I Guess It's Spring Now

Hello loyal readers. This is The Daily Bone and I'm your windblown doggie reporter 

Chester L. W. Spaniel. 

Supposedly yesterday was the first day of Spring. If you take a look around my yard, there is absolutely no sign of it. The ground is frozen solid and covered with snow in parts. This snow has been melted, frozen, melted, and refrozen a number of times. It's hard and crusty, and not nice to walk on. The sky has a thin cover of clouds that make a halo around the sun. Usually when that happens, it means there's a storm coming our way.

And it's very, very windy. Do you see my ears flapping?

We found some little piles of feathers on the ground this morning. Ghostwriter says they're from a mourning dove that was probably caught by a hawk.

Tail feathers.

Wing feathers.

I did some more snooping around and I found a whole pile of birdie feathers right next to the fence!
Wow! There must be enough to cover an entire mourning dove! I bet the hawk sat right here on the fence and ate that birdie for breakfast. Ghostwriter says she's seen a lot of hawks in her travels lately. It's migration time for them. She's spotted lots of vultures too, and thought she heard an owl hooting in the middle of the night after she came home from work late the other day.

Also this morning, there were two ditzy squirrels under the birdie feeder. They ran away before ghostwriter could take a picture. But then they played a silly, inane game that involved chasing each other round and round the trunk of the silver maple tree. Perhaps it's squirrel (gag) mating season.

Ew!

You squirrels keep out of my yard!

Gee, I wish those hawks would catch some of those screwy squirrels for a change instead of our nice mourning doves! 

Ahem, where was I?

Oh, here's the science geek part of my report today. Vernal equinox means that the Earth is at a certain spot in it's orbit around the sun, so that the days and nights are of equal length. There's a link at the end of this report where you can get a more detailed explanation.

Spring is usually thought of as the time when flowers bloom and the summer birds arrive from their winter vacations and start singing in the budding trees and bunnies hop around happily and everyone is singing with joy.



In Western NY Spring usually means "Still Winter." (Ghostwriter always laughs at the store ads that show skimpy Easter dresses for sale. Hahaha! You'd have to wear a winter parka over one of those!)

Actually, here is a pretty accurate depiction of the so-called Spring time around here:



Yup! I think I'll keep my nice, warm, furry coat on for at least another six weeks. Please inform my groomer, Miss Jacquie to schedule my Spring buzz cut sometime in May.

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