Thursday morning the snow started to taper off mid-morning, and stopped before noon. The official snowfall total for Northfield was 15.1 inches over this three-day storm. That’s a lot of snow, but not a record. Now, this morning, it’s cold out there…below zero temperatures!
Thankfully we have a snow blower. With Gary behind the snow blower and me using shovels to clear out the front porch and short walkway, we make a good team, but he does the brunt of the work shoveling out.
We are also responsible to clear the public sidewalk along the east side of our house…Gary uses the snowblower for that.
It wasn’t too cold when we went out to clear snow. It went quickly. Then we wait until the snowplow comes along to plow the street and pushes a huge mound of snow back into our driveway. Gary goes out once again to plow it out…and the sidewalk entrance too. And so it goes.
The birdfeeders suctioned to our windows were full of snow. I saw a chickadee pecking through the snow to find seeds. I “spooned” out the snow and added fresh seed in the feeders.
The first day of the snowstorm we were on country roads driving home. It had been snowing for awhile and the wind was blowing across the fields making it low visibility and white-out conditions over the fields. At that time, it was just beginning to snow…I can only imagine what it is like out on open roads with much snow and wind.
It looks so innocent and serene looking out our windows.
After the Japanese beetles ate many leaves off our birch we could now see a huge squirrel’s nest in the treetop. It looked like a two story unit so we called it the “squirrel condo” – however we didn’t see any evidence of squirrels hanging around.
Gary has been trapping squirrels all summer. We’ve brought fourteen squirrels to what we call the “squirrel resort” – an area twelve miles from our house. The “resort” has a lot of mature trees, a meadow and a pond…everything squirrels need to rebuild their lives away from our birdfeeders!
Even though we didn’t see any signs of activity in the nest we decided to take it down. We recruited friends to help. Gary climbed up his highest extension ladder and used a twenty-foot tree trimmer extension pole to reach the nest.
He knocked the nest and much to our surprise, two little ears and a head popped up, then three squirrels scurried away from the nest. I didn’t see where the mama went (maybe she jumped to the evergreen nearby) but I was startled as one juvenile squirrel jumped to the ground and ran close to my feet! The third squirrel, a sibling, clung to a tree branch. He looked scared and confused.
Gary began swatting to loosen the nest… the lower portion first. It disengaged but got caught in the tree branches. We managed to whack it out. Next Gary went after the larger section of the nest and knocked it out of the tree right away. It fell to the ground. No traces of the condo remained. The timid squirrel kept clinging to a branch watching our every move.
The other two squirrels must have been nearby because soon we saw the younger squirrel go back up the tree to help his brother (or sister) while the mama squirrel waited at the bottom of the tree trunk.
Eventually the two siblings came down but only the brave one ventured away from the tree. The other squirrel climbed back up.
We continued watching as the mother squirrel led her brave, young one across the street. In the middle of the road he stopped so she picked him up by the neck and carried him the rest of the way, like a mama cat and her kitten. Once safely on the other side they both scampered through the neighbor’s front yard into the back.
We kept an eye out for mama to return for her other young’un but we never did see her. Later that day we sought out the third squirrel but couldn’t see it in the tree. She must have come back while we were not watching and showed her offspring the way to their new surroundings.
It was entertaining to watch this all unfold…and no squirrels were injured during this process.
Trapping squirrels, knocking out squirrel nests…I wonder what other squirrel adventures we’ll have?
One of the sure signs of spring is opening the door and hearing the beautiful chorus of birds singing. It is truly an wonderful sound. And these days I’m excited to see cardinals back in our yard. Over the winter the birds that normally dined at our feeders had to go elsewhere to find food.
We use safflowers seeds in the bird feeder that hangs on a pole near trees in our yard. We spend a little more money to buy nutritious, white seeds for our feeder because squirrels do not like them, so the squirrels do not disturb the various birds that come to the feeder. This plan worked for many, many years.
But, for some reason, several squirrels relocated to our yard this year and built large nests in our trees near the feeder. I’m not sure why, but this year the squirrels acquired a taste for the safflower seeds and they were attacking our birdfeeder and scaring the birds away and devouring all the safflower seeds. So much so that I stopped filling the feeder. It was hard for me to stop filling the feeder, but the seed is fairly expensive and I didn’t want to use it to feed the squirrels.
We have another feeder that is suctioned to our sunroom window and we fill it with black sunflower seeds. The squirrels cannot not get to that feeder but it fell down during the frigid, freezing temperature spell this winter so we tucked it away in the garage.
With no seeds in the pole feeder and no seeds in the window feeder this winter, few birds came to our yard and we missed them.
I have now re-attached the window feeder and filled it with black sunflower seeds. We put a small amount of safflower seeds in the pole feeder. So far the squirrels have stayed away…hopefully they are retrieving all the nuts they buried last fall and will leave the birds and our bird feeder alone.
I’m thrilled to see all the birds, especially the cardinals, back in our yard. I’m glad they remembered we offer food here at this location and they returned to give us another try.