The Second Storm in the Second Week

The second storm surge descended upon our prairie home just a week after the first blizzard's flakes had started to settle into a deep cold layer cake.  The wind whirled its patterns from a different direction and piled the snow yet higher and higher.
The seven foot high drift in front of our office door lengthened and widened its form, but grew no higher from the second snow.
Out on our grounds at the Plains Conservation Center, one of the sod buildings echo's a distant past and provides excellent spots for creatures to hide from the wind and snow.
Any shelter in a storm. The ever present cotton tail rabbits use the buildings for shelter to the point of burrowing through the sod walls.
Sometimes even a few old farm implements are sufficient to create a buffer from the wind as this black-tailed jack rabbit shows.
Sometimes the jacks would be found just crouching in a snow bank, and look quite perturbed as you trundled past their spot forcing them to take notice.
Another hare huddled in an icy den isn't quite sure whether to flee or freeze...
Adjacent to our bird mews, the bare poplars would host dozens of English sparrows and an occasional finch.  Were they waiting for the sun, or creating a target rich area for some wandering Cooper's Hawk?
No storm lasts forever, and by the afternoon of December 29th, the clouds parted letting the sun reveal yet another landscape sculpted by Mother Nature's breath.

A few days would pass and bring in the new year with yet our third storm in as many weeks, setting all types of records no doubt, helping the winter wheat crop, but wreaking havoc on the far eastern plains of Colorado into western Kansas and Nebraska.

Winter was truly upon us and we have months to go before the season turns once more.

 

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