Third Day

January 3rd, 2014.  Snowpocalypse, some are calling it.  We dug out this morning from about 2 feet (.61 meters) of snow, after one of the coldest storms on record.  As I write it is -17C at 7.30pm, and expected to go down to -20C later on tonight! We will all sleep well, quite soon!


Last night I lay awake for ages listening to the wind howling around the house, the gale force blasting snow and frigid air at our house, trying to sneak in at any little crevice.  And this morning all the birds arrived at the feeders: bullying blue jays, tufted titmouses, dark-eyed juncos with their tummies dipped in snow, cardinals, American goldfinches in their brown winter coats, downy woodpeckers, nuthatches, fat round doves, and tiny cheerful chickadees, my favourite bird, and also the favourite bird of the person who chose the state bird of Massachusetts.  It constantly astounds me, how these tiny little creatures can survive these gelid temperatures, these bitter nights. 

 Chickadees weigh 9 - 14g, the lightest of feathery creatures, and yet here they are, cheeping away cheerily, perfectly preened with their little black caps on.  Apparently they rely on their ability to lower their body temperature at night and also their amazing memory for where they have stashed food during the autumn months.  Their brains actually grow an extra bump to accommodate this larger requirement for memory, like adding a memory chip to a computer!

It was such hard work posting through deep deep snow into the meadow today.
I have a chair at the pond where I sit and watch the birds.  This is how it changed over three days.

My man-made thing today is a snow-angel.  One of the lovely things about snow, and children in snow, are snow angels.  This is a picture of a world record of nearly 9000 people in North Dakota making snow angels at the same time!

 

I made a snow angel in the second meadow today, under the big rock so that I could photograph it from above, and then decided to make six, one for each person in my family.  It was laborious work, so difficult to get up from the deep snow after each one, trying not to disturb the angel-shape.  I took several photographs, pleased with myself, until I got home and uploaded them to my laptop, only to realise, with a great sense of disappointment, that I hadn't done them correctly, and that instead of six lovely angels, it looked instead as though an adolescent boy had drawn six giant penises in the snow!