Hoarfrosty Morning

Here are some photos I took this morning, on Maple St. near Sibley School and down by the riverfront. In places, the frost is an inch thick.

Hoarfrost January 19 2010

Cats Watching "The Life of Birds"

I try not to put tons of cute cat photos here, but when I discovered that they loved watching "The Life of Birds" I felt that was entirely appropriate for this birdwatching blog.

Fascinated by a canvasback duck.

Yes, that owl has a small rodent in its mouth.

The short video below shows Orion interacting with the screen. The light and sound aren't very good.

House Finch at Feeder

I took this photo of a house finch at one of our feeders on either Friday or Saturday. The zoom on my camera is broken (one or the other of certain unnamed adolescent cats knocked the camera off the desk, alas), but I got this shot by holding the camera to one side of my binoculars -- a technique sometimes called binscoping or digibinning. Not bad for a photo taken through a window, and a better focus than I often get with the point-and-shoot!

See more bird photography at Bird Photography Weekly!

Intrepid Squirrel

A brave squirrel came face-to-face with our cats today, albeit with a pane of glass between them. He spent several minutes looking through our front window, in between athletic feats that enabled him to snack for a while at both of our birdfeeders.

What had been a supposedly squirrel-proof feeder set-up proved no match for Stalwart Squirrel, now that we have more than a foot of snow on the ground and a handy ornamental deer for a launching pad. We had some amusing sights of him sliding down the pole and slipping off the squirrel-cone, but I expect it was no laughing matter for a hungry squirrel. I certainly don't mind sharing the bird food under these conditions.

Christmas Snowstorm: Plop, drizzle, fizzle

Well, instead of another 8-10 inches of snow we got two or three inches of wet snow Thursday night and Friday morning, and a fair amount of drizzle and rain over the remainder of the day. The roads stayed mostly wet, though Dave did have a rather arduous drive on Highway 19 out to the interstate early yesterday morning to meet the rest of us at a family homestead in the south metro. We drove into St. Paul for delicious meals both Thursday evening and Friday afternoon and back home to Northfield in the early evening, the car thermometer reading between 37 and 34 degrees, with never a white-knuckle moment.

We dug out the very heavy wet snow from the driveway last night -- not much in inches, but a lot in weight -- but our muscles are becoming somewhat accustomed to this shoveling business lately and didn't complain too badly. (I asked my son, age 10, to help with the shoveling, but he had tossed his shovel down somewhere in the snow a couple of days ago and it was covered up and no longer to be found.) This morning, judging from the sounds made by the dog's feet when she went outside, everything has hardened to a crunchy crispness, so I'm glad we got the shoveling done.

Speaking of animals walking in the snow, on Thursday morning I found these tracks by our front door. Although I wish they were something wild and exotic, I must conclude* that they are tracks of a domestic cat. Ah well.


*Here is the animal track chart I've referred to before, provided by the Ohio DNR.