Frozen

We were lucky last year to have a mild winter.  Well, lucky is a two-way sword because without cold enough temperatures to kill insects that are over-wintering, then we had a worse insect problem during the summer than in past years.  However, that changed last week.  On Friday, we had really nice spring-like weather.  Temperatures almost in the 70s.  Then early Saturday morning the wind changed to the north and brought in what the TV weather folks called the polar vortex.  Brrrrr.  They weren't kidding.  The temperature plummeted all day.  In fact, the warmest temperature of the day was at about 6:00 am!

It snowed a bit, but not much and it did not stick to the roads.  So, that much was great.  However, by Saturday night the temperatures were in the teens and by daybreak they were in the single digits.  Yeah, I know there are readers who will laugh at me for whining over our  cold weather when this is the norm for them in the winter.  Just call me a wimp, okay!

Honestly, though, I didn't start this out to whine about the cold weather.  I wanted to share some of our bird feeding issues that come along with freezing weather.  A few years ago I wrote about feeding the birds.  Bird Feeders

The last picture in that article shows how we kept our birdbath from freezing using an electric de-icing pad.  As it turned out, it did not work very well, mainly because it kept causing the electric circuit where it was plugged in to blow a switch which, in turn, caused several of the outlets in our kitchen to switch off!  Not good.  We ended up discarding that and just taking out fresh water every day.  Normally, this was enough because if the temperature was near 30 degrees and the sun was out, then the water would stay unfrozen until nighttime.

During the polar vortex we just experienced, the birdbath water froze solid and Tom had to chip some of the ice out in order to add fresh water.  That turned out to be harder than it looked and took a lot of time. Did I mention my husband is not a fan of cold weather?

The problem was that it did not get warm enough during the day to keep the water from freezing solid again within just a few minutes, and eventually, the birdbath was full of frozen water.

So, he decided to just take out a disposable pie tin full of fresh water.

This worked pretty well because it was easy to dump out the ice when it froze and fresh water could be added.  His feathery friends were very thankful.  

I think the solution is to get a heated dog bowl for the birds.  I've heard these work well.  Of course, the polar vortex is over and warmer weather has arrived.  In fact, temperatures are forecast to be in the 60s this weekend.  We will think spring has arrived!