Moose1am

We had several things that worked against us last winter, besides just above normal temps. One was the fact that when we had drawn the lake down about 2 feet, we got a rapid melt off of a 12 inch Christmas snow. That on frozen ground refilled the lake to above normal and kept it there through much of the few cold spells we did have later.

You are right about the gulls. 2 years ago we had a very high level shad kill and about 6-8 inches of solid ice. When that began to melt enough to open a few holes, we have thousands of gulls and more than a dozen Bald Eagles that just moved in and stayed for the party. Eagle watching provided a popular side effect of our shad control project. They made themselves much more watchable than normal, partly I think because they were so full of shad they didn't want to fly unless forced to. Thay also sat around on the ice watching the holes.