Monday 11 November 2013

Thinking of snow

Seeing as we had the first snow of the year yesterday, it put me in mind to post some of the winter photos from Mum's slides. It wasn't much snow, and it melted as soon as it hit the ground, but it was a reminder of winter.

I remember huge snow falls and huge mounds of snow pushed up by the snow plow along the country roads when I was a child. I'm not sure if the size in my memory is really correct, but here is one of a mound pushed up by the plow in front of our house and one of Dad standing in front of another pile of snow.




This picture is backwards. It is hard to tell sometimes in the little scanner that I have! But the scanner is a lot better than holding the slides up to my monitor!

Our house was right on the "old road" which then became part of our property when the new road was built. The new road (Route 619) was a lot straighter, whereas the old road wound and wandered all over the place. The opinion from the oldtimers in the area was that it originally followed an old trail or cow path. When the Quebec government was changing road numbers (sometime in the late 70's I think - I was out west at the time) and putting up French road signs, they had a problem with one curve of road a couple of miles long just up the way from us. There were quite a few house and farms along the road, but there was no official name on record. In the area, it had always just been known as "the old road" and that is what the people living along it insisted it be called, so that is what is on the sign. Our piece of "old road" had just become part of the driveway. Dad kept it plowed in the winter. It is great because it was easy to turn a car so you could drive onto the road rather than try to back into the driveway, or back out. Although Rte. 619 is a secondary highway, it can be quite busy.



Dad seemed to like snow blowing. Never could quite understand that! He had a lot of it to do to keep the driveways in the shape he liked. I offered once to do some when I was home on a Christmas visit, but he politely declined, saying that I was there to visit. I think it was because he just felt it was one of the things he liked to do. Or because he didn't think I could keep the lines straight.

Between the "old road" and the road, was a wide, shallow ditch, which he mowed in the summers. In the above picture, he is "neatening up" the approach to the driveway, because the big road plows just went sailing past and filled in the driveway. 




Here, he is plowing out the access to the mailbox. On rural routes, if that is not done, you don't get your mail.

Whenever Dad had finished the snow blowing, he would look like a snowman from all the blow back.

The other winter activity Dad loved was watching the birds at the feeding stations outside of the kitchen windows. I remember one winter Mum wrote to me and told me that they had been visited by a flock of arctic sparrows, which they found very exciting. There were always the normal birds found in the winter, but depending on the conditions, the feeders were visited by other more rare birds. One winter quite recently that had especially high snow fall, Mum had a flock of wild turkeys on the property. They cleaned up whatever seed fell onto the ground from the bird feeders. Mum said that if she was at the window when they approached, she could not make a movement, because they would see her through the glass and take off. They are very shy.



In this picture the birds are Evening Grosbeaks, of the finch family. Quite a good sized bird, about Robin sized, but more chunky. The snow is quite deep here, probably a good three feet deep. Here is a link to a cool video of them, thanks to Wikipedia: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Hesperiphona_vespertina_CT2.ogv

I caught the birdwatching habit, though I didn't put up bird feeders until after I bought my house. Apartment dwelling doesn't lend itself to bird feeders. I don't get many of the bigger woodland birds, even though Fredericton has a lot of trees and I'm only 3 blocks from Odell Park. I have the odd sighting of non-city birds, but mostly I have several varieties of sparrows and finches - Gold Finches nest in my yard, red polls, robins, mourning doves, rock doves (pigeons), 3 or 4 types of sparrows, etc. Occasionally I'm visited by a lovely male downy woodpecker. He was digging a grub out of my deck railing a couple of weeks ago and I said, "Go Downy, go - get all the grubs!"  A few years ago, I had a young red tailed hawk catch a pigeon on my driveway. That was exciting!



Here is my little Downy, enjoying the sunflower seeds.







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