Blizzard Over Balling And Another Walk

We got a fantastic load of snow! Winters are so much better when white, it extends the day by many hours, brightening up those otherwise pitch black mornings and afternoons. Another benefit is that you have to drag your lazy Christmas-food-filled-carcass away from the top spot in front of the telly - probably loosing that very special extra comfy chair to an even lazier relative - to do your duty and clean the footpath.

The first couple of times every year it is actually quite fun and there is nothing wrong with the exercise. This year we had hired some exceptionally eager foreign labor aka little G. Who by pure spirit and determination easily compensated for her less than mediocre broom handling skills :-) She indeed enjoyed the task so much that it is still talked about how the snow, in a miraculous manner, disappered from around Casa Larsen that Christmas 2009.

Shoveling the footpath is one thing, cleaning the roads is another! As the layer of snow thickened we were actually getting slightly worried that we would have trouble making our way down to the "summerhouse" where we had our accommodation. However driving in snow is much better than driving on ice, so as long as you do not go at an excessive speed you have quite good grip in newly fallen snow.

We easily maneuvered the Volvo and ourselves through the most fantastically cozy winter landscape anybody can imagine :-)

Apart from battling snow in various ways, we managed to do good solid walk nearly every day. As stated in the earlier post there is wildlife around, however, it is not always straight forward to "capture" it. The dobbeltbekkasin (Common Snipe) was particularly difficult - during the two weeks I was home I saw maybe 20, but the best picture I got is the one below :-/ Those Danish birds are smart ones! :-)

A less secretive bird roaming the Danish landscape during winter is the Common Buzzard (Musvåge). Driving around you will see them sitting next to the roads at elevated posts scouting for anything mouse-sized and edible, they will sit there for hours .. or until you step out of the car and start fiddling with the camera gear and they are gone.

Lots of snow is, however, great news for mouse-sized edible creatures, since the buzzard along with most other predators have a hard time hunting creatures hidden by 25cm of snow - 2010 will be a big mouse year :-)

Danish Winter "Bushwalk"

One of the things you learn as a Dane is to seize the day - carpe diem - at least during winter! The day is so short that you just have to get out there and do stuff while the sun is visible or you will hit a winter depression as dark as a ploughed field around Balling - we got some super rich dark soil up there! :-)

Jet-lagged or not, quitting was no option and we hit the fields for a brisk "bushwalk" around Balling - the brisk part was mostly just to keep warm ;-)

Walking around down here in Australia, I cannot help falling into the trap of remembering Denmark as a place without nature. That is absolutely rubbish, of course we have! However we have only tiny tiny bits of nature that have been allowed to develop freely since the last ice age (ice ages have the habit of resetting the countryside in a quite dramatic way - a bit like wiping a blackboard clean). All the human manipulated nature is not all bad though, heaps of wildlife lurking around; deer, hare, fox and lots of birds - even during winter.

Ah well, enough of all this nature talk lets see some windmills I can imagine you asking(?) Jep, jep - no worries any landscape photographer in Denmark (at least in the dark end of Jutland) will either have to be a contortionist or skilled in the art of Photoshop to avoid catching a few mills per picture .. that is obviously not right .. if you are standing in a valley :-)

It was a fantastic day for walking. We started out with the mist lying so thick that we should have brought machetes to cut through, as we moved along on our two hour hike, it cleared up so well that conditions were nearly rivaling a blue-blue Australian desert sky.


Great guns, super duper walk and as we arrived at the house I managed to take advantage of the light by taking some close-ups in the garden. A bit of snow brightens up everything including pictures and plants are excellent stand ins as models they do not complain and will stand still if conditions are right :-)

While I was running around I noticed that I started getting streaks in the photos from snow flakes falling down, strange we had just managed to get a blue sky and everyone knows that snow never stays around Denmark for long .. and then it started to snow for real!! to be continued