A mini-blizzard descended upon Madison on Monday night. It only lasted a couple of hours, but boy was it wicked. My husband and I drove back and forth to a meeting in the storm. On the way to the meeting we couldn’t see more than a few hundred feet ahead of us because the snow was coming down in sheets and was being buffeted by wind gusts up to 40 mph.
On the way home 2 hours later the situation wasn’t much better. It was still snowing—a little more calmly—but the city decided to wait to send out the plows so the streets had about 4 or 5 inches of freshly-fallen snow on them. Some people were just giving up and abandoning their vehicles in the middle of the street!
Some birds are already in the midst of their spring migration, and I assume many were caught off-guard by the storm. The next morning my platform feeders came under attack by unsavory members of the blackbird family. Red-winged Blackbirds, Common Grackles and European Starlings arrived in droves.
These birds are cousins, but they don’t know how to get along. They would land and immediately start fighting and jockeying for positions. Then they’d gobble a few bits of food, fight some more and fly away in a whooooosh! Then another group would descend.
This went on for a couple of hours. Usually when I see blackbirds, I jump out of my chair and run to the window to shoo away the little piglets, but their behavior was quite entertaining.
Or maybe cabin fever has severely lowered my entertainment standards.
