I'm surrounded - send Alfred Hitchcock!

[Richard Flanders]

Yesterday evening gave me something new in the bird world here. I was watching through the big front window, waiting for them to start coming in and come in they did. I watched two birds come in hot and disappear under the snow for a few seconds then pop just their head up a few feet from where they "crashed" in. I knew they did that and have seen their holes here before, but have never actually seen it happen. It happens very fast, so fast that you can't even tell exactly how they enter the snow; they just come in hot and disappear. Very cool. It's a great survival technique for evading night time predators. Ptarmigan do the same thing. I had a ruffie burrow at least 6ft here on the pad once. A predator like a marten will come around poking their head into the entry hole looking for a meal, which alerts the bird which busts out feet away to make a safe getaway. I did see one failure of this in the forest near here some years back. I was wading through knee deep snow hunting at -20F and came upon a feather pile next to a 12ft high spruce snag. An owl had clearly seen the entry hole and sat on the snag waiting for the grouse to emerge and jumped him when he did. Pretty smart owl. The snag was stained with a lot of scat and was clearly a regular perch for the owl. The grouse picked the wrong spot for his night roost.