Better? :rotflmao:
• Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do...
• The scurs and the Weather Eye forecast little precipitation and that’s what we got.
• We also got cold temperatures. Are we due for a warm up or destined to remain buried at the bottom of the freezer?
• Starting Wednesday, mostly sunny with highs in the low 20’s and lows in the mid-teens.
• Thursday partly sunny with highs in the upper 20’s and lows in the upper teens.
• Partly sunny on Friday with highs in the upper 20’s and lows in the upper teens.
• Saturday, partly sunny with highs in the upper 20’s and lows in the upper teens.
• Partly sunny on Sunday with highs in the upper 30’s and lows in the mid-20’s.
• Monday, partly sunny with highs in the mid-30’s and lows in the low 20’s.
• Cloudy for Tuesday with a slight chance of snow.
• Highs in the low 30’s with lows in the low 20’s.
• A sneak peek at Christmas Day calls for partly sunny with highs in the mid-20’s with lows in the mid-single digits.
• We are down to 8 hours and 54 minutes of daylight on the 21st, the shortest day for daylight of the year.
• The normal high for December 21st is 24 and the normal low is 7.
• The normal high for Christmas Day is 24 and the normal low is 6.
• The scurs have another Christmas shopping season under their belts.
• The Human Fund has come in handy once again.
• Happy Festivus!
• Since this is a shortened week this may be a slightly abbreviated column.
• Maybe not.
• Next week, you’re in luck.
• Since there is no column that one will really be abbreviated!
• I did however take the time to figure out about how many pages the past 17 years’ worth of columns has entailed.
• It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200, roughly the same as the Bible.
• I would suggest however that reading the Bible is probably better for you and parts of it are probably a lot funnier.
• Snowfall this past week wasn’t plentiful but it was one of those weeks that snow accumulated without a lot of
blowing.
• Across the countryside the snow amounted to around an inch after falling in several small doses.
• Not much reason to move it around the yard or plow it off the road so it’s a light velvet blanket on the landscape.
• One best not become too complacent however.
• I seem to recall buying a snow blower for the tractor last year and feeling smug when it didn’t snow much, until mid-
January.
• 55” of snow later I was convinced the purchase hadn’t been made in vain.
• One thing about the snow is that one can get a handle on what’s out traipsing around simply by looking at the tracks.
• I was thinking perhaps we’d thinned the bunny herd this last summer.
• That observation turned out to be erroneous once the snow fell.
• There are cottontail tracks everywhere. Fortunately there are also indications that great horned owls are in the area.
• While watching Gunsmoke one night I could hear an owl during one of the scenes set around a campfire.
• The sound effects sounded very authentic I thought to myself.
• The odd thing was I kept hearing it when they cut away to a commercial and got back to a daytime scene.
• Opened the window a crack to listen.
• Sure enough, the owl had to be roosting in a tree nearby, hopefully waiting for a fat bunny to come along for supper.
• The lambs born November 30th and December 8th continue to do well.
• Of course as soon as one writes about them, something bad seems to happen to one or more of them.
• Shortly after the column made print last week the ewe decided to lay on one of the latest arrivals.
• Not unusual and it happens, especially when the ewes aren’t shorn down ahead of lambing.
• Such was not the case this time as these were largely unscheduled lambs.
• Since the other ewes are likely to lambs in a few months and the shearer is booked that probably won’t happen.
• They are doing well and combining them into a group complete with creep feeder soon seems the logical course of
action.
• We should get a delivery of straw on Tuesday so it will be nice to have some bedding to finish our barn cleaning
endeavors for the year.
• Straw has become like gold. If you can find it, good small square bales of straw go for $4 - $6 a bale.
• You read that right.
• If you want decent small squares of good hay, expect to pay anywhere from $6 - $10+ a bale.
• Making dry hay this past year was next to impossible over a large area of the upper Midwest.
• That and no one wants to go to all the work of baling, unloading and stacking small squares.
• Say the words “bale hay” and you can make even the most annoying individuals suddenly disappear.
• As the cover continues to develop on our property the pheasants continue to appear over the course of the winter.
• Ruby was surprised the other morning to hear 8 – 10 of them take flight after they roosted overnight in the Scotch
and Austrian pine.
• Numerous pheasants have wandered through the back yard as well, sneaking from spruce to spruce and eventually
flying off into the CREP acreage.
• They’ve also been spotted in the windbreak under the arborvitae.
• There’s no need to feed them as the squirrels leave plenty of partially eaten kernels of corn behind after eating the
germ.
• The rest of our winter birds have been loyal about coming to the feeders.
• The branches of the smaller trees sag under the weight of the leghorn-sized blue jays.
• There are half-dozen chickadees that keep their favorite feeder busy when not hitting the suet feeder.
• Lots of juncos clean up on the ground although some use the thistle feeders on their own.
• A male cardinal appears from time to time and he is very wary.
• All the birds were cautious when a Cooper’s hawk set up shop in the yard this past Sunday.
• Bird activity around the yard came to a screeching halt aside from the round squirrel too busy stuffing its face to
care.
• As fat as these squirrels have become odds are the hawk would never be able to gain altitude even if they did catch
one.
• A rocket booster might help.
• I know several bird feeders who would like to put their squirrels in orbit.
• Merry Christmas to all and may 2020 be a far better year than 2019!
• See you next week…real good then.