Sunday, November 9, 2014

Their Mothers Raised No Fools

I've been outside most of the day getting things ready for what's supposedly racing towards us.  Mower off the tractor, snow blade on.  Fresh gas in the walk-behind snow blower, lawn tractor taking its place in the back shed and up on blocks, the battery removed.  The garage porch is tidied up, other things lying around the farmstead picked up at the very least and put somewhere that isn't prone and at ground level.  The "I know where that is" excuse can be convincing when things are in plain sight; it gets a bit tougher when there's a foot of snow on top of everything.

So with all of the outside time today, for the most part quiet outside time, I heard them overhead.

Swans.

I heard them before I could see them and that's how it always is.  There's a combine shelling corn across the valley and up on top.  Every round that he gets closer can be loud, but when he heads back to the other side, the crows are about the only thing I hear....besides a couple of early chickadees.....and a slight wind.





 

6 comments:

  1. Now there's something I've never see, a flight of swans.

    A few years back I saw a flock of pelicans off the cliffs of Palos Verde just south of LA. That was cool.

    Around here the big birds are all Canada geese.

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    1. Speaking of pelicans, I've seen them around here in the spring and have no idea how that get north again. There were geese flying the same down-river path today as well; I had to keep checking myself as V's of both were passing overhead. In general, the swans are up much higher than the geese have been. Some of the clouds were low enough that I was hearing birds that were unseen.

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  2. Neat. Like David says, all we get here are flocks of geese in their classic V formation.

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    1. The swans will V as well and do most of the time that I've seen.

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  3. I too have never seen a flock of swans. Are they even called flock? Wait I'll google it.......please stand by.......

    Well, google says they are a bevy or wedge in flight. Look I learned something.

    Hope you guys didn't get hammered. We're pretty safe out here, it all seemed to go east and north of us.

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    1. I've now learned something too thanks to your research. We escaped most everything, maybe an inch or two of snow that came after some freezing rain. The heavy band of snow was relatively narrow and was predominantly north of the Twin Cities. Overall we got by pretty easy.

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