having grown up around the finger lakes, the variations are tremendous, In my sports car days in the Glen Region SCCA, there were solo races on Waneta, and the small lake my parents live on has frozen to over two feet thick more than once. But even Keuka takes a special winter to freeze solid around the bluff.
There was a story in the paper during a bitter winter several years ago about a very elderly man who walked his great grandson across Seneca around Hector, as his great granddad had done with him we he was a lad. the lake had frozen shore to shore at the shallower southern end only twice in about hundred years.
I remember my father telling of some con artist who sold Seneca Lake water to folks in Corning for their radiators in the '20s- selling it on the fact that Seneca water never froze.
there were plenty of birds in the little bays on Seneca when I ran down to see my parents during the recent cold snap.