Burrowing

We got our first real snow of the winter today. By real snow I mean enough to cover the grass, and it didn't melt by the end of the day. And I had to shovel it. (Not that I am complaining. I like shoveling snow the first few storms each year. In general I don't start hating it until March). Anyway, it was somewhere between two and three inches, I would guess, closer to two probably. I imagine it goes without saying that I didn't see any bugs (except for the frozen woolly bear).

But not everything is sleeping for the winter:

 The lawn part of the backyard is covered with these snow tunnels. I presume they are from mice, but I think there might be shrews in the yard, and it could be them, too.

This is a pretty unusual sight for the backyard, partly because with deeper snow you don't see the tunnels underneath until it has melted quite a bit. I guess we got just the right amount of snow for the rodents to need to burrow under and have the tunnels be visible from above.

By the way, I got a new camera for Christmas:

It's not quite as high quality as my regular camera, but it does have an interesting feature, which is that it is a pair of binoculars that takes pictures. As you can see from the very poor quality of this picture, I haven't quite finessed it yet. And I think it doesn't take good pictures through dirty window, unfortunately. But it may make taking pictures of birds in the backyard a bit easier. We'll see.