Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 344
We made it through Christmas and New Years with snow on the ground and even more on the trails than in several years. I even made it to see the ball drop but that was only because a football game ended so close to midnight that I was still awake. There were lots of fireworks going off not far away which I slept through other years. When I turned on the outside light and looked out it was snowing like crazy, so I just shut off the light and went to bed. I’ll deal with that snow in the morning as I have every morning this week. I clean out the bird feeding area first and fill all the feeders, the peanut butter logs and put in new suet cakes if they are gone.
New birds this week were eight Turkeys which came in at four one afternoon and they have come back first thing every morning and again at four in the afternoon if skiers or dog walkers haven’t been down the ski trail. They scratch around getting all the spent seeds as roughage and some whole seeds that have been kicked out of the feeders. The Red-Bellied Woodpecker has been holding her own with that big beak the Blue Jays don’t challenge her too many times on the suet cakes. High count this weekend was twenty- two Blue Jays and sixty -two Evening Grosbeaks. I believe that there are many more because I have banded over sixty Blue Jays since December 17 and I have recaptured some of the early ones I banded just this week, so they are still around. The Blue Jays were even picking the crab apples off the trees along the driveway and the ones they dropped the deer would find in the snow. Those trees are bare of fruit now. When the Grosbeaks are here in numbers on the feeders, they don’t share any space to the Blue Jays as that powerful beak will take feathers right out of a Jay and make a dent in my fingers if they get a good bite.
The snow blower has been getting a workout but down south of us and even in Syracuse I’ll bet some folks wish they had one earlier this week as they got two feet of snow in that area. It looks like a January thaw is coming later in the week with thawing temperatures and rain.
It was that darn Super Wolf Moon that is bringing on all this change again just like the last full moon. This is the last super moon until the one in November this year. When I photographed this one, the planet Jupiter was just to the right, and the sky was full of stars when the clouds would part long enough for a shot. There are going to be three total eclipses this year, but you will have to travel to get the total shot.
When I haven’t been snow blowing or writing I have been getting ready for my trip to Yellowstone in the first week of February to live in a yurt for four days. While there I hope to get some photographs of wolves who will be living in the same valley where we are staying. I certainly will be able to hear them howl and catch that on my cell phone bird apt. They don’t have very much snow there now, but it can come fast at 8,000 feet elevation. There will be stories to be written from this one. Being first there when the fires were blazing in 1988, going back two summers ago, and seeing it green and lush, lots of wildlife, everything but wolves. Now in the snow and the middle of winter temperatures zero to -10 degrees just hope I can keep at least one camera working as those cold temperatures sure eat batteries.
This crazy weather when it goes from forty-seven degrees to minus ten degrees in a twelve-hour period that’s a big climate change but that’s another story. See ya.
Photo above: Evening Grosbeak male banded in hand
