Our climate is very mild compared to most at this latitude but birds find it challenging when the temperature gets cold and snow covers the ground. Birds were visiting my birdfeeders with great enthusiasm all day long.
There were Dark-eyed juncos, Spotted towhees, Chestnut-backed chickadees, Red-breasted nuthatches, Hairy and Downy woodpeckers, a Northern Flicker, Song Sparrows visiting the feeders, plus Robins, wrens and various other birds in the trees and thickets. This photo shows mostly juncos, and a towhee.
We have year-round hummingbirds in the Pacific Northwest: Anna's hummingbirds.
The range of Anna’s hummingbirds has moved north over the past two decades, partly due to warming winters, and partly due to people providing feeders and landscaping their residential yards with a variety of plants that extends the flowering season and encourages insect prey for the Anna’s.
The hummingbird feeder was partly snow-covered but a few holes were sheltered from the weather and the hummers had no trouble accessing their sugar water. It’s important to keep their feeder thawed in sub-freezing weather, either bringing it inside overnight, using a warming device, or switching out a freezing feeder with a second one in reserve.
Maintain the 4:1 water:sugar ratio no matter how cold it gets. You aren’t doing hummers a favor with a more concentrated juice: that puts a dangerous strain on their organs.
It snowed all day long and into the night. Temperature hovered around 32ºF/0ºC throughout. I kept waiting for it to change into rain but I went to bed with snow blanketing everything, the iconic “winter wonderland”, very rare in these parts. It didn’t add up to much since the snow only started sticking in the afternoon — maybe 3-5” total.
Woke up the next day to a different world: temperature over 40ºF, and most of the snow melted.
On a short jaunt out to the beach, the roads were wet but clear. Our road department put a lot of hours into plowing and sanding, into the night. I suspect they were having fun being able to use the snow plow, which has been languishing in the back of the shed for years!
By afternoon, our “big snowfall” was a memory.
How about your part of the world? Getting snow, or has spring arrived already?