Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 347
Winter has settled in big time, and I had a low temperature of -32 degrees on Saturday morning 1/24. That morning as I lay awake listening to the trees popping in the woods out back at four AM, I had a Barred Owl hunting with calls right over the bird feeders. I don’t know if it caught anything but there are mice and voles working in and out of the snow under the feeders looking for seeds. At that temperature they wouldn’t have been out very long so it may have gone away empty-handed.
These cold temperatures have taken a toll on the Turkeys coming to my feeders. It started at eight and one day I had big bunch of fourteen but that was only one day and where the extras went, I don’t know. The eight continued coming for a few days then down to six, then five and now only three are coming every day. With the snow so deep today, they flew in and landed on the ski trail where it was just a short walk to the feeders.
The deer are really struggling now with the deep snow, and those little fawns probably won’t make it through the winter. One little fawn has even been eating on my spruce trees. Today the snowbanks were so high and the snow brought down many branches on the balsam so even the fawn could reach them which is called starvation food. I put out the Christmas tree, and it didn’t take them long to prune that up.
It was a beautiful sunrise this morning 1/27 starting out at yellow to orange and then all red in the east. Red sun in the morning sailors take warning and I guess that is what is coming down this afternoon more snow. Not the two to three feet they are expecting on Tug Hill, I hope. We did have 16 to 18 inches of snow in the storm from Sunday to Monday morning.
The Adirondack Ice Bowl- Pond Hockey Festival in Eagle Bay on 2/20-21/26 might just be a pond with the weight of all this now on the ice. Once when the Inlet Fire Department had car races out on the ice of Fourth Lake, we made the parking lot out on the ice not far off the boat launch, so the water was shallow, luckily. I don’t remember how many cars were out on the ice plus some were at the launch site, but there were too many. As the race went on the ice sank some and the water came up six to eight inches on top of the ice in the parking area. There was quite a scramble to get the cars off. The ice was setting on bottom in the shallow water, but everyone got off in a hurry and parked on the shoulder of the highway for the rest of the races. Another time when making the track out on the ice one of the plow trucks broke partially through the ice on one corner so we made the track a little shorter that year, oh what fun it was. Now we have the Outhouse Races a tad safer for all.
The Region 7 Duck Count for 2026 which takes in Essex, Franklin, Hamilton, and Clinton Counties had fourteen volunteer counters, with Ellie George and Stacy Robinson as compilers. A total of 16,273 waterfowl were counted during the count period. Totals were Canada Goose-40, American Black Duck-142, Mallard Duck-1982, Mallard-Black cross-5, Northern Pintail-1, Redhead-13, Ring-necked Duck-74, Greater Scaup-9364, Lesser Scaup-461, Not to species Scaup-1710, Bufflehead-109, Common Goldeneye-1452, Barrow’s Goldeneye-1, Hooded Merganser-36, Common Meerganser-823, Red-breasted Merganser-14, Common Loon-8, Horned Grebe-37, and American Coot-1.
There were some great Northern Lights photos taken on those super cold nights in the Old Forge Area. I didn’t get too much off my porch that one night, but I got some.
Off to Yellowstone Park if the planes are flying but that’s another story. See ya.
Photo above: Northern Lights Old Forge by Don Andrews
