Several years ago I heard a story on NPR about videos for young kids showing earth-moving equipment. It was the current spin on a story Captain Kangaroo read in the 1950s about Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel…big machines doing big stuff on the land.

Today, Henry and I stood in awe as Butch Richards and his assistant used tree shears and skid-steers to cut, lift, pile and move trees from an old fenceline along our gravel road.  They look like little r2-d2’s puttering around, then cutting a whole tree, grabbing the standing trunk and carrying it to a pile. The cedar in this picture was wimpy compared to some of the trees he hauled. In just 7 hours they made their way down hundreds of feet of fenceline and opened the view from the road onto the prairie behind it.