Yeah, Mike, I moved to the Adirondacks from TX last fall. I'm loving it!
I left my wife to choose what kind of birthday trip she wanted (big of me, eh? 
) and she decided she wanted to go up to Parc nacional du-Mont Tremblant, somewhat north of Montreal. I pointed out to her that winter likely still held more than a little sway up there, but that remained her pick.
Sure enough, there was over a foot of snow almost everywhere, and the lakes were still almost entirely iced over. We tried snowshoe hiking one of the park's accessible trails on our first day there but the snow was too much of a combination of slush, snow and ice for us to get very far. Almost the entire next day there was a chilly rain and mist everywhere. The last day was nice enough and the rain had cleared enough of the slush and ice, though, that we were able to hike another park trail pretty well without snowshoes by carefully walking on top of the ridge of hard-packed snow left by the winter's previous snowshoe trekkers. That hike paid off with an extended, close-up opportunity to watch a river otter hunting a deep, clear pool on a stream and then water-slide down the stream's rapids, too. (You'd think they'd end up all bruised and battered they way they allow themselves to bounce off all those rocks in that rushing water!) The loud water, along with our careful approach to every water body we saw, helped keep the otter from knowing it had an audience to its shenanigans. 
The best way we could think of to enjoy the cold, rainy/misty day was to cruise the park's accessible road, and that did at least turn up several ruffed grouse (no spruce grouse as we were hoping for) and also my first wild snowshoe hare (almost entirely white with one small spot already turned brown). On a river running alongside the road we also saw some Canada geese, and on another river outside our cabin we saw some buffleheads and common mergansers.
On the drive back, too, we swung quite a bit east to look for waterfowl around a well-known stretch of the St. Lawrence River. Found plenty! I haven't looked at my wife's pictures yet to see whether any look good enough to share here, but there were countless snow geese, quite a few Canada geese (didn't see any brants or other Canada goose look-alikes, that I could tell) and a lot of ducks. The ducks I saw were more bufflehead, northern pintail (probably my favorite species), gadwell, ring-necked, (I believe lesser) scaup, green-winged teal and American black. Oh, and mallard, of course. I believe my wife saw at least a few more species (which I can't think of), but she worked it harder than me. There were also a couple of northern harriers hunting a marshy spot - and a peregrine falcon flying menacingly low over an especially duck-rich area! It sure looked as if the peregrine was hunting, but if so, why didn't it grab any one of the many (literally) sitting ducks assembled beneath it?
Hey, a few snow geese just flew by my window overlooking Lake George, even as I wrote this! As I said, I'm loving it!
Thanks again to y'all for your recommendations even though we didn't end up using any of them. We'll definitely keep them on hand for another trip soon.
Gerry
P.S. added by edit: I know my wife was really hoping to see some wolves in the national park - she's always hoping to see wolves whenever we're within their range, and I nearly lost her to a graduate project on the species in far northern Labrador back when we were dating - and though we weren't that lucky, we did find some tufts of fur and a few tracks that we feel pretty sure were from the species. Maybe next time...
Statistics: Posted by gbin — April 24th, 2014, 1:05 pm