See larger views of these winter bird images .. or click on the thumbnail images below.
Lake Geneva is 21 miles in circumference – I’ve GPS’d it and even put together a Lake Geneva Shore Path trail guide for those of you who would like to hike or run it. Within the vast amount of open water is where many people play in the summer. The lake is home and habitat to many wildlife species, including mink, ground hogs, muskrats and a large variety of birds.
Winter time provides challenges to the variety of birds that don’t migrate from the area. As the cold weather freezes large portions of the lake the birds are challenged to find and share smaller and smaller “pools” of open water surrounded by ever encroaching ice.
The winter pictures below show one of the coldest winters I remember where the only open water that I could see was in Fontana. An ever shrinking pool of open water forced the coots, redhead ducks, geese and other species to “layer” themselves within the pool in hopes of surviving the bitter cold and its effects. I found a goose, who is much larger than the other birds, laying asleep atop of coots and redhead ducks as the snow fell softly upon his sleeping back. A coot opted to run through the snow on the ice as he no longer had the strength or another place to go. A constant threat to these birds is the potential of their own weakness to not only the elements but to other predators beyond the elements.
So as winter challenges all of us to some degree or another, think of the wildlife out here constantly working with the conditions that come moment by moment and day to day …
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