Good morning everyone! Just help yourself to some coffee, sit back and relax for a few minutes. It’s a cloudy day again with a temp of -7C (19F), with just a minor bit of snow and some freezing rain coming tonight. Then the cold weather returns tomorrow and it looks like the cold will remain with us longer this time around. But it is still winter, must expect these things. Since it was nice yesterday I decided to walk down to the river if I could. We have had about 8 inches (20cm) of snow since my last walk which was before our last bout of cold weather.

But someone had gone over most of the path with a snowmobile so that helped things a bit. But the snow was still soft which made walking a bit harder. There’s no solid grip when the snow moves around, so a person definitely gets more exercise. But it did make it a bit hard coming back up those two big hills. Going down was no problem, I just kind of went sliding down, especially the one hill where the snowmobile never goes. And there hadn’t been much foot traffic on that part of the path either. At one point I slid off the path and into snow that was 23 inches (about 57cm) deep.

It was a very quiet walk going to the river, not a sound of any kind, except me. No birds. I did meet my 3 friendly deer at one point, they were nice enough to move off the path for me. I was glad, the snow was deep there, and the path was too narrow for us to pass each other. When I was almost down at the river I could see there was still open water, which was a surprise. I thought for sure it would be mostly frozen along there. It wasn’t much different than the last time I was there.

And once by the river I heard the familiar whistle of the goldeneye ducks. Finally some bird life. I started counting them which was hard to do since they kept diving underwater. But there was between 55 and 65 of them anyway. That was the most I have seen down there. Unfortunately they were not on my side of the river so I couldn’t get any really good pictures of them. I did take a few pics anyway. It was heavy cloud when I was down there so not the best time for pictures of the ducks, or even for scenery pics. The sun did start to shine a bit by the time I was half way back home. There was also a flock of chickadees and nuthatches along the way. I wonder if they come around to my feeder? It wouldn’t be a long flight for them. Well, I hope you all have a wonderful day and God bless!

Steve and Muffin.

©2021 Steve McLeod.