Category: Winter

Sharing the trail

I don’t know my fellow trail users, and they don’t know me. There’s little chance we’ll ever meet, unless they venture out in the daytime or if I decide to hike at night. For the most part I use the trail by winter’s day, they by cold and starry night. It works out fine.

What also works is the agreement I and the animals have made but never discussed. And it goes like this: They make the trail, I help maintain it.

When I strap on snowshoes after the season’s first snowfall, I wonder if the trail I used last winter through the meadows, woods and fields will still be discernible. It is. The deer, rabbits, coyotes and other critters out there have stayed the course, softly but consistently stepping down the grasses and leaves through the snowless months. I simply follow their shallow depression in the early snow. I’m back on track. Their track.

My part of the deal comes with the first significant snowfall. There’s a path—a furrow in the whiteness—to follow despite the gathering snow. I strap on my largest snowshoes and stomp down the path. Snowshoeing out and back on the trail is a good start to make the going easier for the nighttime users.

Sure enough, when I come back the next day, there are animal tracks in my snowshoe tracks. They have taken advantage of my snow trampling. I know, however, that I’m getting the better of the deal. To follow an animal’s trail through the meadows and fields, over the creeks and into the woodlands is to follow the path of least resistance, established by those who live in those places. Every day and night.

I am always impressed how animals find the best passage through brush, over creeks and up and down hills. I take advantage, realizing I am the interloper here. And I’m just happy I can repay my trail mates in times of snow.

Resolute on the journey

On New Year’s Day morning the birds will flock to the feeder not long after Orion the Hunter has finished stalking the night sky, east to west. Off and on I will watch the variety of birds that frequent this easy, seedy diner.

Another morning. A morning when I have resolutions in my head, some even on paper, as if a cold morning in early winter sparks wanted, or needed, changes in my life. I can hope.

But the birds and all their wild brethren should perhaps be studied and copied more closely for a clue about resolutions. They have none, but they are resolute.

The finches, cardinals and chickadees at the feeder are resolute to survive winter, feeding that internal fire of fat while puffing out feathers for insulation. The birds are resolute to reach a warm day in May, when a nesting urge sends them into song and nest construction.

Whitetail deer are resolute in the woodlands to also survive the season of cold and snow, the does carrying their fawns from fall to spring, from breeding to birthing, from falling leaves to fields of clover.

If the birds and animals are my guide, then my resolution should be to take one day at a time, not rushing time, only following time while allowing it to carry me from season to season, solstice to solstice.

I often exist in fits of hurry, the only order in the day that of what needs attention next. Is everything on my list checked off? Has the day produced something big, at least in my eyes?

Nature, however, pays calm, instinctive attention to the daily small stuff while staying resolute on the big picture, that vast canvas of survival. They paint it slowly, deliberately. I should, too.

Serenity of the solstice

Winter arrives on the calendar this week. On the 21st at 4:02 a.m., to be exact. So what should I expect from this winter? The worst, I suppose, if I so choose to look at it that way.

But what if I expect the best of winter, of the gems to come, hidden in the serenity of snow and cold? These gems will surely turn my head even as I turn my collar to the wind.

It’s already happening. I see the wide flowerheads of faded sedum dressed up in white hats. Chimney smoke curls into the frigid night air, softly illuminated by holiday lights as the wisps of white ghosts tease the crescent moon.

There’s more to come. I’ll see swirls and lines of frost on the window panes of an old shed. An icicle will hang in the bushes, changing colors as it catches the setting sun’s golden rays. The same golden rays that will find their way through a south window, warming a nook for reading a book.

I’ll study tracks in the snow, discovering a rabbit’s night moves to and from the seeds below the bird feeder, and deer sharing my snowshoe path. A cardinal will appear among the first fat snowflakes of an approaching snowfall, flashing its red feathers as a warning to all birds to feed before taking shelter from the storm.

Winter is bright red high-bush cranberries against a backdrop of pine boughs laden with snow, dogs bouncing in the fluffy whiteness with hints of fun on their noses, lake ice booming in the darkness, the lonesome hoots of an owl at midnight, and geese shrouded in the rising steam of river water when the mercury in morning settles at zero.

Perhaps I’ll approach a feeding chickadee, so close I can almost feel the energy of its dime-weight body vibrating to stay warm. Oh, yes, warmth, what we all seek. I’ll carry in an armful of warmth from the wood pile for the late afternoon’s repose, the serenity slipping into a cozy evening and then, quite simply, a morning indoors, warmed by the wood heat and a hot drink.

It’s winter. Sometimes the best of times.

Tracing the changes

There’s white ice now where white trumpeter swans bobbed next to Canada geese on blue-hued water only a week ago. The landscape is changing, and so is the air, colder now and riding the wind across open fields and through bare trees.

It’s cold. But there’s an allure in the briskness. It has something to do with the fascination of change and contrast, from a warm day and open water in late November to the piercing chill and first ice of early December.

Where are the swans today? As I wonder how many will fly south—some do overwinter on our open rivers—a flock of fast-winging ducks passes over on a flight due south. They fly in a V formation like Canada geese, but the ducks are constantly shifting positions in their V. Is it because they fly faster, 20 miles per hour or faster, than geese?

The ground is as hard as the thickening ice. It’s no longer warmed much by the sun, which is getting up late, going down early and staying well low in the southern sky. In another snowless December years ago, I remember the sun slanting in at such a low angle that my little dogs were backlit, outlined in a furry fringe of white against the brown grass.

The dogs paid no mind to the cold or the hard ground. Happy and seemingly incapable of complaining, the scent of a squirrel or rabbit was more important. The dogs are gone now, and I must accept the changes with no complaint. Always changes. Today I trace the sudden vastness and starkness of early winter. Wide open, cold spaces where nature takes its time to recharge. So should we.

Jays brighten the day

Maligned as it may be, the blue jay has never looked so blue or sounded so welcome a note as now across the drab woods and yards of late fall. As winter gathers on the horizon, it’s too easy to assume the countryside is devoid of color and bird sounds.

So I look anew at the jay of blue, wherever it shares its foot-long color. The bird shows at least half a dozen hues of blue in its feathers—violet and azure if you prefer—along with black, white and gray. The tail is barred in black, and on its head is a handsome crest.

I say “shows” blue because, surprise, the blue jay has no blue pigment. In an optical illusion of sorts, the jay’s melanin is actually brown, but we see it, thankfully, as blue when wavelengths pass through pockets of air and keratin in the bird’s feathers, extracting all colors except blue.

No matter what pigment, the blue jay’s colors draw attention to itself. Not that it needs color for attention, for its screech pierces the silent woods and quiet winter yards. The “noise” provides most of the reason we perceive the blue jay as raucous. I read about novelist Stephen King telling of how boredom on his walks invited creativity, so he didn’t open the book he took along “no matter how bored I felt looking at the same old trees and same old chattering, ill-natured jays…” And then I saw outdoor writer Jerry Wilbur noting that chickadees at the feeder in December can be crowded out by “bully blue jays.”

And yet, besides the cardinal, where do we go for such intense color this time of year? The blue jay gives me hope to look for more colors across the drab landscape, like the crimson of oak leaves, the orange of bittersweet, the green of pines, the red head patches of several species of woodpeckers.

I’ve seen and heard a lot of blue jays this fall. Sure, they’re noisy at times and, yes, even raucous. But from the deer stand I’ve studied and listened enough to know that when perched they also emit low mixtures of whistles and sweet chattering, and higher notes like those of a toy trumpet.

Above all, the blue jays are always pretty. And when they fly away I miss them, and wait for the next screech signaling their return of blue.

A hardy half-ouncer

Weighing heavy on my mind these days is a bird that weighs next to nothing. Over the next week, the black-capped chickadee will help perk up slow hours on the deer stand as small flocks of the small bird suddenly come incredibly close, pick at buds on twigs and then move on. Once a chickadee even landed on my nocked arrow. Indeed, keeping matters interesting.

The well-dressed bundle of feathered nervousness, in black, white and gray, with pale chestnut flanks, doesn’t even weigh half an ounce. I would show some nervous energy too if Mother Nature sent me into Ol’ Man Winter weighing about the same as that quarter in your pocket.

But Mother Nature provided the chickadee with feathers full of insulation. That, and its ability to shut down its body temperature at night makes the lightweight bird a heavyweight in matters of survival.

I used to think that chickadees were too high-strung, too cautious, to loiter at the platform feeder. Cardinals and finches settle in for a meal. Chickadees grab and scurry away. But I’ve learned that chickadees often hide seeds, each one in a different spot, and can remember thousands of hiding places. So they flit about in the tree limbs and bushes—their storage units—as much as they visit the feeder.

On a winter’s night the little bird is in a tree cavity, notching down its body temperature and fluffing up its feathers. A half-ounce bird with a half-ton heater. And a mighty good memory.