The January sun(s)

Here we are in almost mid-January and I can just about count the hours of sunshine that we've had this month on the fingers of my two hands. It's a gray, dreary, foggy, misty, rainy, chilly, cloud-covered month of depressing sameness so far. The only suns that my garden has seen lately are these two.

This Talavera sun hangs on the fence in the sitting area in the front yard, under my beloved red oak tree.

This metal sun overlooks my backyard garden and brings a bit of cheery color to these gray days.

Winter has, in fact, arrived here at long last. Our daytime temperatures are in the 40 degrees F., a bit too chilly to be entirely comfortable sitting outside for long periods. On the night of January 7, we finally had a REAL frost when the thermometer hit 30 degrees F. That's still our low temperature for the season so far.

But if winter has finally come to my yard, the birds most definitely have not.

In past winters, by mid-January this feeder in my front yard would have been swarmed by American Goldfinches, Pine Siskins, Northern Cardinals, Chipping Sparrows, etc. Not this year. I wasn't really expecting siskins this winter, but WHERE ARE THE OTHERS? I've never experienced such an absence before. It is a very worrying phenomenon. Rachel Carson, in 1962, wrote about a Silent Spring that would come if we didn't make changes in our farming practices. I'm experiencing a silent winter, for reasons that I don't understand, and I don't like it one little bit.