Still winter?

The water-logged grass crackled under my feet when I walked down to the shop this morning: oh yes, winter is still trying to hang on for dear life. Temperatures seem unwilling to take the leap into the double digits, in fact have lingered around +5 during the day for quite some time, and night time temperatures have dropped as low as -8 even during the last few days. 

Whenever we cautiously dare to hope that now, finally, the spell is broken we get another blast of winter. Strangely, this seems to happen every weekend, as in this picture taken last Saturday. Winds gusts up to 80 km/h whipped the thin dense veil of snow into small drifts that tried to attach to the crusty, dirty snow banks still left from months of winter. For a few hours the just exposed patches of lawn were once again covered up.

 

It is a losing battle, however: gravel roads are bare, and bare spots show up increasingly in fields and pastures, too. Even with these modest temperatures the melting process is making steady progress. Geese, too, must think it is time: instead of a couple here and there we now see the first larger groups flying overhead, long stretched-out Vs aimed unerringly north or northwest. Every morning and evening the air is filled with their honking voices, and often I stop and search the sky when I hear them in the distance, delighted when I watch their approach from behind the trees, long necks stretched out, wing beat slow and steady. At other times their passing is so quiet that I can hear the whoosh of their wings when they are low enough, interrupted only by bits of conversation muttered in their low, dark voices, talking quietly among each other, like passengers on a night train.  

With more and more snow converted to melt water lakes in the fields it must have seemed safe enough for the ducks to return as well. On Sunday I spotted the first metallic green heads in a crowd of Canada geese: mallards, busily diving in search of food.

They are not the only ones who enjoy the open water: Leo, too, loves it and seems oblivious to its temperature.

 

When I took this picture a few days ago I didn’t notice the bald eagle sitting in the neighbour’s tree on the far right until I looked at it on the computer later; I must have been too busy watching Leo’s joyful splashing right in front of my nose. 

There is one more April weekend coming up. Will it bring more snow? We would very much appreciate a stretch of warm, dry weather so that the snow will finally melt completely and the fields have a chance to dry up. Ideally we would start field work right now, but it doesn’t seem likely to happen before the 10^th of May at the earliest, probably later. As much as we love our farming life, it is never free of anxiety and worries about factors we cannot control. Yet every year it works out somehow.  I guess we just have to follow the example of the geese: stay our course, and trust that we will raise our crop, just like every year.

Where in the world is Spring?

It is eleven pm, and Orion is low in the western sky already. It seems like just a short while ago that he rose in the east at midnight. Now, his feet will soon be touching the horizon, and he’ll start to slip away. This, at least, is a sure sign that the year is progressing and we are into spring, just like the much longer days. The sun set at 8:24 tonight, 13 ½ hours after it rose.

But what kind of spring is this? Right now the temperature sits at -12 Celsius, and there’s a good chance it will dip as low as last night, when it was -18. Daytime temperatures rose all the way up to -4 in the sunshine, and my weekly measurement of the average snow depth for Environment Canada showed 40 cm – five centimetres less than last week. Unlike last Monday, when everything was soft and slushy after almost a week of melting, I had no trouble with snow coming in at the top of my boots: it was cold enough that the snow easily carried my weight. 

Oh, we are all getting a bit tired of this! When we came home from our journey south a couple of weeks ago we had much more snow than when we left on the first day of March, but only a few days later I saw the first harbingers of spring. A familiar raucous cry made me look up in the Costco parking lot in the city, and indeed, there they were: four gulls, their gleaming white bodies in stark contrast to the deep blue sky. The same day a big flock of starlings lifted off our neighbour’s trees, only to settle down again right there, almost as if a wind gust had stirred them up. A day or two later we saw two geese flying overhead – there was no doubt that winter’s icy grip had been broken, or at least loosened. 

Temperatures soared to +8, a couple of times even +10, roads briefly became muddy, but soon cars were followed by the inevitable plume of dust. A big puddle appeared at the edge of the lawn, and water in our basement – all was as it should be. If the snow would continue to melt at this speed - not too slow, but not too fast either – it would be perfect. 

But of course it is never a good idea to project too far into the future, to conclude that weather might behave as expected, which means, of course, in most cases ‘as desired’. The middle of last week brought a marked drop in temperatures, and on Thursday and Friday it snowed. Fortunately predictions of up to 15 centimetres didn’t quite come true, but it was enough to cover the raggedy snow banks with an immaculately white blanket of new snow.

Ruefully we have returned to snowshoeing in the field instead of taking Leo on walks along the road. I’m sure he appreciates it, since he can run wherever he wants that way, and he doesn’t even break through the crusted surface of the old snow under the thin layer of new. Conditions are perfect for snowshoeing, actually, and we should probably simply enjoy it while it lasts. 

The starlings are still around, though I haven’t seen them join chickadees, redpolls, blue jays, woodpeckers and nuthatches at the feeder; they must have an alternate source of food, and of course this is nothing new for them. I feel for the geese, too, brave souls. Whatever might induce those first couples to break away from the main flock and seek out this bleak winter landscape where food is scarce? 

Pussy willows are not afraid of the snow either

But, as Emily Dickinson says in her poem, ‘It will be Summer – eventually’, and I can be patient a little longer. Tomatoes and basil have come up in their seed boxes in the sunny living room window, and the solar lanterns, some of them barely poking out of the snow beside the front deck, spread their glow for much of the night, a sure sign that the light has indeed returned. 

In the meantime, we will at least have enough wood for cozy evenings by the fire ...

Leaving again/travel blog address

Almost spring-like, February quietly ended and opened the door for March. Once again we are on the road south, this time by car, and, just like in South America, with only a rough first draft for a schedule and itinerary. All we know is that we will end up where it's noticeably warmer than at home, and snow-free, and that the Grand Canyon will be one of our stops.

Since my musings cannot really be on the farm when I am away I decided to start a different blog for our travels. If you are interested you can find it under the following link: 
                                  Every Day is a Journey

Mid winter

Late afternoon in February

A month has gone by, and little seems to have changed: it is still winter, the snow pack, if anything, has increased, and within the last week we have had temperatures dip down to -30 while strong winds made it feel a lot colder. Just now, although it has warmed up to near the freezing mark, a veil of falling snow hides the far side of the field from view, and roads are likely to be in poor driving condition yet again. 

Still: looking at the photo above, taken yesterday, something has changed. A month ago the late afternoon sun would not have cast these long shadows across the front lawn. By this time of day it would have set already, never reaching that point in the southwestern sky. The arch of its daily journey has widened, and it is climbing a little higher every day. Already we have gained more than an hour's worth of light since the shortest day, much of it in the evening, though it is noticeable in the mornings as well.  

Pine Grosbeak

One of the joys of this season, for me, is to watch the birds frequenting the bird feeder beside the deck. They seem to have two main meal times, because always around nine in the morning and three in the afternoon traffic is busiest. Chickadees, hairy and downy woodpeckers, white breasted nuthatches and blue jays are the faithful regulars, often joined by a flock of tiny redpolls with breast feathers in varying hues of red.  
This year a junco is part of their crowd, which is unusual for two reasons. Most juncos pass through in the spring and fall and move on after two or three weeks; never have we had one stay all winter. This one not only is doing just that, but also looks a bit different from its cousins: instead of the slate grey upper part neatly contrasted by a light grey underside, it is of a warm hazelnut colour on top, set off with lighter brown fading into beige on the underside. I wonder if the redpolls have taken it into their fold. 

It is always a treat to see another group of visitors alight on the bird house, a flash of colour more intense than the redpolls, and much larger: pine grosbeaks have been quite faithful in coming by more regularly this year than the last few, sometimes staying away for up to two weeks, but often joining the regular crowd for days on end. The males are quite spectacular in their red frocks, but I love the females, too: their mustard yellow head and tail feathers, their black markings contrast nicely with the grey body. They, like the redpolls, belong to the family of finches, their strong beaks perfect for chiseling open sunflower seeds right on the edge of the bird house. 

Feeding habits of chickadees, blue jays and woodpeckers are quite different from each other: chickadees carry every little seed to a nearby bush or tree - in our it often is the cherry tree in front of the kitchen window - to eat it there, while blue jays stuff as much into their beaks as will possibly fit before moving on, and the woodpeckers sit in the bird feeder throwing seeds left and right with wide, sweeping movements of their beaks, looking for the perfect kernel. 

One more rare guest made use of the readily set table the other day: a pileated woodpecker, so shy that we can rarely ever spot it in either summer or winter, though quite recognizable by its call, landed awkwardly on the roof of the feeder. It teetered there for a few moments, seemingly trying to figure out a way how to get on the inside from its precarious perch on the roof. It obviously was too difficult a task, because it finally took off again without having gleaned a single seed. 

The road leading by our house will quite likely look like this a few more times this winter between ploughings, twin tracks disappearing in the distance, maybe we'll even be unable to get out for a day after a particularly nasty snowstorm, but there is a lot of beautiful winter weather to be enjoyed as well - and spring will surely come eventually.