the fourth snow!

Many years we have no particular wintry precipitation - maybe a couple hours of sleet, or more damaging, freezing rain that coats branches and wires with a beautiful crystal coat that they can't support. But this winter it has been snow, more snow than in decades.

The Christmas Eve blizzard was mean. Fierce north wind and temperatures rapidly dropping through the twenties. But last Thursday it snowed from before dawn till after dark with very little wind, and a steady temperature of about 33°, dropping to 30° or so through the night. You could tramp in it for hours with soaked feet and not feel particularly cold.

I happened to spend it at the Ridge. I went out to feed Buddy, and managed to get the car halfway down the hill when all I meant to do was turn around. So, since I had food and fuel, and the cats were all safely inside back in town, I settled in to enjoy it. Took lots of pictures!








The lack of wind and the wetness of the snow meant that huge globs of it clung to the tiniest supports. A branched twig would accumulate a fist-sized clump, until one last flake too many would send it plunging.






The birds were really mobbing the sunflower seeds. Cardinals, towhees, Harris' sparrows, white-throats, a brown thrasher, and even a mockingbird.

Snow days can be great.

More pictures in my Facebook album.

Christmas eve "blizzard"

This is NOT normal Christmas Eve weather! The forecasters, up until almost when it happened, thought we might get a few flurries. It snowed from around 1 pm (after a gradual transition from cold rain) till about 10 pm, all the while with 30-mph winds, gusting to 40 mph, and the temperature gradually dropping from 35° to 25°. B-r-r-r-r!





Another view of those two plum trees. Visibility is actually fairly good here. I took these as I was leaving the Ridge about 3pm; by the time I got to Denton visibility was about a block.

I am eager for March, when I can see these "hung with snow" in the poetical sense, like Housman's cherries, rather than this all too literal version (not that any of it was hanging about, with that wind)!

I took some video of the birds, which I will try to get edited and on youtube. I had gotten the feeder hung from a wire between the living room eave and the shrubbery, out of reach of the coons. But I didn't allow for the effect of 40-mph gusts on the shrubbery; the nail holding the wire pulled out of the eave rafter. I rehung the feeder directly from the eave, just 18 inches from the windows. The birds didn't seem to care.

Here's a cardinal outside the kitchen window on the big rock, chowing down on sunflower seeds. Generally, I seem to have cardinals (at least six males seen simultaneously), chickadees, titmice, Harris sparrows, a fox sparrow, whitethroats (more heard than seen), and two towhees.



Christmas was lovely and sunny, up to nearly 40°, so it melted fast. This brushy area down by the lane that we hadn't gotten around to mowing was transformed on Christmas morning. By the afternoon it was back to just being brush.



This is a big plum tree (I think) in the field above the gate. The guys timed themselves clearing it -- it took about an hour to free the trunk. They simply cut the briers off and left the strands up in the canopy. Picture every gray line in the canopy continued down to the ground, and you will have a "before" picture. I think it's worth doing with all the trees in that field. There should still be plenty of briery thickets nearby to provide wildlife cover!

So that was our white Christmas -- the first I can remember here. All melted now except in the very shadiest spots.

Red-bird Ridge clearing

I'll take an entry or two to summarize what we have done recently here at the Ridge. We're making it look a little more civilized, but I don't believe we have done anything much to degrade the habitat, more the contrary. Of course, the ultimate aim, of building a few houses and selling their lots, will do so to some extent. But three one- or two-acre lots, with the structures we envision, and rules protecting natives and prohibiting transformation of prairie into lawn, should be able to fit in OK. Certainly the wildlife, at least the birds and occasionally the foxes, come right up to this house.

Friday 16 Jan was the first time we used the new little 14" Husqvarna saw. Eddie cut half a dozen little trees, some dead, to open out the clearing at site SC. Then he tackled the largest of his targets, a 7-8" oak, and it fell wrong. He tried to cut the little twisted strip of remaining wood, and the trunk shifted and trapped the chain. Though he turned it off immediately, the drive sprocket damaged some of the drive teeth. I filed them so they would fit in the groove again, but it didn't serve.


So I found a place with knowledgeable Husky servicepeople at Ed's Lawn Equipment in Addison, and trekked down there next day. They sold me a new chain and got the chain brake loose where we did it wrong. Sunday I put the chain on, but I couldn't get it to start.

Last Friday I had Eddie and Virgil and Scott. Scott and I went to the dump with the trash from the shop last summer, and E and V tried "about a hundred times" to start the saw, then gave up and used the handsaw and the axe. Eventually though the SC clearing was pretty open, and the NC also, though I have less sense what needs to be done there. The house is getting a good wood supply (I used a LOT yesterday and today!), and we made a nice shelter-pile with the trimmings. Virgil mowed most of the half of the south field I had started,and the dry gray dead broomweed between the house and NC.

I think mowing fields of weeds and briers is good practice, as a support for the grasses that get more sun. There are still several "hammocks" of trees overgrown with briers in that south field. They are probably more sheltering than the field-ful of thin brier growth. I want to clear out some of them, but I guess not all.

Saturday I went back to Ed's. They diagnosed a flooded engine, removed the spark plug, pulled the starter several times, replaced the plug, and it started right up. Smokily. I brought it home again (via Books-a-Million, where I GOBBLED up Bujold's new Horizon.) Even I could start it Sunday afternoon.

Monday the three guys, with my participation, much more energetically than last Friday, when I was barely over my bad cold, cleared privet at the gate and made a pedestrian gate into the panhandle woods. I surveyed into the woods and located a possible site where clearing a 20' mound of privet, several small dead trees, and one live one would make a nice site, without impacting the ravine/sometime creek. V finished mowing the S field, E and S made another gate/stile from the center woods into the west half, and then we came up to the north field.

Turns out there is more land west of the bulldozed seismic track than I had realized, at the s end of it. The guys made an effort at clearing a path along the west fence, but did no more than half of it. Then E asd I inspected from the back side of the tank dam where Jorge mowed last year. We found that two of the dead pines have smashed the fence. Buddy could have been long out and gone if he wanted to slither down the dam. The seismic-study bulldozer seems to have taken out part of the cross-fence. And as far as the first surveyor's claim of an "iron rod set" in that corner, well! We really need to get our money back from him!

great birdfeeder

Here are actual photos of my birds on the new feeder, somewhat fuzzy, and taken through glass with some reflections from within the room. On the upper left and on the bottom tray are goldfinches, upper right is a titmouse, and at the lower right is a confusing superposition of a Harris' sparrow and a cardinal. They eat up the supply pretty rapidly; it looks like I may need to refill weekly or even more often. A 25-lb. sack of sunflower seeds every month won't break me. But it sure will leave a pile of seed-coats on the ground underneath!

The cardinals often pose in the late afternoon sunlight. I may do some thinning of the yaupon, privet, hackberry, plum thicket, but I will certainly leave plenty of perches.



I have heard the s-s-see, s-s-see of waxwings, though I haven't looked the right direction to see them yet. These are the yaupon berries that draw them. (These are last year's, but there is a good crop this year also, somewhat unusually; often a poor crop alternates with a good crop.) A flock of waxwings will descend in a flurry onto the yaupons and stuff themselves madly with berries, then on some signal they will swirl up into the bare oak, where they will sit motionless, all facing the same direction, for 20 minutes, digesting. Any lawn furniture below will be liberally purple-spotted.

yuletide weather

Here's a kind of cute entry in a blog on weather underground, a worldwide summary of tomorrow's weather with particular emphasis on whether snow-covered rooftops will make things easy for the reindeer. flying reindeer forecast

A week or so ago things were topsy-turvy; it was 28° here and 58° in Lincoln. This early morning however it is 31° here and 7° there.

I am sitting in front of the remains of my evening's fire, which is pretty much gone, so I will soon head for bed.

Eddie and I worked at the Ridge today, and cleaned almost all the windows, which made a HUGE difference. I have been putting out sunflower seed for about three days now, and there are many birds in evidence. Eddie was pretty impressed by four male cardinals at once in the back yard. I told him that's why it's called Red-bird Ridge, a name he had never really paid attention to before. People have become so used to meaningless street-names and subdivision names, that it doesn't even occur to them to look for real meaning in a placename any more.