Purplish-Pink Snow

I looked out of my window yesterday afternoon and saw what looked like pink snow. It snowed Tuesday night, and I woke up to sleet and freezing rain yesterday. We had been having freezing rain for several hours when I saw the pink snow.



The plants in the pictures are pokeweek or pokeberry weeds. They grow about 6 feet tall and produce purple berries in late summer. The birds like to eat the berries, and I frequently see cardinals and blue jays eating on or near the ground by the plants.

In the pictures below, you can see places where berries used to be as well as berries which still haven't been eaten.

I think what happened is the rain washed some of the berry juice off some of the berries (perhaps sub-zero and near-zero temperatures have caused some to split?) and onto the snow. Since the temperature was below freezing, the purplish-pink color was trapped by the freezing rain and did not run off.




If anyone has information on this, I'd love to hear from you!

Squirrels

A squirrel was kind enough to put on a pretty good performance right outside our living room window. We took quite a few pictures, and some of them are in the slideshow. You will have to look pretty closely at a couple of them in order to see the squirrel. His camouflage is quite good!

Squirrel Slideshow

More Rabbit Tracks

The rabbits were busy again last night. It looks like we have several rabbits in the area near our house.

I think the pattern made by the wind in the snow is neat.

Animal Tracks in the Snow

We took walks this morning and afternoon to take pictures of animal tracks in the freshly fallen snow. We were able to find tracks from rabbits, deer, cats, dogs, squirrels, and birds.

On the left is a picture of deer tracks going across the field. Followed by a close-up of a deer track.

Here is a paw print from the cat who has adopted us.

Gray squirrels live in the trees which surround our house. Here is a picture of what we think are their tracks. The tracks continue on the other side of the fence.

Here are two pictures of rabbit tracks. We saw several different places with rabbit tracks. One place clearly indicated that the rabbit was running fast, but that picture didn't come out well. Perhaps we can try again tomorrow after it stops snowing again.


Below are some bird tracks. The birds are very busy eating the seeds from the weeds. If you look closely, you can see seed remains on the snow.

Here is a picture of the wineberry vines covered with snow. Wineberries are similar to raspberries, but their vines are red and hairy with thorns. Wineberries ripen in July and make delicious pies.

We even found a tree that the rabbits have damaged by eating its bark. While not shown in the picture, rabbit tracks lead right up to the tree and go away in another direction. I think the same tree has damage higher up from white-tailed deer.

First Entry

I've decided to start a blog to document some of the "experiments" we've tried in our homeschooling journey. I've called the blog "Trials and Homeschooling" to emphasize that we have trials of many different ideas. Some trials turn out extremely well. Others...don't! But we learn from each and every one of them.

We're working on several projects and special interests right now: robotics, planning this year's garden, Civil Air Patrol, sewing, crafts, and Generation Joshua.

From time to time, I'll be posting updates on how our projects are going. One more special interest that we'll be involved in tomorrow is sledding -- and snow shoveling. We're finally expecting our first normal snowfall of the year starting in a few hours. The kids can't wait!