Cold Necks are Us

“Dress warm,” he said, not willing to go out again himself just yet after an hour or more spent looking after cattle.
I did. Ski pants, tuque, gloves, scarf, flipped-up collar of a lined corduroy jacket.
And was glad. Icicle wind was blowing in from the east. It would’ve been a much shorter walk had I not gone prepared.
It felt like snow was coming.
It hasn’t … yet.

** 

In spite of thinking of myself as definitely not a scarf-wearing woman, I keep buying them (usually for $2 at the MDSI secondhand store on mainstreet Wadena, sometimes at garage sales, occasionally a gift, or a hand-me-down from Joan) because they keep my pencil-neck warm and some of them are beautiful. This is the one that came home with me last week; my photo doesn’t do it justice. Scarves! Their ends are often in the way — but they do the trick.

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For the past four days there has been a lone redwinged blackbird, a male, perched high in a tree behind the house. I’ve heard it trill only once. Is it a scout, waiting to be joined by its flock? Is it calling to a potential mate? I try not to worry, but considering how we have managed to decimate the bird population around the world … and it doesn’t only happen somewhere else … there is always a possibility that we won’t have the usual numbers around our dugout. That would be a real loss, to me.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Red-winged_Blackbird/sounds

This video and the files beneath it don’t really have the bicycle-bell sound as much as we’re accustomed to.

Farmbeau would like to see the dugout filled in. A costly undertaking; a fact that I hope keeps him from insisting on it.  This yard would lose its main attraction for me. The waterfowl wouldn’t spend spring and part of summer so close to us. We wouldn’t step out our door into a jungle of bird calls.

It probably bores you when I go on about birds during these seasons, but it can’t be helped: their presence makes me happy.

Today I heard my first snipe of the year; these do their hunting all around our house but from so high up that often they aren’t seen, but only heard. The sound is the air flowing through their wings as they dive, picking up insects. Something like that. I think ours are common snipes, but the Wilson’s snipe file sounds more like what we hear than the common snipe recording does:

https://ebird.org/species/wilsni1

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Two days ago this is how much snow was left a quarter-mile north of our driveway. Now there’s even less. It’s been going fast. Some local roads are washed out or flooded. A friend who works for the Highways department spent a night — from 11pm to 8 am — flagging drivers down to make sure they were aware the pavement was down to one lane.