The tremendous winter storm that we’ve been getting warnings about – indeed, the entire southeastern US – rolled in mostly overnight, and dropped about 20-25cm in our area. North Carolina isn’t a state that typically copes with such things and doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to handle it – mostly, the snowplows and salting trucks – and so most things shut down when storms like this happen. Nature photographers, however, are on the job as always [breathes on nails to buff them, watches a fog of ice form, gets a bit more humble…]
I went out late last night to do a few night exposure pics while it was coming down thickly, with ‘okay’ results, but not quite what I was after. if you’re using strictly ambient light, mostly streelights bounced from the overcast and then again from the snow on the ground, the exposure goes far too long to show any flakes actually falling, so I was augmenting with a single flash burst, which produced this:
That might have been an adequate amount of light by itself, at least for the immediate surroundings (dropping off into darkness in the middle distance,) but the snow in the air definitely overwhelmed things, and yes, this was a single burst in the milliseconds duration. So I tried again, this time angling the flash upwards by maybe 30°:
That’s a bit better, concentrating the illuminated flakes towards the upper portion of the frame against the darker trees and sky. I was going to try for a few more, but as I was experimenting with shots of the back of the house, the camera batteries died about the same time that I realized my gloves were wholly inadequate for the conditions and I was tempting frostbite. I could have swapped batteries and gone back out with other gloves, but the fingers needed to warm up to operating temperature first, otherwise the gloves would simply keep them at dangerously cold levels. So I just went out some time later to do a couple of ‘only flash’ shots, like the weathervane.
Plenty of snow in that frame, and you can see that the fading light from the flash allowed the snow to ‘smear’ a bit. It wasn’t gusting, just faintly breezy, but when I’d come back in from the first session (a mere 12 minutes according to the image timestamps,) my coat, hat, and headlamp all had a distinct blanket of snow on them, as did the towel covering the camera.
Daylight this morning was good enough to illustrate, though, and it had finally stopped snowing by then.
In comparison to yesterday’s images, now the pond has completely frozen over, with a heavy blanket of snow over everything. I will say it was fluffy, dry snow due to the temperatures, but I’d still hate to shovel it, and with the faintest luck we won’t have to at all – we’re not going anywhere, and the sun is already breaking through, the best thing about nearly all NC snowstorms.
However, someone wasn’t happy to stay home, and forged their way around to the feeding apron with no small amount of effort.
The trees coming out of the pond just right of center are Duck Island, and the path broken exuberantly through the ice is still relatively fresh, not completely refrozen, so I’m going to say it was early morning. This was not ducks or geese, instead either the beavers or the nutrias, leaning towards the former, but only just. I’m sorry I wasn’t out there to hear this at least, because it probably was no small racket – I’ve heard them breaking much thinner ice than this.
The chances are, they were actually finding something to eat with this, since The Girlfriend had distributed corn late yesterday afternoon even while it was beginning to snow, and the ducks certainly hadn’t made much of a dent in it by nightfall. While the corn that was distributed on the banks is well hidden, plenty of it was spread in the water too, before the surface had frozen, and so awaited anyone’s attention in the shallows. You can also see a small scattering of it to the far right from this morning. It’s funny how the snow makes the bank look steep and distinct – it’s anything but, just sloping gently into the water, and it’s only the fact that the snow was melting into the water for a while as it piled up on land that produced this effect.
Definitely not considering the ice much of a discouragement, you have to admit. And now, looking at that path, I’m changing my mind towards favoring the nutrias as the culprits, since the beavers don’t seem to use Duck Island much but the nutrias always do.
More items of opportunity.
The Puddle, naturally, was frozen over, and here a Carolina wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus) and dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis,) both fluffed up against the cold, check it out hopefully in case any plants had dropped seeds conveniently onto the surface. The small birds are very active out there and raiding the feeders exuberantly.
The wood duck nest box awaits its occupancy in a month or two. We did see two pairs swimming around right alongside it a few days back, but no one flew up to check it out while we watched. I need to get a camera on this, too, so I know when it’s in regular use; even staking it out like I did last year is hit-or-miss, mostly miss. A camera in it would be ideal, but hard to work out, since it sits a solid 50 meters from anything, much longer if I tried to run wires to it (around the perimeter of the pond) for either power or image transmission, and outside the range of the wifi. Even reaching it to swap out a memory card is tricky, so this is a project that is not likely to happen.
The old Japanese maple in the backyard collected a nice load of snow upon its bare branches, aided by the last flimsy leaves still clutching the ends. The snow really did stack up as if carefully balanced.
Between the wind gusts and the sun now blazing down, this will be gone pretty quickly – this is why I make it a point to get out early to get pics before the conditions change too much.
And a pair of comparison images, the first from three weeks ago:
This is a fountainhead removed from The Puddle, awaiting my efforts to clean it up and decide what to do with it. It was still sitting in the same position when the snows arrived:
Tried to do the same angle and perspective, but I might not be quite exact here. It’s a good before/after illustration, though.
So yeah, nice little winter storm, impressive but not debilitating, and we don’t expect it to remain very long at all. I wouldn’t mind getting down to the waterfront to see what that looks like, but it’s unlikely the roads in our little development will be plowed anytime soon, if at all, so I’m setting that goal aside.
But I still have to get back to video editing…