The view from the middle of Lake Appert near the end of 2017.

May everyone ave a healthy, happy new year!

Six of us Celery Farmers braved the cold and wind to clean out the Wood Duck nesting boxes on Lake Appert and put in fresh sawdust.

If you check out the one photo below, you can see the little ladder that baby Wood Ducks climb to leave the nest the day they hatch in the spring.

(The photo on the right by Jerry Barrack is of a male and female Wood Duck atop one of the boxes in the spring.)

Most of the boxes had at least one unhatched Wood Duck egg, A few of them exploded on the ice, which made me jump at first.

Bird of the day -- the only bird of the day -- was  a Bald Eagle.

We did the maintenance on five of the seven boxes.The other two were broken.

One had been ripped down by skaters some time yesterday, so we will have to replace it.

Ditto one that hockey players destroyed last year.

Just like the Wood Duck boxes, there can be a bad egg or two.

On Monday, Deb Endresen asked: What plant is this? My husband saw it on the golf course around the corner [in North Jersey].

The answer, thanks to Deedee Burnside and Ginny Chucka: Jimsonweed or Thornapple, a.k.a. Jamestown Weed, Mad Apple, Devil’s Trumpet, Locoweed, or Stinkwort, (This plant must have had  a great marketing team!)

More on Jimsonweed here.

Not sure if he or she was eying the birds at the feeders or not, but the wind was doing a job on his/her feathers.

Waited a while for him/her to fly so that I could look for a leg band.  Must be a no-fly zone. (I'd like to think it's Laura.)

By popular demand (of the Demarest Garden Club), I'll be giving a  talk and slide show on my book "The Nature of the Meadowlands" next Friday (Jan. 5) at 2 p.m.

The talk, which will be at 109 Hardenburgh Ave. in Demarest, will feature some of the book’s amazing nature photography and archival images -- including Snowy Owls.

The talk is free and open to the public.

A Star-Ledger review of the book is here.