Leaf fall #phenology

Big ponds and lakes and most mid-sized ones are still wide open water. Small water bodies like the "wet spot" in our back yard and the puddle in the driveway are frozen. Chickadees and nuthatches have make the heated bird bath really popular today, but they're not taking baths, they're drinking from it. For the next week or so, daily high temperatures will be close to normal low temperatures for this time of year. It's always nice to get validation from the National Weather Service, supporting our gut reactions to weather patterns. If we don't soon get an above normal warm spell, it's liable to be a lonnnngggg Winter.

Source: NWS Twin Cities

We're not sure what's going on but this Autumn, especially the past week or so, we've ended up with more mice in the traps than we recall from the entire time we've lived here. Plus, this year again there seem to be several of the little critters that manage to eat all the peanut butter without tripping the trap. How they do that is befuddling, since we've got a couple of sore fingers from carelessly placing set traps and catching ourselves from time to time.

We've not yet had a visit from a local pileated woodpecker. That's something we still can look forward to. A little downy woodpecker was pounding on our North soffit the other day. We hope that's just a misdirected exploratory effort and not a case of the bird knowing something about carpenter ants that we haven't noticed yet.

late January visitor

Photo by J. Harrington

This week's weather, with howling winds and rain turning to snow have just about finished leaf fall except for those oak leaves that will be dropping from time to time all Winter and into next Spring's leaf bud swelling. The rain and snow hindered cleanup so it'll be interesting to see if they end up clogging the snow blower, unless we get a light enough snowfall all Winter that it doesn't come to that. Now there's a fantasy for our version of the North Country, except that lets the frost line go even deeper unless it stays relatively warm. It doesn't cost any more to dream big. We checked.

Patience Taught by Nature

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1806- 1861

“O Dreary life!” we cry, “O dreary life!”
And still the generations of the birds
Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds
Serenely live while we are keeping strife
With Heaven’s true purpose in us, as a knife
Against which we may struggle. Ocean girds
Unslackened the dry land: savannah-swards
Unweary sweep: hills watch, unworn; and rife
Meek leaves drop yearly from the forest-trees,
To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass
In their old glory. O thou God of old!
Grant me some smaller grace than comes to these;—
But so much patience, as a blade of grass
Grows by contented through the heat and cold.

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