Winter is all around us but at least we have enough snow for most folks to enjoy skiing or snowmobiling. I don’t think you could have gotten another snowmobile trailer in Old Forge over the weekend from what I saw on Saturday night.
I hope they all had fun enjoying the snow. The couple inches sure helped the situation but that was just about worn out by Sunday night.
It made for good hare hunting on both Saturday and Sunday. Jason Harter came up on Sunday with his dog Buster.
The dog is just learning that hares can jump six or seven feet, unlike the cottontails he’s accustomed to chasing that jump only a couple feet. But Buster did well.
I shot the first hare in front of him. Then he ran the rest of the day, and neither Jason nor I saw another hare.
There was plenty of music—which is what I like to hear—and Buster has a great voice.
He took one hare over the ridge and right out of hearing range but came back in a few minutes.
Jason tracked Buster with a GPS unit and said the dog ran over ten miles during the day.
He wasn’t ready to quit but the green patch we were in was so tracked up it was hard to tell which hare went where.
With all the cold weather this season many lakes that haven’t frozen up for years froze this winter, including Lake Erie.
Some of the water birds that normally remained on these lakes had to fly out.
And some—like earlier in the season—came down before making it to open water again.
Nina Schoch, a loon rehabilitation expert, picked up a couple of these birds.
One was a red-throated loon that came down at Van Hoeven-berg Ski Center.
That bird was caught and taken to the open waters of Lake Champlain for release.
Another bird, a Horned Grebe, came down at the Lake Placid Airport. Nina kept that one in her bathtub overnight and released the next day in the Mohawk River down near Albany.
While in the tub she fed it some minnows which it gobbled down as quickly as they were tossed in the water, she said.
Ellie George took some photos of the in-tub feeding frenzy after bringing some of her ice fishing minnows for the bird to eat.
The cold weather broke just in time for the ice harvesting at Raquette Lake. The ice was great and about 18-inches thick, making each block weigh about 300 pounds.
There were a lot of volunteers cutting the ice into blocks and moving them around into the channel up to the conveyor onto a dump truck.
Then they slid down a shoot into the cellar where they were stacked for use during the summer for air conditioning at Raquette Lake Supply Company.
There were hundreds of visitors and lots of helpers enjoying the day. The power went out about noon which put a stop to the operation.
I’m sure it got going again after lunch as they still had another pond of ice to harvest.
The Great Backyard Bird Count starts today and goes through Monday. You can count the birds at your feeder or take a walk in the woods and record the birds you see there.
If you go to the GBBC’s online website you can get instructions on how to report the birds you saw. If you don’t have a computer give me a call and I will send in your bird tally.
Many birds have flocked to the feeders with all the cold weather so record them and send in a count.
You may have a rare bird or just a plain old black-capped chickadee, but they all count.
Chasing more snowy owls, but that’s another story. See ya.