Kaw Valley Almanac

This is a wonderful time of year to take walks in area prairies and take photos of abstract patterns of tousled grasses and dried flowers.

This turkey will get warmer if cloudier weather this week, and perchance the opportunity to find more bugs and scraps to eat as the crusty snow softens and melts away in the predicted rain.

This downy woodpecker has been doing double duty: pecking on the rail to inform other woodpeckers that he has intentions to make this area his territory, in addition to snatching a sunflower seed now and then.

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.

Cedar (actually juniper) boughs are easily harvested as a fragrant and popular indoor decoration to festoon a mantle, window sill, or even as an alternative Christmas tree. The blue berries are a favored food of many an overwintering bird, too.

Even though the least total daylight of the year occurs on the winter solstice, the earliest sunsets of the year occur this week, and they can be spectacular.

Winter flocks have come together. Concentrated further with each snow storm we get chickadees, cardinals, bluejays, juncos, nuthatches and titmouse; give yourself a ringside seat by putting out a birdfeeder this winter.

Trees and animals depend on each other for their mutual survival. Acorns, pictured here, have a protective package on the outside, allowing them to be safely transported, some eaten, some buried to sprout elsewhere.

”Blackbird” flocks can be seen any time of day this time of year, sometimes in tight blobs of shape shifting flocks called ”murmurations” like this one at the most common time to spot them, around dusk.

No, this isn’t a pile of sprouting chia seeds — it’s sporulating moss, stimulated by the recent rains.

Young oaks tend to turn redder than fully grown oaks this time of year, as is evidenced by this particularly red young red oak tree.

This is perfect walking weather not only for humans — dogs love it, too!