After the past week, the scurs and Weather Eye are thinking the warm winter we had going is a faded memory. Will Old Man Winter tighten his chokehold or will Mother Nature throw him into the turnbuckle? Starting Wednesday, mostly cloudy with highs around 10 above with lows around zero. Thursday, partly sunny with highs around 10 above and lows around -5. Mostly sunny Friday with highs around 10 above and lows around 5 below. Saturday, mostly sunny with a slight chance of evening snow. Highs around 20 with lows around 10 above. Partly sunny on Sunday with a slight chance of snow. Highs in the upper 20’s with lows around 15 above. Monday, mostly sunny with highs in the low 30’s and lows in the mid-20’s. Partly sunny for Tuesday with highs in the mid-30’s and lows in the mid-20’s. We’ll see the sun rise at 7 a.m. CST on the 23rd. The normal high for February 23rd is 30 and the normal low is 13. The scurs scored lots of Valentine’s Day goodies just in the nick of time. The good news: It blunted the effects of this past week’s cold. The bad news: It burned up a lot of it. April 4th can’t happen soon enough.
The major topic of interest this past week was the weather, whether you were dealing with it personally or trying to avoid dealing with it altogether. It was a lengthy stretch, one that would’ve made most Januaries proud. In ag related issues, it’s just a hassle when dealing with livestock, whether it’s frozen pipes, augers, tractors, you name it. On the crop side there’s more curiosity about what this cold snap may do to insect pest populations. Unfortunately, on the local level, probably not much.
Western corn rootworm eggs need to be exposed to soil temperatures in the 14-degree range in order to blunt their numbers much. At the SROC, as of this writing anyway, the lowest soil temperature at the 2” depth has been 26 and 28 at 4”. Northern corn rootworm eggs just laugh at temperatures such as that. Snow cover is a factor as well. The 8” – 10” blanket of snow should help keep those soil temperatures from getting too much colder. The cold has had an effect on the frost depth, measured at 14” on the 15th, down from 9” on the 8th. Let’s hope this is as deep as it goes, so we can start thinking about something other than staying warm.
Soybean aphid mortality is also being talked about. It is unlikely in the local area that the cold snap will have much impact on overwintering eggs on buckthorn. Air temperatures need to reach -29 before it really takes a toll. Even then, some of the buckthorn branches are likely buried in the snow and insulated from the cold. Coupled with their being deposited as pregnant females bearing live young during the growing season, one learns quickly not to rely totally on Mother Nature for help. The fact they produce winged adults that are carried by the wind helps them infest areas where they may have seen some temporary population reductions. Local overwintering success becomes a moot point. Fortunately, it appears the beneficial insect population has responded positively over the past several years, making soybean aphids less formidable than they were when first introduced.
Still battling our way through the cold snap in the lambing barn. Over halfway done, but it has been a struggle. There are three bottle lambs in the house as of Monday. Chores have become a major workout morning and night. A lot of bales, pails and feed pans going to individual pens. What was taking about a half hour now takes over an hour per session, if nothing goes wrong. A logjam has been created as it’s been too cold to move very many down to the loafing area just yet. The ewes are not shorn yet either, which has created more headaches with promises of more to come if we don’t get it done soon. Right now the ewes are content to lounge around outside in the sub-zero temperatures as long as there’s little wind. They also decide to lamb outside sometimes, which in -20 degree weather creates even more issues.
Getting the shearer lined up isn’t as easy as it was when we were growing up. It was a set date, Lincoln’s Birthday and usually there were plenty of shearers available should one cancel. The temperature didn’t matter much. Can even recall shearing with a Knipco heater running in the barn. Today there are far fewer shearers and even fewer of them that do the kind of professional job we’ve become accustomed to over the years. This year with the cold weather, a lot of producers cancelled their scheduled appointments, so there’s a huge backlog to overcome. Oh, it’ll get done eventually, but we’ll likely have only a handful of ewes that haven’t lambed already to shear. We’ve often said, when Bob decides to quit shearing, that’s when we’ll be done with the sheep. I wonder how much of a bribe it would take?
There was a little time Saturday to refill the birdfeeders after being preoccupied in the barns. The nearly 10 lbs. of suet I’d bought was nearly gone as I put the last of it in the feeders. The woodpeckers especially appreciate it in the cold. The rest of the feeders were also replenished, including the ear corn for the squirrels and jays. I’d brought a partial bag of old birdseed from Mom’s that was no telling how old. I scattered it on the ground between the feeders, fairly sure the juncos would find it. They did, along with the jays and chickadees that helped themselves in particular to the sunflower seed it contained.
The next morning a rooster pheasant was scratching around in it under the feeders outside the living room window. He was very wary and likely the same one we’ve seen from time to time. Beautiful big rooster with a long tail. He evidently can see in the window fairly well as, in earlier sessions, one quick move towards the window to get a photo and he was gone. This time I was able to shuffle slowly enough, so as not to spook him, and got some nice pictures of him doing pheasant things. It won’t be long and they’ll be setting up breeding territories. He seems to be comfortable hanging around the yard, so hopefully, he’ll stick around. Few game birds are pettier than a rooster pheasant in full breeding plumage. The way they strut around the yard for their harems, pretty sure they’d agree.
See you next week…real good then.