No Calm

Even the little bit of snow that coverd the forest yesterday afternoon when I took this photo is gone this morning. A bit of rain, fog and warmer temperatures combined to make it disappear. All that is left this morning are a few fist-sized patches of it scattered here and there.

Nature doesn't seem to like calm very much, though the saying says she abhors a vacuum. A day of calm weather is almost certainly to be followed by something more extreme or at least more active. Yesterday it was freezing rain. Today it is wind. Tomorrow? Well, the temperature will drop from the spring-like temperatures that greeted me this morning to a wintry 15 degrees by tonight.

The rain had a bit of good effect at the cabin, at least from my point of view. The driveway is largely clear of ice this morning and for the first time in weeks, navigating along it wasn't slippery. Although, in some ways, mud isn't much of an improvement, either.

This morning, for the first time since the December ice storm, I saw a red-breasted nuthatch at the feeders. Is it the same one, I wonder? It is certainly a female. It was only there a moment and then flitted away. Has it finally gone through its stash of seeds? Quite literally, it came to the feeders about 50 times a day from the moment it arrived to when it disappeared. I soon realized it was storing its seed somewhere and couldn't possibly be eating that much. The one little bird was nearly single-handedly responsible for my high bird seed bill in November and early December. Then the ice storm hit, and until this morning I'd not seen one again and feared it was a victim of the storm. Perhaps it was just living off the stored seed that it must have kept in a hole the size of a small silo. In any event, I am glad to see its return, if only briefly.