Island Falls notes (week of April 18, 2018)

6 years ago

Son Tom, along with son Chris, all from Bangor, arrived in Island Falls recently to visit Riva and also to admire all the great piles of snow up here in The County. Apparently there is not too much of the white stuff south of us, but up here it sure doesn’t feel much like spring.

While they were here we all went to Brookside in Smyrna for lunch, as the one restaurant in Island Falls is only open about two days a week. We had a great lunch and were waited on by Kim, who has been a waitress there for some time.

I was talking with Sherry Willigar recently and she and her husband, Kent, are still snowmobiling — and here it is the second week of April. They drove down to the foot of the lake and went to Bible Point with no trouble at all this past weekend.

I still have the six deer that show up just about every late afternoon. The snow is still about three feet deep in my backyard, so they mostly stay close to the woods where the ground is quite bare and graze there, occasionally walking gingerly through the snow toward my cedar trees and grazing under them at the new shoots that are coming through.

I have several crows now that arrive late in the afternoon, and as I was watching them I swear that they were trying to take a bath in the snow as they would burrow their bills in the snow then come up and shake their heads, snow flying about them.

I still have oodles of finch that flock to the feeders and now have about four or five blue jays, too, but with the tube feeder, they don’t empty the feeder too fast. I haven’t seen the little chipmunk lately but am sure he’ll turn up when it is warmer.