Mice in Winter

In the spirit of Harmony Art Mom's Outdoor Hour Challenge, I'm going to talk about mice in winter.

On Friday, A of GAIN and join one of our home school groups for snowshoeing through a park. A county naturalist is leading the way. (He's the tall one.)

He talked about the many tracks we saw, including mouse tracks. He went on to tell us about mice, running around in burrows above the soil.

Fast forward 24 hours. My husband and I are walking around a prairie, without snowshoes.

Winter walking without snowshoes is totally do-able, especially when you have proper winter clothing. For example, we invested double digits in thermal socks for the family this year.

(and i geocached, too. post on that will come later.)

We heard and saw birds, and saw a lot of animal tracks, including mouse tracks. We didn't see any people tracks.

I laughed when I saw this on the trail.

Mouse tracks in front of mouse burrows/beds. They must wake together and attack the night en masse.

Find #191 and Nature

My next big milestone would be 200 finds. If I were to put a date to hit the milestone on, I would pick March 21. That is in 17 days and falls on the first day of spring. Nine more finds.

I got closer to 200 today as I picked up find #191 GC1J0VQ Twin Cottonwood Colonels' Offset. This might be my first offset cache find. An offset cache can be a few things, and in this case it involves finding one container, and it is not at the coordinates listed. Instead, it is in the vicinity of the coordinates. You have to use your geo-sense. Sometimes you must solve a puzzle or find another container with different coords to get the final location of the container.

Because we recently read about insects in winter, we searched for evidence of insects. I always need to keep things fresh and new to keep a familiar place from getting boring. Books has been good that way. We did not spot any galls or scales or larvae that were described in our book. But we did find worm wood. "N" of GAIN was peeling bark off a fallen stick and uncovered the tracks of some larvae. After inspection, he and "I" of GAIN found some holes -- either the mom's entry hole or a baby's exit hole. I also found worm wood near the cache. I don't know that I would have had access to this worm wood once everything leafed out. This was in a low, boggy area where the kids had fun breaking the remains of ice sheets.

I find a lot of value to hiking in the winter. I see more things and go more places without underbrush. But there is more. For example, the sheets of ice in and near the river. Click on the pictures so you can see the details. The birds' nests. This one, and another one that I photographed were found a little higher than my knee. I have a bird nest ID book that I hope to use. Having your hand in the photo is nice to have a sense of scale when you look things up in the reference books.The seed pods (there is a chapter on winter weeds that I did not read aloud). The low volume of foot traffic -- big bonus! The many migrating birds, their noise, and their scat. Gotta keep on your toes with all the scat. Sometimes we get to see other animals and their tracks. Today the water was very high, so not much mud bank was visible for tracking.

Snow Shoeing

The younger half of GAIN went snow shoeing with a naturalist from the county today. (Hat tip to Daila -- thank you!) I waded through the snow without snow shoes. My objective was to see how snow shoes worked with smaller amounts of snow. Our previous experience was that a LOT of snow (24" base) made snow shoeing very hard, but easier than hiking with no snow shoes. Today, with snow coated with ice (from yesterday's thaw), the consensus in the van afterward was that snow shoes weren't a huge advantage unless there was a lot of powdery snow. The crust of ice just held our weight when we took the snow shoes off (no one wore them by the end).

I also wondered if snow shoes would make geocaches more accessible during winter. Winter is great for hunting in that there is no thick underbrush to deal with. (It also means ice, which definitely held me up yesterday in my quest to find three geocaches. I found one urban cache, the other two are lost to me at this time). After today in the woods, I conclude that snow shoes are great for hunting geocaches that do not require moving over steep slopes. Also, you may want to remove snow shoes if you are hunting for ground zero in a tight area. Otherwise, I see snow shoes as an advantage in lots of powder (like the ten inches we got a couple weekends ago). Going over fallen trees and walking around things are not a problem in snow shoes. I love the quiet of winter hikes, seeing the scat piles, the evidence left behind from mammals browsing for food (pictures later), and matted down areas left from sleeping deer.

Winter walk

The entire family went out to Raccoon River Park in West Des Moines today. I wore the Skippy Peanut Butter backpack. You can see the Skippy water bottle in the pocket. I think the water bottle is hard to use because I need to use two hands to drink from it. It definitely was designed for the backpack, or the backpack was designed for it. It's a perfect fit.

We attempted to reach the island, former home of a geocache called Raccoon River Island, and current home of GC15HNN, Here on NVG's Isle! My kids differ with the NVG on the name, but when they claimed the island for themselves years ago, they never let him know. In fact, I didn't even know who the NVG was back then. So Scott, we will not fight with you over the name. The island does not care what anyone calls it anyway. I think it wants everyone to create a personal name for and relationship with it.

Getting to the island would have involved six of us passing open water and slush. And five of us weigh over 100 pounds. So Mr. GAIN and I were nervous about getting there, even though I knew from past trips that the water must be shallow. "N" of GAIN was very disappointed to leave, but he was a very good sport about it. I was too lazy for months to get the FTF, STF, etc. with the boat. I figure out how to get there, though. If I used the inflatable boat, I could have launched, beached, and disembarked without a lot of difficulty.

Without the underbrush, our walk around Blue Heron Lake was awesome. Getting to the different fingers of land was a piece of cake. Walking to the bird blind was a cinch (and cool). Seeing the wind sailors and kite sailors through the trees and grass was a snap (and fun to watch). We had never made it all the way around the lake's 3.2 mile trail until today, and we were quite proud to say that we did it.

We attempted another cache, GC157YN, Down, Out, and Broke, but the gps-r said we had another 250' to go, into the river.

We also found what one of the kids called a beaver buffet line. You can see it here. We also saw a tree that the beavers had chosen to abandon, even though they gnawed it close to falling. Maybe the sap was sweeter on the other side.

On the way out of the park, I felt joy when I spotted GC13ZPR, Man in Black #4 from a distance. I cannot believe I never found this during the warm months. I must have looked at it a dozen times but didn't recognize it for what it was with all the foliage.

high temperatures

Today our high temperature was around 40 F -- perfectly sunny and windless, too. My older son and I spent some time trekking around my family's home place, found a rabbit warren, then we joined some others in the family to make snowmen out in the front yard. Had I been in a place to hike and/or geocache, I would have been. The weather was wonderful. Bushwhacking in the winter is also wonderful.

Although I have not been out hunting for geocaches, people have been out seeking mine. Yesterday (the weather was not as nice as today's) someone visited two of my geocaches (Little Bunny and Wise Guys). I always like nice comments that say more than "TNLNSL," so I was quite pleased to read a whole sentence, no abbreviations in geo-speak either.