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The photo to the left is our rental house as of December 23, 2011. It hardly looks like a December shot. We had 3 inches of show in November but it has all melted and we haven't had anything larger than flurries. Last December we had 7 days below zero, this December we have only had one so far. People are fishing through the ice and a few are using 4 wheelers to pull their fish houses out onto the lake. Still we haven't had enough cold weather to call the ice safe for anything other than a person.
To the right is a photo from last December looking towards the house from the North. As you can see we had a good amount of snow.
We are ready for Winter. We are much better prepared than last year. We bought an extra cord of wood at the end of the season that has been sitting inside for months so it is really dry. We arranged to purchase a fairly large load of wood from one of our neighbors. It is supposed to by dry wood. It was split but in a small pieces as we prefer. So, in the last few days we have started to reduce the larger pieces to the small ones that fit well in the stove. By the time it is used it will have been drying out an additional 2 months or so. We also have a bit of older wood that we sitting outside our neighbors. We paid for it last year and move some of it, but we were only able to move the bulk of it this summer.
Winter is truly here. The migrating birds are gone. Our last Robin showed up on November 30th. Most of the birds are the same every day and the number we see is small. One highlight was the Norhthern Shrike which has shown up a few times this fall.
We saw the Trumpeter Swans on 10 different dates starting with October. This bird was once very rare. It is still far from a common bird. I had never seen them in NJ. We also saw the more common Tundra Swan.
Below is a photo of a female Rusy Blackbird. I had only seen it once before and I am not so sure I identified it correctly then. This photo is unambiguous. The early fall was busy and exciting. The later fall birding was slow. The beginning of Winter has been very slow. We can get all of our bird observations before 11am.
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