It’s the Mallards – again

They showed up a few days ago.  On the heels of the receding pond ice.  Wonder if they’re the same pair that visited last spring?  Or the spring before that?  After a week or so, she disappears.  Then sometime later, don’t remember how long, the drake follows.  The pics below, taken today, show the drake in the pond, with the female (dame?) standing on the end of the dock.  In one pic, there’s even a shot of a drake on the back deck.  Click a pic to slide through em.

Spring Snow and Mud

Spring … the promise of summer, encased in mud and snow.  Some pics of the pond (and mud, and snow, and ice).  The animal tracks made on the snow that had covered the ice that covered the pond for the last two months … well, during the last couple warm days, that snow merged into the melting ice, and then refroze last night and today, into a rather intriguing pattern made all out of pond ice.

Close up of the raised frozen animal tracks.
Close up of the raised frozen animal tracks.

And a gallery of pics, showing all – click and see …

Pond Ice Starting to Give

The deer would break the ice just about every night, at the warmer edges of the pond (in front of the chairs in the pics).  And then the deer, and various other animals, would converge on those areas for water, during those many frozen winter days this winter.  You can see the tracks in these pics.  (no human tracks in the pics – as I could not traverse the yard this winter, due to injury)

And in the middle picture, the rotting ice is readily noticeable in the back center of the pond.  40 degrees today.

Something sad to think about – our outdoor cats also worked at breaking the ice in their water bowls, with their little soft paws.  And break the ice they did – till it got too damn cold, and the water froze up, all in disarray, from the kitty paws that kept working the ice till the very end – all froze up hard and lumpy.  (But we put out several bowls of hot water for them each day.)

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Author tgreen Category Nature