Snow day

First I would like to thank those of you that made the sacrifice and signed up to receive the blog.

The area here is quite unique in that a lot of the storms that sweep through the area and on into Idaho, miss us altogether. The mountains to the north and south seem to pull the storms far enough either way to miss the house completely. It can be raining like crazy just six miles up the road and the same for the area to the south, and dry at the house.  It was overcast this morning, but basically dry. We had a small rain last night, enough to see on the side walk, but nothing of any consequence. As we drove further east we began to get some flakes of snow on the windshield. The weather forecast called for a "winter storm warning" until 10:00 AM.

We checked the pond that I have been flying with Jessie and while I thought that there might have been some flying ducks there, I couldn't really pick any out with the bino's.  There was definitely some Coots.  ( diving Ducks, hard to make fly.) There was also a bunch of cows around the pond. It is not a good idea to be running, screaming and flapping your arms around a man's livestock. It can be misinterpreted as rude behavior.

We checked another pond, but found nothing to fly. There was another pond by the Hwy that I had not flown yet this year and we decided to try it. By the time that we got there, Karen drove in with my camera, which I had forgotten when I left this morning. I talked her into going with us to fly Jessie there. By the time we got in position it was snowing big flakes and the ground was starting to show the snow. I turned Jessie loose and she never even went over the pond to see if there was ducks there. She instead circled over a hay field and then sat down in the edge of it. When she didn't return, I decided that it was going to be a bust, so we drove out and over to where we saw her sit down. She had decided to go flying and was circling high over the field. I finally got her attention and called her down to the lure. One down, two to go.

We drove to the rabbit field, Karen went on home. Smart girl! The flakes by that time were about quarter size, but we went out any way. While there were tracks all over there wasn't a rabbit to be seen. They were hiding and not about to come out. We made a pretty big circle and perhaps saw 6 rabbits of which the girls only chased one like they meant it. Thayen got tired of getting snow in his face and soon let me know just how foolish it really was. Sue was still reluctantly willing to chase something if we could get it close enough to see it through the snow, but Peg had given up. Snow is not a Harris Hawk's friend. They really have no water proofing on their feathers and are just not designed for that type of weather.

Both were quite glad to get in their box out of the snow. It put down about 1 1/2 inches in about 30 minutes. On the way home we had not gone more than 10 miles and there was no snow at all. Oh well!