by Lynn Hagan, Debbi Harris, Carolyn Henderson, Sue Ann Kendall, Donna Lewis, Phyllis Shuffield, and Cindy Travis
Our area got much more snow on January 10 than we usually get. Lots of folks in the area received between four and six inches. We saw many beautiful pictures in our Facebook feeds, but here are a few more, so that our friends who are our blog subscribers can see what the natural beauty of Milam County looks like with a blanket of snow.
This gorgeous view from Lynn Hagan sets the scene.
By the way, here’s an issue a lot of us Master Naturalists had to deal with. Our CoCoRaHs rain gauges got all full of snow. We hope they get an accurate reading once the snow melts.
Carolyn Henderson’s rain gauge filled with snow for the first time.
Yesterday, we showed you what Cindy Travis’s house looked like when it first started snowing. It got just beautiful after a few more hours.
The horses were smart and stayed under the shelter!
Over at Donna Lewis’s place, the birds were brave. She reports:
Donna’s brave birds
“I bet we were not the only ones to have 8 inches of snow and ice. Last night we had no heat, no TV and no internet. All but the heat has finally returned.
We have limbs and maybe some trees down. What a day for our little hummers. But they survived. I made warm sugar water for them early this morning.”
Says Donna, “A real Texas sized snowman family!!!”
Phyllis Shuffield got a LOT of snow on her property. Her trees were beautiful.
Snowscape from Phyllis
Sue Ann really liked the snow as it set gently down on the trees in her little woods. It was a great day to explore!
Snow on trees at Sue Ann’s ranch
Pond and woods outside of Cameron
Lynn Hagan lives on a hill with a view, so some of her snow shots had actual vistas!
A world of snow!Two views from Lynn’s place.
More Photos!
After we first published this post, we got some more submissions, so we decided to just add them here. It’s all so beautiful and well worth saving, because it doesn’t happen often.
Debbi Harris reported that they got 6″ of snow in Griffin Chapel.
Donna Lewis got some more photos off another camera, and sent these beauties in. You can see a black-chinned hummingbird in the feeder photo.
More snow pictures from Donna Lewis. Click to see the pictures full size.
Lynn Hagan also sent in a few more photos of the trees around her place.
More from Lynn Hagan. Click the images to see them full size.
Update from January 12
The snow melted a lot on January 11, but then it got really cold overnight. The ground was very moist, which is conducive for fog formation. Since it was cold, the result was frozen fog! There’s weather you don’t see often. This let to a very thick blanket of frosty ice, especially where the snow had melted but it was very damp. Sue Ann got some photos of the frost at the Hermits’ Rest Ranch.
A morning of frozen fog between Cameron and Burlington
The day before the snowstorm I took a little walk in our five-acre woods.
After all the rain we just had, lots of beautiful things were emerging.
I cannot identify most of them, but they are so cool. Some of you might know what they are. I love to touch the green moss that was back there with all the other interesting things.
[From Sue Ann: it’s snowing in Milam County today, so we may get a few snow reports. This one came first, with beautiful birds!]
Snow coming down, bluebirds, chipping sparrows, yellow rumped warblers, pine siskin, orange crowned warblers and more enjoying my home made suet blocks (recipe on web site and on the blog here).
Barn snowWoods snowHappy birdsMr. Bluebird loves Cindy’s suet recipe.
I’ve been out all last week taking advantage of the warm weather to get the housing ready to open for the returning Purple Martins. Martin Landlords everywhere are getting excited and waiting for that first magical song of the first scout seeking this year’s home. The scouts are the older birds who want first pick of the accommodations.
The first photo is the Gourd Rack. It has the gourds and owl guards attached now, and I have plugged the entrance’s with cloth. I will not raise it nor open any gourds until the scouts start arriving. Then I only open a few at a time, hopefully preventing non-martins from taking over the gourds. House sparrows, blue-birds, starlings, barred owls, and snakes would like to get in. Most will eat or just kill the martins for their nests. Only the sweet little blue-birds are just there looking for a home.
Ready to accept new friends, repelling all enemies.
I will also have to install the racoon baffle, the decoys and the snake guards soon.
Yes, it’s a lot of work. Our friends the martins are on just about everyone’s menu.
The second photo is of the plastic decoys used to make the martins think their friends are there also. I call the decoys Heckle and Jeckle. They also serve as a target for owl attacks.
Heckle and Jeckle, all ready to attract friends.
The third photo shows one decoy attached.
That must be Heckle.
The last photo is the apartment rack. It is lowered for adding the nest boxes with fresh pine-needles and again blocking the entrance holes off till the martins arrive.
All cleaned out and ready for new tenants.
The houses were cleaned at the end of the year and plugged. I used the wet/dry vacuum to get any spider webs or other insects out.
I’ll raise the house as the scouts arrive. How exciting!
How do I know when the scouts are here? They fly around the structures and call. Anyone would know when they have arrived.
The start of a new year always seems to inspire folks to look back and analyze things. I got to thinking that last year was a hard year for our Chapter, since we had to stop meeting in person, couldn’t do a lot of the activities we’d planned, and only had a virtual conference to attend (nice as it was, it wasn’t full of hugs and chats). We certainly got more visitors in 2020 than in 2019 (granted, we didn’t start until February 2019).
We had 3700 visitors last year, not bad for a little chapter!
Our blog, though, provided us with a way to communicate with each other and to share what was going on in our own little slices of the natural world. I was really grateful to see how our contributions grew and grew, as the blog transitioned from reports on our chapter meetings to contributions from our members. We have a nice group of regular contributors now, as well as some Chapter members who contribute whenever they can.
In fact, there were 12 different Chapter members who contributed last year: me, Donna Lewis (winner of the “most contributions” award), Catherine Johnson, Eric Neubauer, Linda Jo Conn, Carolyn Henderson, Debra Sorensen, Joyce Conner, Cindy Travis, Larry Kocian, Ann Collins, and Sherri Sweet. What? Don’t see your name on the list? You can fix it by sending me some words and/or pictures (my email address is in the member area of our website).
Blog hits by month.
You can see from the previous graphic that our hits went up and down. There were two big months. Last February, someone went through and read every single article, twice, which explains the jump. But, last month, December 2020, really spiked. Did we suddenly become fascinating?
Hmm, December 23 was a bonanza of visits.
When I look at a month’s stats, I can always tell when a blog post came out, because we get a spike in visitors. But, that was a BIG spike! The next day was pretty big, too. I was very curious to find out what the heck got published on December 23 that was so darned fascinating. A look at the most popular posts of the year gave me the answer to “what” but not to “why.”
All Time Blog Post Stats. Hmm. Two of those got a LOT more hits.
I only figured out yesterday why Donna’s sweet post about being nice to a snake was so popular. Because of all those flags people are flying these days, the phrase, “Don’t Tread on Me” has become popular. Donna’s post must have come up in searches!
The other really popular post, Let the Tours Begin, by Lisa Milewski, was from October 2019, and was about the big event we held with the Rancheria Grande Chapter of the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail Association. That link got sent out to a lot of places and shared often, so no wonder people looked at it. (Sharing posts is how you get people to look at them; you could do that, too).
How You Can Help Our Blog Grow
We’d like for more people to be able to find and enjoy the writing and beautiful photos from our chapter members. It’s great that we are getting more posts from a variety of members, but it would be good for them to be seen! People clicking on our blog links and sharing them are what gets our blog promoted more by search engines and WordPress (blog site). So, here are some things YOU can do:
Contribute. Send me (Sue Ann/Suna) your nature observations, research, fun projects, or reports of activities. You can type them in an email, put them in Word, write them on a piece of paper…whatever works! I can make them into fun blog posts, even if you aren’t a professional writer.
Read. When you see a blog post announcement on our Facebook page (or in email if you are one of our 37 subscribers), click on it. See what fellow Chapter members have to say! You might learn something. Or laugh.
Comment. Do you have something to add to a post? What about a question for the author? You can comment on our blog posts. Just put your name in there and start commenting! That’s how blog readers converse and build communities.
We’ve only had 79 “real” comments. Help us out!
Share. Did you find a post interesting? Copy the URL (the web link, at the top of the page) and paste it in an email, Facebook post, or message to a friend. Or, click the Share button on a Facebook post. Maybe someone you know will enjoy reading what you or another member wrote.
Talk. Mention reading the blog in conversations, when you’re explaining to a potential new class member what fun it is to be a Texas Master Naturalist, or if you’re asked what exactly we do. The blog is a good record of that!
This can help you, too! Writing a blog post gets you precious volunteer hours. Taking the photos and doing the research for an article also counts. It’s under Chapter Administration > Website and Social Media. This is something fun, interesting, and helpful that we can do while maintaining our pandemic protocols.
Oh yes, thanks for reading! Y’all are all the best!
Nature Along the El Camino Real 