Now, when wildlife food it sparse, is an opportunity to see results of yard, garden, and woodlot plantings that supplement birds’ and mammals’ needs.

Several common shrubs and small trees, including crabapples, grapevines, winterberries, hackberries, and ornamental landscape pears, hold their fruits into winter. Various birds, including cedar waxwings, carryover robins and bluebirds, and woodpeckers resort to a frugivorous lifestyle when snow and freezing make it so.

Often the fruits are frozen solid but soften during warm spells and can be torn apart and eaten in pieces, holding animals for long feeding periods.

It is easier to plant for winter animals’ needs than spring or summer, when those needs can be met naturally.

Last weekend’s early catch and release trout season was an example of what this season could be when near-record highs put early spring on the plate for anglers.

To an angler, it was the weather that had them excited, even more than a 12- and 17-inch brown trout caught in an unnamed tributary to better known water.

This near-perfect bluebird day, named for the sky color not a bird or a spring season, brought and kept fly-fishers and spin-anglers out much of Saturday’s opener.

Still the water was a bit cloudy, but most runoff didn’t reach the streams to cool the water.  A few clouds could have been ordered in, too.

A spin-fishing angler described a 17-inch brown almost lumbering toward the required lure before taking it in as though the entire episode was in slow motion. Another 12-inch brown acted similarly.

There will continue to be days like this before the May opener.

Wait them out and be ready to snap them up.

The last of seven deer seasons came to an end as sun set on the Holiday Hunt. A teenager from Berlin, Germany, an exchange student exploring the Coulee Region near La Crosse for the year, took a couple practice shots before bolting in a third round and downing a deer.

Marieke Kuchenbecker had never handled a gun before because there are few wild animals in her home area and guns are not allowed there. She taught us a lesson in fully appreciating what helps make Wisconsin “Wisconsin”.

Her mentor, Gregg Sikora, of Stoddard, remarked that a young hunter is more likely to listen and follow directions because she knew basically nothing about the outdoors. The rest of us who think we know a little or a lot are less likely to pay attention, and maybe appreciate the opportunity, it seems.

More bobcats were reported, confronted and marveled in southern Wisconsin this past year. One large male (tom) stood his ground as an archer walked out of the woods, while the female (queen) was more timid. The pair raised three kittens during the season.

New or improved turkey calls are coming onto the market just as harvest authorization cards arrived in the mail with results of the awards. (Zone 1, Period B, for me.)

Wintertime events, contests, classics, and expos are showing up as advertisements.

It’s fine to rush spring a little, by testing germination of carryover seeds and seed-saving harvest of others. One of four Fortex pole bean seeds germinated. Twenty-five percent is not a good enough rate.  Slugs came out of the plant pot and ate the cotyledons and young stem. They do this in a garden, too.  Try diatomaceous earth powder.

It takes about a week to indoors-force blooms from pussy willow stems given warmth, water and light.

Winter is returning, water is refreezing, but given a meager chance spring-like things are willing to take an opportunity to bring on a smile.

— Jerry Davis is an Argyle native and a freelance writer who lives in Barneveld. He can be reached at sivadjam@mhtc.net or at 608-924-1112.