I don't know why, but, at pizza night last night, our daughter started reminiscing about a couple summers ago when a family of raccoons lived a block over and took to raiding her sweet corn patch in my garden.

It was actually quite cool to see the family loping around the neighborhood. I think the gait of coons looks like a lope. Not so cool was how they could strip all the perfectly ripe ears in one night.

Somewhere, we heard the way to protect your sweet corn ears from coons was to wrap them in plastic bags. We did and it worked for what corn remained.

Looked all kinds of odd, but worked.

A gray morning with all kinds of cold, cold enough to freeze solid all the remaining puddles from the thunderstorm the other night.

Heard Canada geese in the distance, then couldn't see them.

The belted kingfisher flew off on the north old clay pit, but I couldn't pick it out in the distance.

Then, as the meathead and I neared the bridge over the neckdown between the two old clay pits, I saw 11 Canada geese very quietly swimming by shore of the south old clay pit. Another group of five swam behind them and a group of 13 behind them.

As we crossed the bridge, a pair of geese came in cupped up to land until they saw us, then circled and landed on the west side of the north pit.

Now, I had not heard any shooting this morning, but I am going to make an educated guess that these geese were educated by hunters earlier this morning. They sure looked like they knew there was safety on the town pond.

Smelled skunk as the meathead and I came out of the trail on the old rail bed above the town pond.

Now there is something we don't have too often. Considering we live in a small town in the country, we very rarely see or smell a skunk.

I once asked a state biologist about that and he didn't have a real good explanation other than we might just be lucky. For now.

The flock of 11 geese lifted off and passed overhead as the meathead and I came back into town.

A gray squirrel jumped off down the street as we neared our porch.