With so much snow still in the woods, it doesn’t look much like Spring here. Thankfully, the Easter Bunny hopped by this morning to remind us that not just Easter, but Spring too is on its way. Its coat of blended tawny brown and white indicates the lengthening daylight hours. Surely all that extra sunlight will help us see grass again soon.
It’s been a rough winter for wildlife. Relentless snowfalls have covered food sources and made movement on all types of terrain difficult. Deer have been frequent visitors in the yard, looking for anything edible.
Not all creatures are as lucky as the snowshoe hares to be able to leap with ease on top of the snow. Bobcats haven’t been able to keep up with them in deep snow and have suffered the consequences in their dwindling numbers. With their small prey buried deep in tunnels beneath the hard snow cover, snowy owls have also suffered.
Sometimes hard winters make it seem like warmer days will never come again, especially when snow continues to fall for weeks after the vernal equinox.
Hopefully, the real spring is just around the corner.
The deep roots never doubt spring will come.
~ Marty Rubin
Text and photographs copyright Amy-Lynn Bell 2015
Flandrum Hill 
Wonderful to see a new post after such a long drought. Welcome back to the blog-o-sphere. The pictures are lovely but you’re right … it HAS been and still IS an awful winter here. Snow today ? Really ?
Sybil, it was Julien’s suggestion that I post my hare images 🙂
Yesterday afternoon I saw a red squirrel with a wounded eye on the deck. I wondered if he had managed to fend off a predator or was perhaps running with a stick 😉 We’re all a bit worse for wear after such a long, hard winter. Hopefully this week will bring some much needed change in the weather.
Great pictures. I totally agree with you on the hardship of winter for the animals, human ones included. Our orchard is full of coyote tracks. The farmers can’t even get into the orchards to prune. What a winter!
Bonnie, if there’s food to be found, the coyotes are certainly clever enough to find it. Though I’m sure they too are suffering. What a winter indeed.
I was thinking of you the other day, wondering if you would be blogging again, so that was a nice surprise to see this post. Your snow hare images are so cute, we don´t have them in Denmark, but who knows if they will come one day. We have got wolves again, after more than 200 years without. They are coming from Germany, and slowly increasing in numbers, it is not allowed to shoot them, even they are eating of the farmers sheeps.
Not everyone likes to know that it is possible to meet a wolf while walking in the nature, as we have not been used to fear anything there, except to get lost. And even that is almost impossible in such a little country with so many smartphones. It is told that they aren’t dangerous to people, but I think it will take some time before people feel confident with this new member of the Danish nature.
Happy Easter.
Not sure how much more blogging I’ll be able to do but it is great to at least get one post done. I finally completed my school courses but now work full-time and still have my grandchildren here full-time which makes for a very busy household 🙂
We have not had wolves for a long time in Nova Scotia. German author Hermann Hesse wrote a short story, ‘The Wolf,’ about an individual wolf being hunted down and killed by people who had no reason to feel threatened by it, but unfortunately did. I think wolves keep to themselves more than the opportunistic coyotes who have replaced them in our ecosystem. They are less afraid of humans, and so pose a greater threat.