A Lot of Snow Shoeing, A Little Birding on a Sunday

I went off in search for solitude this morning with my snow shoes, binoculars and camera to take advantage of the snow as it will most likely be gone tomorrow with all of the rain we are foretasted to get this evening into Monday. I decided to stay local with my first stop being Martha Deerling in Millbury. The first thing I heard when I got out of my car was a Hairy Woodpecker so I took it as a good sign.
There were pockets of birds here and there including a Red-bellied Woodpecker, the usual Blacked-capped Chickadees, White-breasted Nuthatches, Golden-crowned Kinglets and of course the Tufted Titmouse, but was very happy to get this Brown Creeper above that I crept up on which is hard to do with snow shoes believe me! ;-)
After that it was one of my favorite places for birding in town which is Brierly. The first thing I noticed was how devoid of bird song it was. Usually the area is alive with song, today the only sound that could be heard was the crunching of snow being made from my snow shoes.
The picture above is one of my favorite places of all here as it is full of warblers in the spring including Chestnut-sided, American Redstart and Common Yellowthoat, also good for various vireos and one of my favorites the Veery. Today, I was lucky to get an American Robin taking advantage of the bittersweet that is mixed in with the wild vegetation.
One of the best things about the snow is the fact that it's a lot harder to get lost which allowed me to explore various paths here that I was reluctant to do before. It was obvious others have been there recently with the snow mobile tracks and cross country tracks so took my time exploring every nook and cranny of the place. Of course these nifty new arrows the mountain bikers have put up recently did indeed help as well as my own snow shoe tracks should I lose my way.

I got a new phone a couple of weeks ago and I absolutely love it. It's the new Droid and has a lot of cool features including this device called ITracks which is a navigation device of sorts you can use while hiking, running, etc. It basically maps and tracks your route which is awesome for a data dweeb such as myself.
As you can see, I took my sweet old time wondering about and plus it's much harder to be fast when trudging through snow with snow shoes on. Hard for me though as I am used to doing a 3 mile run in a half an hour, but I keep reminding myself I am out there for nature not exercise.

Will probably not blog much this week as with work and all but be sure I will be out there next weekend. Take care all!