Winter update

The Mergancers are still here. I haven't see the Dark Eyed Juncos lately. The squirrels are visiting the feeder! Grumble, grumble. There are three Great Blue Herons out there right now. The smallest of the three keeps flying over the mergancers as if to try to chase them away from their feeding ground. Many geese are still here too. The creek has not frozen over yet this year. There has been ice on it, but more just occasional icebergs.
I also heard a barn owl two weeks ago. He hung around for about a week, right before we got the real winter weather. The last night I heard him I promised myself I would listen to the Cornell website to find out what kind of owl he was, then of course expected that I could record him the next night, and he was gone. My dog Bert, did bark alot last night, which he tends to do when he hears something strange, and he did do the first couple of nights the owl was around. Hopefully the barn owl has come back and I can at least record him, and report him to the Barn Owl Project. I expect he will at some point for I do remember hearing him over the past few years. When we first moved in here it was quite a scary sound.
Other than that, the timouses, cardinals, downy woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees, white throated sparrows, and the caroline wrens are still around. I recently realized the Carolina wren has a nest under the garage apartment porch. I haven't seen the brown creeper or the winter wren lately.