After a winter of grousing about winter (ours hasn’t been much worse than many parts of the country) we awoke to this … zero degrees, everything covered in soft fluffy down like snow, the clear, still air literally sparkling as moisture condensed and formed snow which didn’t fall, but just floated.

We get maybe one of these mornings a year, usually in late January or early February. You just stand there in the silence and marvel at them.

During the snow yesterday, about a foot of it, the wind howled into huge drifts around the gallery. This one’s nearly 5 feet deep.

Birds, especially pheasants, have really taken a hit this year because of the snow and cold. The songbirds often travel further south, but the pheasant are stuck. Early snow kept them out of their cattail cover and deep snow finally knocked out most of their food sources. On our west fence row we used to see 40 to 0 every morning. Now we see just a few stragglers.

and a week ago, we almost thought we were to have an early spring. Oops.