Yesterday morning as I hung out the bird feeders not long past dawn I heard birdsong! Nothing like the dawn chorus of summer, of course, but lovely, and welcome. I’m not sure what bird it was, but I’ve heard it often, so it was definitely one of our regulars. Recently I’ve seen a single redpoll […]
Feb 26: I’ve had many chances to look over our flying squirrel on the bird feeder after dark, and I’m positive it’s a southern flying squirrel, well north of its traditional range. It’s much smaller than a northern flying squirrel (we’ve had one of them, too) and its eyes aren’t as cartoonishly large. Well, the […]
Finally! Snowed all last night – about a foot of new snow today (and it’s still coming down, at noon). There will be snowshoeing this winter after all! We spent a good chunk of the morning clearing snow from the driveway and from the balcony/deck that runs around three sides of the house. My partner […]
The deep freeze continues – down to -25 or -30 or even -35 at night, highs of only about -20, with bright, sunny days. (That’s lows of -20 – -20 F, high’s of 0) We still have under a foot of snow, and haven’t had a real winter storm yet. The weather maps on the […]
We have been having very cold weather, but little snow, and lots of sun. And moon! Doestoevsky called one of his stories “White nights” in reference to the long summer nights in St. Petersberg. It applies equally well to nights lit by the full moon, in the wild, where there’s no competing light. Even in […]
Moderately cold weather continues, and we still have only about six or eight inches of snow. This time of year we should have at least a foot and a half! The farmers are worried about it being excessively dry this spring with so little run-off – although we had such an incredibly wet fall, we […]
Well, we’ve finally had some winter. No real winter storms, but light snow on and off on many days since Christmas. We now have maybe six or eight inches on the ground, here “in the bush” where it doesn’t get blown around much. We are still quite light on snow for this time of year! […]
Very, very strange weather. The six to eight inches of snow I walked through a week or so ago, trying to track the deer I’d seen earlier, are about gone, after a week of abnormally mild weather and RAIN. On that walk, I couldn’t track the deer, but did see lots of small animal tracks, […]
Last night as I was doing the dishes, I looked out the window over the sink, and admired the full moon in the northeastern sky. A host of tiny clouds covered the sky, drawing closer and closer to the moon – there were hundreds of them, like small scales of cloud separated only by thin […]
Awoke this morning not long past dawn, a clear, cold winter day, the eastern sky still pink. Not that early at this time of year! As the sun rose, its rosy light touched the treetops, turning the frost-covered branches, every least twig of them, to pink. Lovely. And as if that weren’t enough to make […]