The O-Zone

Yesterday was the first day of Spring!  We celebrated by going on a birding trip south of here, a four plus hour drive, to an area where Sandhill Cranes congregate while on migration.  There were flocks of them in the air, calling to each other about weather. flight plans, who has the longest legs, and other things of importance to cranes.  They have the neatest voices!!

A large flock resting by a pond, near a corn field.

More birds were flying in and landing, and then others would take to the skies.

Hard to count, but hundreds of birds were in this one field.

It’s so hard to explain to non-birders just how neat it is to see birds in this concentration, and listen to them.  Cranes, in particular, sound prehistoric.

Sandhill Cranes, Canada Goose, two Tundra Swans taking a nap, and ducks.

We also visited a national wildlife refuge down that direction, but didn’t have as much time to spend as we would have liked.  It took longer to get down there than we thought it would.  Oh well 🙂  what a nice way to spend the first day of spring.

Around here the local Snowshoe Hares are wishing that the mountain had just a wee bit more snow.

Global warming from a bunny's eye view.

There was a little frost on the ground but nowhere near enough from his perspective.

Mish just has fits when he sees these guys outside the window.  He so badly wants to get out and chase them around the ground.  They would leave him so far in the dust.

Just last week spring was here.  Granted, no flowers were blooming yet, and for that matter they still aren’t blooming.  And then winter snuck up on us again.

Snow has swirled around, a couple of inches accumulates and then melts and then returns.

Just last week all this ground was bare of snow.

It has been snowing again off and on all day today, and predicted to continue doing that for the next couple of days.  Spring is sneaking up on winter though; and the Equinox is only 10 days away.

Birds are sneaking north.  We’ve seen Robins, Varied Thrush, Mountain Bluebirds, Meadowlarks, Song Sparrow, and heard Great Horned Owls,  Pygmy Owls (often), and Saw-whet Owls.  Hummingbirds in six weeks!!!!!!  It’s totally amazing to think that there will be green grass and flowers in just that long.

Recently we’ve had eagles hanging around our place, much to Opal’s dismay who is of the opinion they are trying to sneak up on her and eat her.  She tell us immediately when she sees these large predators, occasionally when they are still outside of our ability to see them.

This adult Golden Eagle had won the high ground and sneaking up to take a picture is not easy! Eagle-eyed does have a basis in fact.

Perched on the tippy top of a pine tree, the winds challenged this eagle to stay there.

The gold on the back of the head of a Golden Eagle is distinctive.

Speaking of sneaking up on things, here is Mishkin attempting to sneak up on a mouse which he had cleverly released in the kitchen so that he would have more fun catching it again.

There was on flaw in his master plan. The mouse just wasn't that into the whole catch and release concept of play.

Mish couldn't figure out why he wasn't able to fit underneath this furniture. After all he remembers being able to do that.

Mish did pay for letting the mouse go.  He spent the entire day trying to entice his little playmate out from under the furniture.  The story has a happy ending from our perspective in that the mouse did end up being caught.  Mish has a new nickname given to him by Dan – Rodent-releaser.

It’s supposed to be really white outside, with a couple of feet of snow on the ground, perhaps icy on top from recent warm spells.  It’s nothing like that this winter.  We have at most five inches of snow on the ground, with large bare patches where the sun is the most unobstructed by trees or shadows cast by the mountains to the east.

Gray skies make for very little in the way of solar gain. And it is raining again today.

The hillsides directly across from us have very little snow left.  And if the temperatures continue this warm for the next week, as predicted, our driveway may have large areas of gravel showing through under the ice.  That will be neat!

This really does look more like March than mid February.

We could still get a large snowfall, but the chances are dwindling and migrating birds are coming back.  Yesterday we went for a walk by the river and heard flocks of Canada Geese flying, saw a small flock of ducks bombing around over the river.  I heard a Saw-whet Owl calling early in the morning, very close to the house.

Yesterday we had a  fairly sizeable flock of Pine Siskins visiting the feeders.  They look like mobile dry leaves decorating the bare branches of bushes in front of the house.

Flighty little things, I didn't dare go out on the porch to take their picture, and it looks a little fuzzy through the sliding glass doors.

They are such pretty little birds when you get a close look at them, with a lot of variation in the amount of yellow in their plummage.

This one has quite a bit of yellow on the back and above the tail.

A pretty profile; the conical shaped beak marks these guys as seed-eaters.

Their steaked sides are great camoflauge when they are in dry grass, a favorite feeding spot.

Non-migratory, the flocks range over a pretty wide area in the winter, searching for food.

Only 69 days until our first hummingbird is due to return.  That’s not very long in the grand scheme of things.

Last Sunday I made pancakes for breakfast.

It has been warm enough that the cookstove is enough heat for the house until evening, and it is nice to take advantage of this by using our cast iron griddle for cooking.

Mish has a new toy. He's almost 2 years old now, but still discovering new and exciting ways to get into trouble.

Here he is immediately after being chased out of the bathroom and away from his handiwork.

Note the totally innocent body posture, and demeanor, which states, beyond any doubt, “I’ve been here all along and have NO idea what you’re going on about.”  I quoted a favorite line from “Back to the Future,” – You’d better get used to those bars!  He didn’t get the reference.

As the name of this species intimates, it was discovered on the Lewis and Clark expedition across the North American continent in the early 1800’s.  These guys live at high elevations, 3,000′ to 13,000′ in the Rockies mainly, and in the higher Cascades.  This is a member of the Corvidae family, related to Jays and Crows, though it acts very much like a woodpecker.  Very smart and with lovely singing voices.  They cache food for the winter and are quite capable of digging through 8 feet of snow to find a supply of their favorite pine nuts.  These birds have an amazing memory for where they put their cache, remembering a thousand locations.  If only I could remember card combinations even half as well!

They are a pretty soft gray bird with striking black and white patterns in their tails and wings.

This guy was keeping an eye on the tree where the suet is located.  They love to pick the highest point on a tree for the best vantage point.

A better view of their heavy bill, the better to tear up rotting downed logs.

Prior to moving here the only place we saw these birds was in National parks, either in Canada, Montana or Oregon.  We saw them a few times on our property next to Glacier National Park, and they did demolish a whole downed tree in an amazingly short amount of time, banging on it with their beaks and eating the bugs while reducing the tree to toothpicks.  Industrious.

I was standing under this one, next to the suet tree. Shows off their white bird butt.

Dan keeps the official bird list for this county, and the state list keepers just sent a list of all the birds in county to see if Dan agrees with how common or uncommon various birds are.  They think these are Uncommon, but in reality in this area they are Common.  Just look around and listen.  Do you hear something loud and raucous?  It’s most likely one of these.

Speaking of loud and raucous:

Here she is looking perky and not yelling for once, since she was sitting on my knee getting pets.

The sun was shinking on her gleaming feathers and she was pretending she didn't know what that gold ball of light was.

Dan was bringing me a cup of tea, she was watching to see if it was for her. She's always sure it is for her.

Dan tells her she’s a nutcracker wanna-be as sometimes she makes noises very similiar to them.

The county road by the river is almost completely free to snow and ice, even along the edges, and today was bright, sunny, and not too cold.  Time for a walk!  Last year we weren’t able to go for walks on the road until March.  It’s just an amazingly warm January, and not too snowy either.

Heading up the road, less than a mile to the border crossing.

I took the camera along today because we’ve been seeing Bald Eagles along the river when we go to town.  So I asked Dan to drive downriver to the trees where they usually hang out.  Nobody was home, and I was a little disappointed.  I decided to take the camera with us anyway and just take a picture of how nice the road is for walking right now.

A large Ponderosa Pine next to the road.

The really neat thing about these trees is how their bark smells when the weather is hot and the sun is shining on their bark – they smell like vanilla.  Really.

As we got around the corner, we started seeing and hearing Ravens and then an eagle.  Dan pointed up the road at a Bald Eagle sitting on the roadway, right where we were going to be walking.  It was obvious there was a dead deer up there off the side of the road as there was a bird party going on.

One of eight or more eagles hanging out in the woods and along the roadway. Most were full adults like this one, a couple of juveniles of various ages.

They were quite active, jumping off branches, flying around, yelling at each other and generally carrying on.

This is the same bird as in the previous picture; they took flight immediately after I snapped their picture. Impressive wingspan.

Several eagles were soaring overhead, squeaking. They have a tiny voice, really, for such large birds.

This one was pretty close, in a cottonwood tree right next to the road, and not in the least bid afraid of us.

He was keeping a close eye on us, and hoping we'd leave the roadway soon so the party could recommence.

We didn’t hang around much were the dead deer was lying; we were interrupting not even the Bald Eagles, but also thirty Ravens and a half dozen Magpies.

Coming out of the trees and back into the sunshine. The river is breaking up in the shallow areas.

There was a bird singing along the river and Dan asked me if I knew what it was.  It was a Dipper, another of our favorite types of birds.  And right then one of them flew over to our side of the river and was standing along the edge of the ice, bobbing it tail  and being a dipper.

These little birds feed by jumping into the water and walking around on the bottom.

Their feathers are so dense and waterproof that they are sort of encased in a bubble of air and the water never penetrates.  When they pop back out the water just runs off them in beads.  They hang out along this river all winter long, as it rarely freezes completely, and they just need a little opening of running water.

Looking downriver, towards the south and the sun was starting to get fairly low in the sky.

The weather is so spring-like that only the short days provide the hint that this is mid winter and things could change at any time.

Dan had a mouse rodeo this morning with Mishkin, as soon as he got up.  There was a mouse hiding under the speaker in the living room; when he lifted the speaker, Mish stuck in a paw and without claws tapped the mouse on the side a few times – tap, tap, tap.  The mouse ran and hid between the modem and the wall; Mish tapped again and the mouse ran back to the big speaker.  Dan and Mish repeated this a couple of times until Mish was too slow when Dan lifted the speaker, and Dan was able to nab the mouse.  Whew.  Out the door it went.  I think Mish was relieved because he ran upstairs to use his cat box, and then had a bite to eat and something to drink before stretching out in the front of the woodstove, looking very pleased with himself.  He’s taken a couple of naps today already; I think he was up most of the night playing with his little friend.

The days are noticeably longer now, almost a month past the Winter Solstice. Of course, we aren’t seeing much sunshine during the day; we’ve been in the clouds or under the clouds for several weeks now. A couple of days ago the clouds went away right as the sun was setting and we got a very pretty sunset. I was playing with the zoom lense on the camera, and seeing how it intensifies the colors in the sky.

Looking south west, the sun still is setting more in the south than in the west and it seems like each time we actually see it setting, the has moved more across the sky and heading north along the west horizon.

Zoomed in a bit from the last view, and the pink is more vivid. I liked the contrast between the sky and the branches on the Ponderosa Pine next to our front deck.

Now the rose color is the most intense, and the landscape really disappears in the bottom of the picture.

It’s been snowing here overnight and during the day, and our walkways are just going to be very treacherous to walk around on, with an inch on top of glare ice.  Dan is going to go out to split firewood and I’m going to work on fixing the kitchen.  It’s pretty messy.  But it’s a good messy.

Pecan Sticky Rolls, and they are very sticky.

I fixed some mashed sweet potatoes today, and one of my bread recipes uses mashed sweet potatoes and chopped fresh cranberries as a combination.  I’m going to make that today after I clean up the present mess.  Should be interesting, and it should be very healthy with that particular combination.  I definitely need to make up for pecan sticky rolls.

Branches were bare last evening, starkly dark against the white background of the ground and cloudy sky.  Things changed overnight.  An overwhelming sense of light met our first view of the morning, though the sun had not yet risen.  Snow had fallen, adhering to every surface, and has continued to fall all day.  A band of this weather has mostly gone through and we should see colder and clearer skies.  Good!  Some solar gain will be nice.

Planted in a row, marching down the hill from the Aspen grove, fruiting bushes provide shelter and a playground for bunnies and birds.

These fruit plants are right outside our bedroom windows and are popular with various creatures, big and small.  Tracks abound in and around them.

Even the tiniest branches support snowflakes.

Snowy aspens and snowy satellite dishes. Shortly after I took this picture, we lost our connection. A tromp through the show, broom in hand, fixed the problem. It is really picky.

Branches collect and hold snowflakes until wind arrives, or temperatures rise, or one too many flakes land. Then whoosh, a cascade of snow flies through the air to the ground below. Sometimes I help this along by shaking a tree, if Dan is standing in just the right location.

Fir trees are probably my favorite when it comes to the way the snow collects on the ends of their branches.

Ponderosa Pines seem to hold even more snow than do fir trees.

Our normal 40 mile view is reduced to less than a mile. The snow is falling thickly today.

Dan did plow the driveway but I haven’t shoveled any paths yet as I will have to do it again tomorrow anyway, and might as well do it once instead of twice.

Lots of baking this weekend and today. These are banana/almond muffins on the left, and orange/cranberry/almond muffins on the right.

Shortly after we woke up this morning, it started to snow, and it has been snowing steadily ever since.  Four inches have fallen so far, with no signs of letting up.

Somewhere under the snow lies our driveway.

I can predict the future.  Tomorrow Dan will be plowing snow.

Branches capture the snow and become weighed down.

I have some very ripe bananas which need to be turned into muffins or banana bread, or both.  I think that will be my baking project for the afternoon.  We will have to run the generator anyway; no solar gain today.  The view from the front deck is just an indistinct blur for the hillside immediately across from us, and pure white everywhere else.  The world feels very small.  How nice and cozy!

In a word. Yum.

Lemon butter cream icing too. You'd never guess these are gluten free and lactose free.