This week I cleaned out our bluebird nest boxes to get them ready for spring. The bluebirds should start coming back in March, and I want to be ready for them.

The recommendations for how to design bluebird houses are always changing as people discover better ways of preventing mortality and increasing nesting success. The Bluebird Restoration Association of Wisconsin
now recommends that boxes be made with no ventilation holes. Since all my boxes were built before I learned this, I decided to cover up the holes. So as part of my spring-cleaning of the boxes, I fastened small pieces of wood over all the holes.

Here’s the Narrows Prairie with one of the bluebird boxes.

We still have some snow, although it’s getting hard and crusted from all the freezing and thawing. On the upper fields, where the wind blows it around, it forms wonderful wave patterns, like the patterns you see in loose sand.

This is our view of the valley to the north of us. In the summer we can’t see it at all – it’s only visible when the leaves are off the trees.

Here is Volvo Meadow – I realized that we don’t have many pictures of it so I thought I’d start taking some. It’s an area that I think was once cultivated because it has typical old-field vegetation – mostly Field Brome, Canada Goldenrod, Gray Dogwood, Prickly Ash and Box Elder. In the winter I often see Northern Shrikes sitting in the scrubby trees. It also has an old rusted out Volvo – we’ve never figured out how to get it out so it sits there as a kind of weird sculpture, with weeds and shrubs slowly smothering it.

I tried calling owls this week and only heard one far-away screech owl.