If you look carefully, there are rabbit tracks to the right of the coyote tracks. It’s likely the coyote was “reading the tracks” left by the rabbit, following in hopes of a meal.

Around dusk, many flocks of blackbirds find a safe place to alight in the upper reaches of cottonwoods, oaks, elms and other tall trees. You can see this dynamic play itself out across the state every year just past the winter solstice.

This immature hawk perched on a cedar limb is looking for an
rodent or stray bird for a quick meal. Judging from the number
of hawks on power line poles, fences and trees this time of
year, there is enough to live on.

”When I was a kid in the 1960s, most years, we’d be ice skating by now,” Ken Lassman writes in the latest Kaw Valley Almanac.