It's beginning to look a lot like.......

Easter?!?

The weather guys were only half right and boy, are we thankful for that! We've got about 3-4 inches of heavy, wet snow on the ground but that's nowhere near the 5-10 inches they were predicting when we went to work early this morning. It snowed pretty hard for most of the morning, but by 1:00 it was pretty much done. We had one more burst of snow between 3:00 and 4:00 and then it finally stopped. The roads are wet and sloppy, but no real travel problems. We're not even going to shovel this stuff because temps are probably going to be warm enough tomorrow to melt most everything off.

Here are some pictures of the birds that were in the backyard when we got back from grocery shopping earlier this evening.

A fairly large flock of Red-Winged Blackbirds stopped by. Here are a couple of females and a male picking on some of the bunnies corncobs. I like to see the females; you don't see them very often at the feeders once their nesting territories have been established.

Here's another large group of males enjoying the birdseed in the tray feeder. I'm glad I cleaned all the snow out and refilled these trays when I got home from work.

There were also bunches of robins in the backyard. Last weekend when I saw my first robins, I took the last two buckets of old apples from the basement and dumped them out on the ground. Fortunately, for these robins, they were able to find some of these apples that had been buried under today's snow.

Robins aren't really keen on eating birdseed, but we did have a customer at Wild Birds Unlimited who put out shelled sunflower seeds for his robins and they loved that. Robins also really love mealworms. I think tomorrow morning I'll take one of my tray feeders and put out some treats for the robins to tide them over until the snow has all melted. Then they can go back to digging around in the backyard for their own treats.

Here's a little video of a bunch of robins who were taking advantage of some of the dried-up crabapples still left on my tree from last summer. I still have a couple of highbush cranberries with fruit on the branches, but they must not be as tempting or tasty as crabapples. Maybe the cedar waxwings will like the cranberries when they come back.....

Here's a little treat I picked up for my squirrels at the grocery store.

There was a shopping cart full of clearance priced (99 cents per pound!) Brazil nuts and pecans left over from Christmas (there's 6.4 pounds in these 2 bags). That's a heckuva deal because 2 weeks ago when I bought some of these nuts they were still $3.29 per pound. I just couldn't pass this up and I know my squirrels will be so happy!

(Update: when I was taking some of these pecans out for the squirrels this morning, I decided they were so nice that maybe I'd just better save a few back and make a nice pecan pie for Mr. Johnson.)