With the string of cold nights, the water in my pond is already “stiff” and the fallen leaves are frozen into the ice. And with a predicted low of 3 degrees tonight, it doesn’t appear the leaves will become free in the next few days and may be trapped until spring.
Pond is Stiff
The sunny and warm day helped to melt most of the recent snow and the water surrounded the old willow tree again but not quite as bad as the first main snow melt.
Old Willow Tree
The freezing temperatures overnight caused an ice layer to almost cover all of my pond. There was a small patch of open water in which I spotted a pair of Wood Ducks and Hooded Mergansers floating close together. They probably needed the bigger body mallards to break up the ice, but at least by noon, they had this bigger patch of water. At least the ice wasn’t as thick or damaging as the iceberg that the Titanic hit 107 years ago on April 14 and sank less than 3 hours later.
Freezing Over Again
After two days of rain and fog, I definitely need to find some ice skates as my icy driveway has been polished to a slippery mess. It may be a while before the ice melts and the gravel reappears.
Icy Driveway
The sun peeked out in between snow showers but the wind whipped the snow around to make it seem like it was snowing longer and there was even some like cyclones of snow spinning up into the air. On an icy day, like this photo, the snow couldn’t blow around with the ice layer holding it down.
Icy Snow
My pond refroze since the colder weather has returned but the water created unique inkblot like patterns across the surface of the pond.
Ice Spots
Winter was trying to take a nibble out of autumn with a few snowflakes in the sky as the temperature dropped to freezing this morning.
Bite of Winter
The red-winged blackbirds have been very vocal and they are probably complaining that the pond is still covered in ice where they often build their nests among the cattails. But with nights below freezing, they better not try to lay eggs yet until it warms up to melt the ice and snow.
No Nest in the Cattails Yet
It sure felt like old man winter was blowing some very cold air around today and there was no hint of spring whatsoever especially if a record low temperature might be set tonight.
Blowing Cold Air
Although it wasn’t above freezing this morning, the sun was bright enough to melt some snow and my pond has finally filled back up and was overflowing. But there wasn’t any frog croaking as the only sounds were the cracking of ice as the sheet of ice moved around, especially as the fall low water level ice layer started to float to the top of the flooded pond.
Full Icy Pond
