This week we had a visit from our friends Ellen and Ann who just bought a house in Alma. It’s fun to have friends who are close enough to come for dinner! It was too late to walk, so they’ll come back sometime when we can do an outside tour. We had a nice dinner and conversation.
It was so warm when we arrived that the snow was melting off the fields, and it really felt like spring. The temperature stayed at 40 degrees all day and all night, and in the morning, nearly all the snow was gone. I’m a little worried about the seeds I planted – I hope it hasn’t been warm long enough for them to start sprouting. At about noon it started to snow – and by the next day we had an inch or two – enough to cover all the fields again. And it was cold and windy.

The new snow was perfect for animal tracks – lots of different small mammals, and coyotes, and a few deer.

Coyote tracks on the driveway

There are many fewer deer tracks this winter, and more coyote tracks. I think the 13 deer that our hunters killed probably helped to keep the deer population down, and I think that growing prairies rather than corn or soybeans helps too. A few of the farmers down the valley have big herds of deer in their fields almost every time we go by – I think it must be because they have corn left in their fields.

There are all sorts of different tiny tracks – some look like mice with long tail marks. Some are just tiny footprints. It’s especially fun to come out right after a snow fall, when the tracks are crisp and clear, to see all the different tracks crossing each other and try to figure out which kinds of animals made them.

We tore out the remains of the beaver dam by the driveway – the melting snow made the creek rise, and we were afraid that the huge waterfall over the dam would dig a hold under our culvert. Now the dam is nearly gone, and the water moves through the culvert much more smoothly – Mike is much happier. The beavers seem to have moved up the creek – they hadn’t worked on that dam for at least 6 months.

The Frog Pond is full of melt water – I’m sure it’s so high because the ground underneath is still frozen.

Frog Pond

I wish I could figure out how to keep all that water from draining out – I think the clay would have to be brought up farther along the sides. I’d like to figure out a way to fix it without hurting the frogs and tadpoles that are already living there.

We finished about half of the upstairs floor – next week we’ll do the most difficult part – around the stairwell and matching up with the floor in the closets. And I finished seeding Buffalo Ridge Prairie. It helps to go for a seeding walk after I’ve been stapling floorboards for a few hours – good for my back.