February 2023
Monday February 6 Strange weather the last few days. We've been having an unusually mild winter: early Friday morning it was 32F. But Saturday morning, when I got up to take Maddie out, it was a breezy -11F (-24C), with a wind chill of -28F (-33C) in Cambridge; the photo is a frosty window we passed by. In Boston, the low of -10F was a record. And by noon on Sunday, it was 50F (10C). Yikes! This morning, ice at the edges of Jamaica Pond. Lots of Canada geese hanging out in the water just beyond the ice. Maybe 50 or so common mergansers, many beautiful males with their white bellies, black backs, shimmery, greenish heads and bright red, thin, narrow bills. And the hoodies, which had numbered around 100 a few weeks ago, almost all gone, only about half a dozen left by the tiny island. A couple dozen ring-necked ducks gathered together in a single group. And the lone pied-billed grebe still there. On our afternoon walk around the neighborhood, I spotted these large, grey feathers st...