The scurs and the Weather Eye forecast little precipitation and that’s what we got. We also got cold temperatures. Are we due for a warm-up or destined to remain buried at the bottom of the freezer? Starting Wednesday, mostly sunny with highs in the low 20’s and lows in the mid-teens. Thursday, partly sunny with highs in the upper 20’s and lows in the upper teens. Partly sunny on Friday with highs in the upper 20’s and lows in the upper teens. Saturday, partly sunny with highs in the upper 20’s and lows in the upper teens. Partly sunny on Sunday with highs in the upper 30’s and lows in the mid-20’s. Monday, partly sunny with highs in the mid-30’s and lows in the low 20’s. Cloudy for Tuesday with a slight chance of snow. Highs in the low 30’s with lows in the low 20’s. A sneak peek at Christmas Day calls for partly sunny with highs in the mid-20’s with lows in the mid-single digits. We are down to 8 hours and 54 minutes of daylight on the 21st, the shortest day for daylight of the year. The normal high for December 21st is 24 and the normal low is 7. The normal high for Christmas Day is 24 and the normal low is 6. The scurs have another Christmas shopping season under their belts. The Human Fund has come in handy once again. Happy Festivus!
Since this is a shortened week, this may be a slightly abbreviated column. Maybe not. Next week, you’re in luck. Since there is no column, that one will really be abbreviated! I did, however, take the time to figure out about how many pages the past 17 years’ worth of columns has entailed. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200, roughly the same as the Bible. I would suggest, however, that reading the Bible is probably better for you and parts of it are probably a lot funnier.
Snowfall this past week wasn’t plentiful, but it was one of those weeks that snow accumulated without a lot of blowing. Across the countryside the snow amounted to around an inch after falling in several small doses. Not much reason to move it around the yard or plow it off the road, so it’s a light velvet blanket on the landscape. One best not become too complacent, however. I seem to recall buying a snow blower for the tractor last year and feeling smug when it didn’t snow much, until mid-January. Fifty-five inches of snow later, I was convinced the purchase hadn’t been made in vain.
One thing about the snow is that one can get a handle on what’s out traipsing around simply by looking at the tracks. I was thinking perhaps we’d thinned the bunny herd this last summer. That observation turned out to be erroneous once the snow fell. There are cottontail tracks everywhere. Fortunately there are also indications that great horned owls are in the area. While watching Gunsmoke one night I could hear an owl during one of the scenes set around a campfire. The sound effects sounded very authentic, I thought to myself. The odd thing was I kept hearing it when they cut away to a commercial and got back to a daytime scene. Opened the window a crack to listen. Sure enough, the owl had to be roosting in a tree nearby, hopefully waiting for a fat bunny to come along for supper.
The lambs born November 30th and December 8th continue to do well. Of course as soon as one writes about them, something bad seems to happen to one or more of them. Shortly after the column made print last week, the ewe decided to lay on one of the latest arrivals. Not unusual and it happens, especially when the ewes aren’t shorn down ahead of lambing. Such was not the case this time as these were largely unscheduled lambs. Since the other ewes are likely to lamb in a few months and the shearer is booked, that probably won’t happen. They are doing well and combining them into a group, complete with creep feeder, soon seems the logical course of action.
We should get a delivery of straw on Tuesday, so it will be nice to have some bedding to finish our barn cleaning endeavors for the year. Straw has become like gold. If you can find it, good small square bales of straw go for $4 - $6 a bale. You read that right. If you want decent small squares of good hay, expect to pay anywhere from $6 - $10+ a bale. Making dry hay this past year was next to impossible over a large area of the upper Midwest. That and no one wants to go to all the work of baling, unloading and stacking small squares. Say the words “bale hay” and you can make even the most annoying individuals suddenly disappear.
As the cover continues to develop on our property, the pheasants continue to appear over the course of the winter. Ruby was surprised the other morning to hear 8–10 of them take flight after they roosted overnight in the Scotch and Austrian pine. Numerous pheasants have wandered through the back yard as well, sneaking from spruce to spruce and eventually flying off into the CREP acreage. They’ve also been spotted in the windbreak under the arborvitae. There’s no need to feed them as the squirrels leave plenty of partially eaten kernels of corn behind after eating the germ.
The rest of our winter birds have been loyal about coming to the feeders. The branches of the smaller trees sag ubder the weight of the leghorn-sized blue jays. There are a half-dozen chickadees that keep their favorite feeder busy when not hitting the suet feeder. Lots of juncos clean up on the ground, although some use the thistle feeders on their own. A male cardinal appears from time to time and he is very wary. All the birds were cautious when a Cooper’s hawk set up shop in the yard this past Sunday. Bird activity around the yard came to a screeching halt aside from the round squirrel too busy stuffing its face to care. As fat as these squirrels have become, odds are the hawks would never be able to gain altitude even if they did catch one. A rocket booster might help. I know several bird feeders who would like to put their squirrels in orbit.
Merry Christmas to all and may 2020 be a far better year than 2019!
See you next (year)…real good then.