sawdust were the clues, but I was clueless. After several additional nights of waking to boring sounds, I was able to isolate the sound to one part of a spruce bed leg. I saw a few small holes in the bark. We removed the bark and bingo, a white larva. After a little research, we concluded it was a sawyer beetle larva. The adult beetles are commonly seen flying around later in the summer.
Listen to the first 30 seconds of this video if you are interested in hearing the boring sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q2C5A0-dkk&ab_channel=drlucci
Some say the sawyer beetle is not the most handsome of insects, with their scary oversized antenna (see video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW-1WRtJpgk&ab_channel=BillTracy).
Have A Question About This Note?
May 20/21 (Facebook May 14/21).