Happy Holidays 2008

A White Christmas!

This is going out the sliding glass door looking out the back of our property.


The patio furniture. The snow is two inches above the arm rests on the chairs.


The raccoons finally came out last night. I haven't seen them for about five days.


The latest measurement - 18 inches! This is the most snow we've ever had up here!


This beautiful three-point buck dropped by for a nibble this morning.

The owl came back tonight!

I've been watching for this little guy since the other night when I first saw him. Tonight we came in from the snow and there he was sitting on one of the bird feeders. I was so happy to see him, but I needed to cook dinner and when I came back from doing the dinner dishes, he was still out there!

Snow update - Sunday, December 21, 2008

Black Capped Chickadee Prints

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

These are not the most interesting photos, but they do show the progression of our first major snowfall of the year up until about 2 p.m. today. At last measure we had about 8 inches. It's snowing again now, but it's too dark for making images and it's getting pretty cold as the meteorologist predicted. We're supposed get down to16 degrees tonight.

(Graphic courtesy of king5.com)

A new visitor tonight...

I was working in my office tonight and I must admit, I have this knack for knowing when something in my yard shouldn't be there. It can be almost completely dark, but if one shadow is out of place, or something shouldn't be out there, I can tell. (OK, not fair, I was asleep when the bear came to visit...)

Well, I looked up at what we call "the bird condo" that Paul built a few years back and I saw something up there, but it was so dark I couldn't make it out. Paul was in the living room with his headset on listening to music on his computer, so I im'd him to "Drop whatever you're doing and come in here quickly and quietly."

Paul came in and I had my flashlight on it, but neither Paul, or I couldn't tell what it was as it's head was turned away from us and then I asked Paul to grab the granddaddy of flashlights while I grabbed my camera.

It wasn't until I was looking through a 200mm lens, I saw what it was--An owl! This was exciting, because we've seen a lot of different birds and wildlife in our yard (just last night we saw a five point buck saunter past my office window about midnight,) but we've never seen an owl on our property.