Took the opportunity to walk across the lake while the water was hard to check a few things, along with my wood duck houses, two duck huts and two home made ones, hadn't been anything in them except wasps and one had a hornets nest hanging from the bottom of it,about 6" in diameter, I had them out at a reasonable time last spring but the wood ducks were already here as I seen some when I put the nest boxes out, also seen them afterwards but they never did utilize my boxes last year but maybe they will this yr. Ice is approx 4 to 5" thick, would be thicker I think but we have at least 5 inches of snow on top of it that kept it from getting thicker, if it had been clean with the cold weather we've had we would probably be looking at close to twice that thick. I did see an otter track in the mud headed into the pond a couple weeks ago before the mud was frozen. gotta keep my eyes open, see if I can relocate him after it thaws out. Appear to have brighter days ahead with as high as 50 in the 7 day forecast, we have not been above freezing temps in a while, might be close to ten days, with a good bit of that being around 0 and a lot of double digits negative wind chills so 50 is gonna feel like spring. We have had geese flying north for a couple weeks and there are tons of cowbirds, red winged black birds and grackles already here, usually they don,t show up for another month, I had hopes for an early spring but it hadnt been that way yet, although this stuff can melt away almost as fast as it shows up so we still have a shot at an early spring.
All the really good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.
