Sapcicles

As you can see from the previous post, today is woodchuck....er....Groundhog...day. Not that that means anything, really. All our local marmota monax critters are hibernating and will be for a good while yet. Around here all the shadows in the world won't bring spring in six weeks, no way, nohow.

Of course when spring does come they will emerge from their burrows, make more burrows, gobble garden, and generally be annoying. You gotta take the bad with the good.

Anyhow, we took a little ride yesterday evening, looking at Amish farmsteads on the back roads around our area. There are certainly plenty of them!

As we passed under some sugar maples, which line the roads in many places around here, dripping down from some twigs broken by some passing tall truck...probably a milk tanker out there...were sapcicles.

Yay! The sap is running! There can be a lot of winter yet, but still.....

Happy

Day

The Peggy Channel

Peggy is quickly learning numbers and colors and how to sort things, like her Go Fish cards featuring fish, crustaceans and sea mammals. And of course, it is always fun to play blocks with Uncle Alan.

Riverbank

I have always wanted to get down to the river at dawn to see how the sun plays on the mist and the water turns to copper and gold.....

Yesterday I did. 

Neighboring

Don't tell anybody, but when I went out for my daily bird count and walk today, I came back munching a lovely cookie.

Yeah, the barnyard gate was open so I went down that driveway instead of up the hill or down the house drive. I am usually too lazy to go find the key, open the big gates, and then re-close them when I get back. It was kinda neat to take a different route.

Just as I was almost to the bottom, a neighbor, who was passing and saw me, pulled in to talk farming and neighbor stuff...and birds of course, since I had bins and a camera hanging around my neck. Geese are grazing his cornfields, but not too many of the gazillion Mallard Ducks that are hanging around this year. And little brown jobs...we all seem to have a lot of those around.

And then, just before he headed out to finish his errands and deliver a box of homemade cookies to someone, he opened the box and gave me one.

Yep, a groundhog cookie. And a frosted groundhog cookie at that. I wanted to take a picture to share with you but my hands were so cold I had to eat it so I could put them back in my pockets. Delicious.

Ain't small town life great though? 

Goal Birds

My good friend, Linda, of Life on a Colorado Farm sent me these lovely photos of Sandhill Cranes. In Colorado where she lives, they are not rare. Here in NY they make the rare bird alerts all the time, and I will probably never count one on our farm count, although we do see them up at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge. Thanks, Linda for making my day!

To the Quiet One

Happy Birthday, dear one. Hope this is a good day for you.....glad you liked the surprise.

Love you!

Evening

This is a tiny fraction of the gulls, mostly Ring-bills, Herrings, and Great Black-backed.
Hundreds more roost on the buildings at the fairgrounds and on the ground, and still others
sit on the river itself. It is mind boggling. Click for a better look.

I rode over to town with the boss last night and on the way home we paused near the river to look at the gulls. There are staggering numbers thereof, probably rivaling the Canada Geese and Mallard Ducks that darken the water in their plenty, morning and evening. I took a few photos to give you an idea of the largess.

Air Dog

Open Winter

Somebody's watching

This sort of weather has its downsides. There are folks, not including myself, who love outdoor sports...braaaaap....

There is mud.

Muddy dogs. 

Lots of ice when it freezes. Lots of days when the animals can't be out because of the slipperiness. 

However, there is also the real and genuine possibility of walking all the way to the Stolen Car Field and back, knocking those 10,000 steps a day right out of the park and getting a female Harrier and a Red-bellied Woodpecker for first of the year birds.

Probably an Eastern Bluebird too, but I couldn't quite be sure through the binoculars when he perched on the chopper chute....and with the camera I got a lovely, sharp, clear, shot of the chopper chute.

There were crows, over a hundred of them. Ninety odd robins. (Well, forty or so of them were probably even). A couple hundred or so starlings.

Tempestuous skies, scudding clouds, tracks and traces of coyotes and deer. Turkey tracks, although no turkeys...

There is warmth in the January sun...

Cold in the January wind...

Crows ride it like a crystal pony, wings flashing neon white and bear-coat-black in the low-lying sun.

Shout and lecture like a mile of math teachers, geometry on sky, hexagons, cubes, and diamonds of noise and self-importance.....I wonder what they are yelling about.

Clues

After going out before anyone else was up...except Becky who goes to work before four....I was hanging around the house, keeping an ear on Peggy for Liz. Liz came in and I peeked out the window to see if anything interesting was on the feeders.

I hadn't filled them yet, so there were few birds around except one little White-throated Sparrow that was huddled against the wall of the shelf feeder the boss built me, picking disconsolately at leftover seeds.

Every time I went back to the window he was still there. This is not normal behavior so I finally went outside, figuring he was sick or injured. Nope, as soon as I came in sight he was gone like a rocket, along with another one that had been hiding on the ground...in plain sight pretty much..they have great camo.

Since I was out anyhow I wandered down to the heifer barn and paused to try to get a photo of some approaching Canada Geese. Suddenly, out of the heifer barn haymow window, burst a big Cooper's Hawk! It had to turn on the diagonal to even get out the window! 

Wow! I still wasn't quick enough to get a photo, but now we know the rest of the story about why the sparrows were acting so oddly.

On a side note I was able to get all the way up behind the barn for the first time this year. Yay! I would have gone right up to the upper fields, but I need to be inside to listen for Peggy while Liz does chores. Soon.....

On the Bright Corn Snow

An Adirondack Barred Owl, seen on Moose Quest a couple of years ago

Whatever phenomenon you choose to blame for this oddly benign January, I am pretty much enjoying it. This morning the icy sleet and other forms of ultra cold water that blanketed the ground during the last storm had turned to corn snow, something we don't see terribly often and usually only in March.

It was fine to walk upon, requiring only a reasonable amount of care. Wildly stoked by the Rough-legged Hawk and Great Blue Heron I saw on one short bird walk a couple of days ago I decided to try a bit of owling. I didn't go far, just down to the Long Lawn, but out there is a whole nother world when the sun is still asleep.

I know we have Great Horned Owls, as I seem each year to find a few downy feathers where one has dived into something thorny after a bunny or a mouse. However, it is noisy  here by the house....what with all the highways...and all the best wildlife is up back in the woods. The odds of hearing or seeing one are pretty slim.

However, watching the way the faint light of false dawn and the nearby towns played on the snow and sent itself back to the sky, and listening to water trickling from the broken blind ditch, which has found an unfortunate new outlet near the compost bin...and thinking good thoughts and small prayers for friends and family members beset by illness and misfortune this season....was as rewarding as a good bird.

An Eastern Cottontail paused, momentarily mesmerized in the beam of my flashlight, which I had flicked on to see what was moving out there on the lawn. I switched it off to free him and he gamboled a few feet away before stopping to nibble on the frozen grass under the bright corn snow.

I will do a little real birding later, but Owl Quest was.....nice.....

Fail

Caption this.....

White Ice

Although I spotted a single Snow Goose yesterday, flying in formation with what ended up being 226 Canada Geese, birding has been slow at best.

With the warm weather, open water, and bare ground, only a handful of regular yard birds have been coming to the feeders. Walking has been a bit better...made it down the driveway and back...alive! ....yesterday, but still don't dare try for the hills and fields. Frozen, greasy, mud tussocks aren't much better than ice on bad knees, alas.

However, this morning, after last night's combination of sleet, snow, and freezing rain, the feeders were packed. I had to finish the Farm Side so I only did a tiny count, but as soon as it brightens up a bit I am going out again. The winter sparrows were back...I thought they might already have started moving north, as I hadn't seen a White-throated in over a week. Guess they were just partaking of wild seeds and such because they were here again.  40 Goldfinches, and two male Cardinals in all that snow! Gorgeous!

Anyhow, after all the mud, it almost nice to see the white stuff clinging to the trees and sticking to the ground.

***Update: went out to see if the geese were coming off the river and got a Great-Blue Heron and a Rough-legged Hawk. The latter is a pretty big deal for me, having not seen one in a very long time.
 

Nature's QR code