Dear Chicago

Dear Chicago Weather,

I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all the posts about how Your winters are cold, gray-brown affairs without any charm. I'm sorry for suggesting that our position on Lake Michigan inhibits snow (two significant lake effect events this week). I'm sorry for saying that it's always bitterly cold here with exposed grass in the park. I'm sorry for thinking about how the frequent thaws simply expose the litter and fast-food offal beside the street.

You have proved me wrong this winter. We've already reached our average seasonal snowfall total at O'Hare. I've cross country skied twice--including at Camp Sagawau near Lemont--and likely will ski again this weekend. Temperatures have been really cold. Our heating bills have skyrocketed. Our pipes have frozen.

Please, Chicago Weather, continue to send low pressure systems into the area. Cold air masses that skirt Gulf moisture and dump snow on us. And Panhandle Hooks that rear up from the Southern Plains and feed snowstorms that span from here to Wichita. Please keep the rain-snow line somewhere near Watseka, and send those northeast winds down along the 300-mile fetch of Lake Michigan.

Squirrel roundup

It's been a long fallow period for squirrel news. Then last week came and squirrel updates were all over the place. First, the New York Times covered the ongoing conflict between red squirrels and non-native gray squirrels in Britain and that the Brits are now dining on the indomitable grays. The European red squirrel, by the way, has ear tufts like the Abert's squirrel of the American Southwest.

Then a report came across of an acorn shortage in Illinois and Indiana that is affecting the squirrel population. Local squirrels are behaving even more brazenly than before, this from a genus that produced a creature that once slurped from a disposed cheese cup in my front yard.

Finally, in other wildlife news, a black bear has been seen in northwestern Illinois, the heart of the driftless area, at least a couple hundred miles from where it should be in Wisconsin.

Snowy day

It's snowed a lot here this week! It's been snowing most of the past 24 hours, and I'm guessing we have about 10 inches or so.

Hailing comet

The Chicago Tribune is citing a report that it was a massive collision with a comet that killed off the megafauna of the end of the last glacial period, 13,000 years ago. The event took place not far from Chicago.

The theory has its skeptics, including me. (I've missed 10 years of scholarly study, but why not jump into the conversation?) If I recall my Pleistocene college courses correctly, the glaciers had been surging forward and back for eons when they all receded about the same time as the supposed comet. Because of the current interglacial, the megafauna were wiped out. What exactly caused the interglacial, I'm not sure--maybe that's where the comet comes in.

My favorite Pleistocene mammal: the auroch, which persisted in Europe until the 17th century.

Carp diem

It isn't often that national media report on the news from Pymatuning Lake, which straddles the border of northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, but recently National Public Radio broadcast a story from there. Officials want to change the rules at a reservoir spillway that is a place where "ducks walk on fish" to feed. The spillway is a churning cauldron of carp where people feed the fish and ducks everything from bread to birthday cakes. This inexplicably is a prime tourist attraction in Crawford County, Pa. The hope was that people would stop throwing bread in the water and would instead use meal pellets. Lawmakers are still working on solutions to the problem.

Subtle enjoyment

At first glance, the trip from Cleveland to Chicago via I-90 might be considered a boring one. I beg to differ. Here is the trip in six segments.

Cleveland -- It was 36.1 degrees and windy when we departed from the east suburbs of Cleveland today. There was a Wind Advisory in effect, and indeed the wind was blowing. Aberrant 60-degree temperatures from the day before had cleared the last of the snow in the area. Even the little piles in shopping centers and along highway medians were gone. The grass was surprisingly green. I recorded a red-tailed hawk in the woods of Bratenahl, just north of I-90.

Firelands -- The Firelands are a section just west of Cleveland, mostly in places like Erie County. Cleveland's root date to the time of the colony of Connecticut and the Western Reserve of the tiny state, which once extended in a narrow swath all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of Lake Erie. Along the Firelands, we dropped off the Allegheny Plateau to flatter land. We traversed deep ravines along the Vermillion, Huron and Black Rivers.

Black Swamp -- Most of northwestern Ohio was once a vast, post-glacial swamp known as the Black Swamp. Settlers drained the swamps for farmland soon after arriving in the 19th Century. There are still a few remnants of the swamp, and on a post-thaw day like this many of the rivers overflowed their banks. In Williams County, in extreme northwestern Ohio, there was more snow on the ground than at any other point on today's trip. North-facing slopes held snow, as did a few woodlands.

Michiana -- A region that includes the South Bend-Mishawaka-Elkhart trifecta, Michiana is a land of rivers and creeks and farms and lake-effect snow. It also is home to the RV Hall of Fame, a tantalizing roadside attraction in Elkhart. A couple more red-tails were recorded here, and at least one accipter sat on a fencepost. There was some ice on the agricultural ponds, but mostly it had melted in the big thaw of the past few days.

Dune Country -- Gas-a-roo is a formerly independent gas station on Calumet Avenue in Hammond, Ind., that is now owned by Valero. It's a great place to fuel up on the way back from Ohio or the Dune Country. Here we discovered that the massive snow melt had also occurred in the Chicago region.

Chicago -- Our city was icebound when we left on Wednesday. There's nary a trace of snow now, except a few black piles of a snow-like substance along a few highway medians. This now is the wettest year in recorded Chicago history--for the second time this year the Des Plaines River is flooding.

The final tally: seven red-tails, three accipters (sharp-shinned hawks or cooper's hawks), at least four dozen white-tailed deer, acres of flooded farmland and a winter jaunt across a lovely landscape.

Cold facts

I've been a little obsessed with the weather lately. Today is no exception: the temperature right now in Uptown is -0.9 degrees (or degree?). It's bright and sunny and absolutely frigid. I decided to hop around Weather Underground a little and discovered that it's a relatively balmy 17.9 degrees in Christmas, Mich. Christmas is on the northern edge of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and we camped there last May. So 300 or so miles north of here it's actually "warmer." I also checked International Falls, Minn., typically a really cold place, and it's actually "warmer" there, too, at 1.2 degrees (really just across the Ontario border in Fort Frances according to Weather Underground). I'm hoping to actually get outside and ski or something one of these days and have a more active driftless area post.