The Town of Ballston, where my mother lives, has been fairly lucky as far as snow this winter. They’ve gotten some, but haven’t really been hammered. As a result, it was a white Christmas, but only just, and the snow was getting a bit worn-looking. The storm that has been creating havoc in the eastern US for several days was expected to miss entirely, but by Christmas it was tracking close to the coast, and so we did get some after Christmas snow. It was a pretty decent nor’easter along the coast, but we just got outer snow bands, for a total of about 5-6″ overnight. The trees were all snow-covered, and the bare patches and dirty spots disappeared, making everything clean & bright and new when I went out to get the paper (Paper delivery! Something we don’t have in Barrow. We can’t even get paper sent to the stores, apparently. And the newspapers wonder why readership is declining…). It’s hard not to feel optimistic when one goes out after a snow storm is over. The winds weren’t too bad here, although we did get enough gusts to take much of the snow off the evergreens over the course of the day.
The other thing was that the snow covered many of the plants, so the seed eating birds were looking for something else, and found the seed bell we’d gotten them for Christmas. We had a pair of cardinals, juncos, a blue jay, and tufted titmice and chickadees. Only the latter two stuck around until I got my camera out.
As far as I could see, there were no deformed bills in the bunch, unlike the situation in Alaska, where they are becoming alarmingly frequent.
Out of Ice and Time 