Dave Greschner Outdoor Journal – Page 5 – Writing about outdoors and nature

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.

A shutter flush

I tried this for fun. A camera, not a gun. It was mid-September, before the leaves got deep into painting by species. I went looking for ruffed grouse.

I have hunted grouse for years with a camera slung over my back, the telephoto lens precariously swinging into branches and bumping against my back as I crossed uneven ground. On my back the camera is of no use for taking photos of grouse on the fly. The flush happens in an instant, without notice. The camera was for the occasional deer that appears or bittersweet burning orange against autumn’s blue sky.

So I went hunting with a camera to get that first ever—which I find hard to believe—photo of a grouse in flight. If you think targeting a grouse on the fly with a shotgun is hard, try it with a camera. Autofocus is sometimes too slow, or for the person behind the camera it’s too hard to get the focus dots on the rapidly fleeing target as the lens line swings across branches and brush.

I have only a handful of live ruffed grouse photos over many years of pursuing the woods chicken. They are wary, hiding before whirling away in an unnerving racket of pounding wings. Every now and then you can sneak up on one, perhaps on its drumming log, or see a young one on the road. But photographing one in flight? That’s hard.

I wanted to “shoot” the grouse by raising my camera just as I would my shotgun. So I held the camera ready and stepped into the woods. I soon flushed a grouse, but the bird was immediately into too much brush. I moved forward for the reflush, now on high alert, my eyes darting back and forth, my finger on the shutter. I kept walking slowly to avoid the pause that will send the bird into nervous flight too far ahead.

Suddenly the bird burst from the ground. It was close but immediately put a tree trunk between me and my camera. Gone again. And then the scene repeated throughout the afternoon with other birds in other places.

I had given up, but had to walk down a narrow road back to my truck. Suddenly, in the ditch with scattered low bushes and tall, tan grass stems bending with the breeze, I saw movement. My camera came up just as the grouse did, curving away over the field. Click, click, click, click. One of those clicks captured the bird in focus. Finally, I had the photo.

Autumn against the wall

It’s late October and I want to sit on the south side of the old shed, an autumn afternoon’s slanting sunshine on my face, the weathered red boards and my shadow at my back. Today takes me back to that spot, immerses me in memories of when I soaked up the fading warmth of the sun before cold nights and the first snow that stayed under pewter clouds grimacing in the biting winds.

The shed was part grainery, part storage and always home to mice, the mice that never smelled a feed sack they couldn’t chew open. A barn cat was locked in the granary overnight for hunting duty but it didn’t buy into the job. Horse collars, long retired, hung on the wall next to a broadcast seeder that in spring had filled in the spots the wheeled oats drill missed. There was a scythe with a dull blade on the wall, and a tannish baseball inexplicably stuck into a dog collar that hung on a nail.

The sun both soothed and enhanced my senses, already saturated with fall smells of dying grass and fallen leaves. From the other side of the boards through a broken window pane came the waft of spilled oil and fresh oats. I would stare at the pasture and woods for the next passing of anxious blackbirds or a love-struck buck. Across the fields a neighbor’s dog barked. Or was that migrating geese in the distance?

In his book, “The Seasons of America Past,” Eric Sloan writes, “We have actually come to believe today that we must either progress or retrogress … there is no such thing as intelligently remaining stationary.”

I was neither progressing or retrogressing on the south side of the shed. But I remember contentment in my stationary being in late autumn’s sun.

Into the weather

I normally accept weather as it’s handed out, because weather is going to be weather whether I whine or not. So I’m gracious on the good days, stoic on the bad days. I like to ignore the rain and go for a walk, defy the cold and go for a run, and always stay out in the snow, listening for the whisper of white landing on my wool.

But I do prefer my Octobers with some measure of warmth from the slant of the afternoon sun as the crispness of morning settles into a soft breeze to stir the leaves and my ambitions. I like the color of the month, and then the branches as they bare against a blue autumnal sky, revealing nests that were the birds’ task of spring, birds and their young ones now flown away. I love the quiet gathering of darkness after a golden sunset, so still I can hear acorns fall and squirrels scurry in the leaves.

But not this October, not since that first golden week. We settled into too-cool temperatures, too much wind, chilly rain and then those 5 inches of snow on the 20th day of the month, exactly 2 months before the winter solstice. The woodland trail is soggy as I slog for firewood, and the tree stand waits for me as I wait for a bit warmer temperatures in which to hunt deer silently and still, not shivering from the chill.

Yes, I accept the weather but also wait on it, for the sun, the geese against the blue sky, and someone mentioning the last feel of summer. There is firewood to cut, grouse to flush, deer trails to find and wait along, and sandhill cranes to hear barking across the sky, winging high and southward.

The long-range forecast is favorable as Halloween week carries us into November. Favorable for sunshine and temperatures into the 40˚s, perhaps even 50˚. I count on October to exit as nicely as it entered. With that thought I’m going into the weather, hoping it comes along with some warm enthusiasm.

Hunt of many directions

All my shotgun would knock down on this day would be apples. I was hunting for ruffed grouse, but I found smooth-skinned apples, field rocks, bittersweet berries and a hornet nest. That was fine, to just let the autumn day take me in whatever direction for whatever observation it wanted me to absorb.

The tree in the pasture between the woodlot and brush was cleared of apples only as high as a deer can reach. The deer needed some help, so I beat the October winds to the task. I pointed my long-barreled shotgun straight up and tapped branch after branch. Apples tumbled to the ground and rolled to a rest in wet grass. Red on green. A deer’s delight tonight.

I headed back for the woods and the birdy-looking brush. I displaced some grouse without dispatching any. I pushed on, simply happy that a grouse hunt meanders on the whims of wings in October’s color.

Along the fence line I stumbled over a leaf-covered rock pile I did not remember being there. The rocks would be easy pickings if I wanted some in our yard and gardens. But if I took some, would I disturb the homes of weasels and chipmunks and a hundred species of insects, all burrowing in for winter?

Not far away a grayish bald-faced hornet’s nest hung from a branch about 12 feet up in a small maple tree, which was intent on shedding golden leaves and exposing nature’s construction of wonder. By this time in autumn the hornets are dead save for the queen, who will ride out winter nestled under the bark or in the crevice of an old tree. Hornets won’t use the nest again. It would look nice in the back porch. I noted the location.

The hunt moved past the bright orange berries of bittersweet vines and crimson leaves of blackberry bushes. I paused, staring at the color, wondering what direction to take. My pensive pause flushed a wary grouse. I followed its flight.