The thick snow and the frozen pond caused a near=total cessation of involvement at the pond edge – no ducks, no geese, no nutrias, no beavers. Just some grackles and blackbirds. We dropped some corn on the edges and across the ice a little, just in case, but even the trail that someone had blazed through the ice had refrozen completely over.
I witnessed a quick pass yesterday around midday, a lone duck doing a high-speed circuit over the pond and returning back down towards The Bayou, apparently checking to see if the ice had retreated yet – it confirmed my suspicions that they were keeping tabs on it and ready to return when they had access to the banks. But in the early evening, the wood ducks (Aix sponsa) apparently decided that they’d waited long enough, and descended on their feeding spot. Now, I still have the previous video clips that I’ve been working on far too slowly (lazily,) but these had to jump ahead of course.
The light was dropping and the batteries about to die, so I pulled them and the memory card out, and of course, that was when the two adult nutrias waddled all the way across the ice from the background trees, and then three white-tailed does came to visit as well. With all this, we waited until almost full darkness to go down and distribute more corn, eventually realizing that one of the juvie nutrias was watching us from the copse to the left of Duck Island, not making any move to come get corn. There were potentially two reasons for this reluctance: the first that the light was just enough that we could be seen as human shapes rather than, like usual, the blinding glare of the headlamps, and the second being that coming out would have meant scampering across the ice, as in, not in the water, and they felt far more exposed and unable to escape as readily.
Earlier today when I went down to check conditions on the edge and see how fast the ice was melting, another adult nutria that had been hidden down there left quite quickly, far earlier than we’ve even seen them do so; several times previously, we’ve drawn surprisingly close even in broad daylight, so my guess is that, knowing they have to cross 20 meters of open ice and not being the most adept runners, they err on the side of caution.
Just so you know, since I haven’t shot any pics of this, the snow remains only in small patches here and there – it took fours days rather than my predicted three, but that’s what snowstorms in NC are typically like. They might hit hard, but they vanish quickly, commonly under the onslaught of the sunlight that comes the following day. That’s the kind of winter I can cope with.