Snowshoeing as far as we could

Carroll and I snowshoed into the woods today. We managed to walk several hundred yards when we came across many small cedar saplings bent over into the trail making the trails barely passable. After a heavy snow, we have had wet snow and then rain followed by a sudden hard frost that pretty well solidified and weighed down the snow on the trees. The snow on the ground was still not solid enough to walk on so we still needed our snowshoes. The heavy snow has caused many cedars to bend over. We hung up some extra bird feeders along the trails. Last night we has a very light dusting of snow on top of the hard snow base creating an ideal surface to examining animal tracks. There were male white-tailed deer tracks of a good size, fresh fox tracks, again along the driveway and lots of snowshoe hare tracks, some red squirrel [Tamiasciurus hudsonicus] and field mice, all common wildlife for this area. We have yet to see fisher tracks this year, but I am quite sure they will be found if we went further east on the property.

It has been a beautiful day otherwise with a clear blue sky and cold. A beautiful Christmas Day.