Frost
Ice, Ice, Baby
With a credit to Vanilla Ice, his song could be the theme for this winter in Nova Scotia! The weather has been incredibly changing as they say, we were at almost 12° C one day this week, and dropped to -11° C the next. The thing is that with those kinds of swings, the little snow we’ve had hasn’t stayed around long so no skiing or snowshoeing for me, but more importantly, a bit tough on the vegetation.
Many plants need the cover of snow or some other insulator during our harshest months of January and February, and I fear that this weird patter of freeze, melt, freeze we’ve been having must be wreaking havoc with some plants. The birds too are finding it hard, I’ve noticed larger than normal numbers of chickadees and sparrows at our feeders, birds we normally have in the yard, but who don’t normally spend too much time at our feeders.
The cold that comes after each warm period, though, has produced some amazing frost and ice patterns. Friends have been skating on ponds which are smoothed with all the rain and then flash frozen, and the streams all have ice in them – even in moving water where we see little ice floats now and again.
With the very cold after the very warm, some folks are going to question global warming, but it is important to note that while we’re having this weird bouncy temperature pattern, places like Australia are suffering through the hottest season on record – as we did last summer.
Weird weather.
I just hope it’s not the new normal.
