I suppose the lesson here is that I shouldn’t complain about nuisance snowfalls. Three days after my post, the flakes began to fly. Within 72 hours we’d “welcomed” 18 inches of fresh snow.
It came in waves so we were able to stay ahead of it for awhile, but that grand finale blizzard the other night was something else. I’ve never heard the winds howl that loudly in winter before. I thought for sure we would lose power, but the lights stayed on and our house remained toasty-warm. I probably would have slept pretty soundly except that the NOAA weather radio siren shrieked at both 12:30 and 1:30 a.m., alerting us of a Civil Defense Warning. After alert number two, I yanked the cord from the wall and flipped the unit upside down to remove the back-up batteries. There was a greater chance of me dying from a heart attack than the raging blizzard outside.
The next morning this was the view out my bay window:
The birds needed a little assistance:
They waited patiently in the nearby bushes while I cleaned off the feeders and chopped through 4-foot snow drifts to clear a space for the ground-feeding birds. I was just glad to see that the birds were still alive and kicking. At dusk the night before, I literally watched a junco get blown off the feeder in a 40 mph wind gust. A veritable “snownado” snatched him into the air flipping and twisting. After it passed I looked for a tiny body on top of the snow, but I didn’t see one so he must have righted himself and escaped.
After shoveling out the birds, it was time to shovel out the driveway.
Spring can’t come soon enough.