This is spring?

 Mother Nature’s April Fool joke continued with heavy, wet snow that whole damned day Saturday, April 2. It varied from small, barely visible crystals to large balls of flakes stuck together.

Heavy, wet snow

The temperatures hovered a little able freezing, and an equilibrium was reached in the midafternoon. The snow melted as quickly as it fell, resulting in no more net accumulation.

Once it got this deep, it didn't get any deeper

Fortunately, it melted the next day.

Tuesday evening, seven deer gathered in the field.

Six of the seven deer grazing

We think they were does with yearlings. Some of them were frisky, jumping and darting around as youngsters do.

All seven deer with one frisky juvenile in the center

Certainly there were size differences among the individuals. This photo shows a large one, presumably Mom, with two yearlings.

Mom (center) and two small  juveniles

The goldfinches continue to molt into their breeding colors. I’m sure they all hope to be done before the prom. Nothing worse than showing up with those dreaded tan patches on your back and your black beret not quite finished. I continue to be surprised at how much variation there is in the molting schedule. I have read that the brightest colors do correlate with various factors that make a good mate. It seems reasonable that the earliest male to achieve said bright colors would have an advantage.

Goldfinches at various stages of molting

Here a house finch photobombed the goldfinch picture.

Photobomb!

Red-bellied and downy woodpeckers are frequent visitors to our feeders.

Red-bellied at the feeder, deck post at right

 They immediately fly off to the partially rotten deck posts (replacement is on the list of renovations for the summer), where they peck at the seed. At first, I thought they were caching, and we would have sunflowers sprouting from the posts. Further investigation revealed no seeds, however, so they are just cracking them open there. It isn’t doing the deck any favors.

Red-bellied woodpecker cracking open a seed

Downy woodpecker doing the same thing on the same post 

As I was rooting around in the freezer for something, I found two one-quart containers of Tundra Surprise peaches. (“Tundra Surprise” refers to any food that has languished forgotten in the bottom of a freezer for an unspecified length of time.) I was moved to invite some friends over and make the first pie of the year.

First pie of 2022, Tundra Surprise Peach

People say, “Easy as pie,” but pie is not easy. Nevertheless, people love my pie, and I love my people. I got to thinking about a common joke from my childhood, I think in comics but perhaps also in sit-coms. A woman puts a fresh-baked pie on the windowsill to cool, and one or more children, typically boys, swipe it. Obviously, this was in the days before air-conditioning. Now that I am more familiar with baking pies, I believe this heinous crime should be a capital offence. At the time, it was considered nothing more than a prank. Maybe for women who made pies often, it was no big deal. Cooks in lumber camps make enough pie for all the men in the camp every day. I can’t imagine. Nor can I figure out where all that fruit came from. Canned? Dried? Buried under the permafrost? (Hey, it worked in Alaska.)

Anyway, despite not getting the top crust on straight—again—the pie was both beautiful and delicious, if I say so myself.