Surviving the Arctic Cold
We survived the coldest spell that I can remember in central Nebraska. I was awakened two weeks ago by loud pops and cracks of the house at 4:30 am. I got up and looked at the thermometer which had -30 which is scary cold. Apparently my house doesn’t like it that cold. I sat in the living room watching the cattle that are in the field next to the house and got a text from a guy who was night calving he had -36, It really doesn’t matter when it gets that cold. It was so cold that we cancelled school for Monday and Tuesday because of the danger on bus routes.
I got out to do a little scouting as I can get a little stir crazy cooped up in the house and found a lot of deer hanging pretty close to food supplies. I thought about how lucky the deer on the ranch are compared to many others in the West. The deer here in extreme cold tend to hang near the cornfields and hit the alfalfa bales hard and if its really cold they make a nighttime visit to the silage pit. We have no winter die off where a lot of the places I hunt in Colorado and Wyoming really get hit by winter wildlife losses. The unit I hunt in Wyoming for antelope had somewhere between a 50-70 percent die off last year. I took a couple of pictures of some younger bucks who were out and around before my battery got to cold to work. The bucks should be pretty close to shedding their antlers as March is just around the corner.
