The news of the lake is not all that exciting from a Winter Sports point of view. We are finally getting some weather that is below the average temperatures for the date but there are still more days when it is warmer than average. People are still playing golf at Kingswood Golf Club although recently they are a little more bundled up than a month ago.
Snow is not on the ground and the weather forecasters are worried about having a white Christmas. The lake is not near freezing, either, so ice skating seems a bit far off. With about 10 days to go until Christmas, there is little really cold weather coming for that time period.
A week ago, there were five loons seen off Brummit Island but they were probably migrating and not the ones we had last summer. Buffleheads and Hooded Mergansers (two kinds of ducks) are still seen in flocks and there is an occasional grebe who show up sometimes in the late Fall. One of the things that seems to be a daily event happens on Stamp Act Island. It seems that there is a crow meeting there every day with hundreds, or maybe on some days, thousands of crows. With that many birds, it gets quite noisy. A crow probably finds an owl or hawk and then yells and screams about it which draws more curious crows. It is quite a sight to see hundreds of black birds flying to or from the island. Huge flocks are seen in the fields around the lake as well.
The lake level is getting down to its “winter” level but just when it gets down a bit, it rains again and it has seemed to rain hard every now and then. There has been ice on some of the swampy areas but the lake, itself, has not frozen over any night yet. The first freeze or two usually breaks up and has lots of “ice cubes” showing up on the downwind shores but none have been seen yet.
The biggest change, here, is the new web site format. It looks great and from my point of view it is much easier to work with. The old one would sometimes “eat” my articles and I would have to start over. Thank you Rich and Dave Masse! Making significant changes to a web site is never easy but they have done it! They have preserved the webcam (this wasn’t as easy as it might seem) and they have allowed people to see the old website as well. Amazing what volunteers will do!
Peter Goodwin
