FRIENDS
OF LATODAMI ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION CENTER
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Latodami Journal- February 2005 Latodami The mercury is still shrunken
and shivering in the thermometer—14oF at Still, the birds seem to know something important. Even a hawk’s arrival doesn’t squelch their singing. Without warning the big bird appeared, drifted silently over the pond, spread its broad wings and red tail hugely before a maple’s topmost twigs, dropped lightly onto one, shivered to settle its feathers, and now gazes down upon us with the cold haughtiness of a Caesar. Unimpressed, a jay looks it directly in the eye—well, directly at the back of its head, then—from only feet away and insults its parents. The little birds sing on. Another big bird
arrives, but with far more noise and far less grace. A pileated
woodpecker flashes black and white over the pond, lands smack against the
side of pine. It’s just passing
through, though, and soon rattles away, northward along At last the hawk turns to the jay, considers the odds of catching it, I suspect, decides against that futility, unfurls its great white sails and gently floats northward to the meadow. Soon I follow. In the woods and at the meadow’s edge, titmice, chickadees, and cardinals join the chorus. The air is warming. There’s something contagious in their songs and the sunshine. I feel like snapping my fingers at the naked branches, the cold hard snow, and anything else that would dare remind me that this is, after all, only very early February. For here are the bluebirds, a flock of them, flashing bright blue through the trees and over the dead brown grasses, warbling their brief song. And now there are robins, too. One is perched in a small tree, nibbling the rose hips that clasp the trunk and dangle from the branches. A mockingbird arcs from a bluebird house to the hedgerow. The meadow seems ready to burst with life. The snow itself bespeaks the abundance of life. Tracks of deer and small birds, of mice and shrews and the gray cat that stalks them, tell tales of passage and, in a trampled and blood-spattered patch of grass, of capture. In the snow beneath the Asian bittersweet lie hulls of the orange berries. This invasive worries me: the vines swarm so eagerly, so inexorably, into and over the trees. I’m reminded of pirates. But in their turn, the birds swarm over the bittersweet. The balance is beyond my wisdom. Certainly, though, there is abundance here, of birds, of berries, and of the million grasping little weed seeds that have leaped from the grasses to my pant legs. Beneath the privet bushes lay black paper-thin skins. Something is eating the seeds, Meg says. That would seem like an act of desperation, were there not an abundance of other food. Privet seeds would seem to have the nutrition and digestibility of bird shot. Nonetheless, in spite of all the eager little weed seeds and the plump masses of bittersweet still hanging in the trees, something seems to like privet. That’s good. Despite the joy of this interlude, blizzards surely still await us. Privet may look good to others on some frozen March day. Grom Run is next on my itinerary. But as I turn downhill, the broad wings and long tail of a northern harrier sweep over the meadow. I’m too startled and impressed for political correctness. I stammer “marsh hawk” and point with a thick gloved hand. What effect that big hawk must have on the little mammals of the field as it looms above them, I can only dimly imagine. Now on to Grom Run. At first, I notice that the stream is frozen, snow-covered, and busy with animal tracks. There are a few dark irregular openings. The waters hurry through them, rustling gently. Mostly, the stream runs unseen beneath the snow. But there’s a pattern in the tracks. Most belong to deer and raccoons, with a rabbit or a squirrel appearing here and there. Some are just crossing over. But most run right down the middle of the stream in a well-trampled little path. Grom Run has become a highway for the four-footed. It works for the two-footed, too, in the upstream sections. Downstream, though, the openings increase and the ice makes alarming sounds as I walk. I give the road back to those who made it and walk the banks. And now I notice a difference in the stream’s open runs. Last week, the edges of those openings reminded me of a phalanx of spears, advancing. Today they are shelves of smooth rounded lobes. They glisten as they melt. This is the look of retreat. Back at the pond’s edge, I’m torn between two interests. In front of me, two golden-crowned kinglets are frisking a hemlock. Behind, a red-tailed hawk just screamed—maybe. There’s a counterfeit note in that scream that whispers, “blue jay”. I stay with the kinglets. I’d rather watch their exuberant acrobatics than risk turning to gaze into a smirk on a long blue face. A drop falling through the sunshine draws me even from the kinglets. It looks like sap dripping from a maple. Now that’s a sign of spring! In my haste to reach the tree’s trunk, I impale my eye on a twig. The tree is weeping from a broken branch. I’m weeping too, on my left side. On my right, though, I’m laughing. As I walk to the car, torn between worry for the eye and joy of spring, I idly tear sticky little seeds and their threadlike stems from my coat and pant legs. But Meg sees me as I pass the barn, examines my little travelers, and informs me that they’re buttercup seeds. I like that. I’m not tossing hobos off the train. I’m planting buttercups. Latodami, Several inches of snow fell yesterday. This morning, the trees are unloading their burden in cold white puffs. One just slipped down my neck. One would think that would cure spring fever, but it hasn’t. Cardinals and titmice are calling from the trees; the first grackle appeared at the feeder yesterday. What’s a little snow when the birds are testifying to spring? I’m late today, though, and by the time I reach the windmill, the serenades have ended. I’ve arrived during a lull when, I suppose, the birds find food or rest and preen as need demands. The only sounds are those of my boots softly scrunching the snow. The only signs of life are tracks: a dog and its owner, several deer, and a fox. I see neither mouse nor bird tracks. Perhaps the snow cover is too new to be laced with the subnivean labyrinth and, with nowhere to go yet, the mice are curled up in warm places they know. Minutes slip past the apple tree. The lull continues: no sparrows in the grasses, no cardinals in the bittersweet. But there is movement, finally: a mockingbird appears on one of the windmill’s braces halfway up. It seems to be drinking snow. It scoops something from the metal surface, tips its head back, swallows, and scoops again. After several sips, it wipes its bill on a twig, flutters into the bittersweet vines, tugs off several berries, and quietly disappears. After a few more minutes, I follow it into the woods. The scene is a study in white on brown on white with blue above. Every twig and branch is loaded to twice or thrice its diameter with snow. Feathery white clouds float above. The pines hold cotton balls in their long green fingers. Now the wind is rising, though, and all through the grove, is tearing at the cotton. The balls tumble away, then fall gently until a gust blows them into clouds of fine crystals that drift, glittering, to their brethren below. Lovely, but most unspringlike! The fox tracks continue until they reach an old groundhog hole. Around the hole, muddy little prints seem to be coming and going. Though the mice may be resting, their predators certainly aren’t—probably can’t. I have read that late winter is the hungriest time: the pantries grow bare. Again at the meadow’s edge, an orange and white cat prowls from the hedgerow toward me. After it disappears into the underbrush, I follow its footsteps in reverse. It walked a zigzag path from one tuft of grass to the next. Its way seems to have been pretty random. With neither tracks nor tunnel entrances to focus on, it seems to have checked just about every possibility. The hedgerow is laced with rabbit tracks and littered with their droppings. The cat investigated them much as I am doing now, but its single, closely spaced prints say that it saw no more of the rabbits than I see now. The sky, from the meadow’s northern edge, is now covered by a light cover of scalloped clouds. That herringbone design indicates atmospheric instability, or so stated a field guide. Perhaps a second front approaches. Indeed, a large white cloud bulges up from the western horizon. Cardinals and titmice are calling from the woods again, and a flock of bluebirds passes over, twittering. A bluebird house stands among the brown grasses and naked multifloral rose in the meadow. A layer of snow a couple of inches thick lays on its tan angled roof. Icicles hang from the roof’s lower edge and block the entrance hole, rather like stalactites before a cave’s mouth. So very unspringlike! But one of the bluebirds lands on the roof’s sharp peak—and warbles his little song. He’s just a silhouette, his song is brief, and he soon leaves with the flock, lest he be left behind. Nonetheless, and despite my heavy boots and the snow, I skip for a couple of steps. The rasping of a nuthatch, then the loud rattle of a pileated woodpecker call me into the woods. I knew the woodpecker was close, but here it comes, a huge black and white form flashing red as it ricochets from tree to tree. It approaches, it passes, and it’s gone. The woods would seem empty, but there’s the nuthatch, chuckling to itself as it scrambles up a dead branch, then back down the oak’s trunk, poking and pecking at every crevice along the way. Less quickly than the woodpecker’s, but nonetheless at last, the little bird’s search for lunch carries it deeper among the trees and away. In the meantime, the titmice have begun another census: one nearby calls, is answered by one across the meadow, then by another yet farther away, and so on out of my range of hearing. I’d love to know how far the chain reaches, the object of the exercise, the conclusion the population comes to, and how they manage to conclude anything at all. I’m sure it isn’t some idle exercise. I just don’t know what they’re up to. Anyway, this census devolves into a whistling contest between the nearby titmouse and his closest neighbor. After a while, the neighbor leaves or stops calling and my titmouse, with the stage to himself, enlarges upon his theme. Titmice have a voluminous repertoire. My friend in the nearby oak is showing off his and, in the process, laying claim to the woods around Boy Scout post #21. He is a proud, pert little fellow, hopping lightly from twig to twig and from tree to tree. He seems to be calling out the boundary line of his territory, for his tree-hopping is on a rather straight line into the woods. I wonder if he did circle his territory, to appear from the opposite direction sometime later. I wish I’d waited to see. Perhaps I’ll come back to post #21 on another day. My lunch is calling, but on the way down to the parking lot, I find another area of virgin snow sparkling in the sunshine. At first, only the largest gleams catch my eye, and none are glittering in color. As I look, though, millions of tiny pink and green sparkles seem to leap out from the featureless white of the snow. I’m reminded of how, at dusk, the very brightest stars appear from a starless sky, then are followed as the darkness deepens and my eyes widen by more stars and still more until I’m gazing into black velvet strewn with a myriad of diamonds. And again I’m reminded that much that is worthwhile takes time. Indeed, that’s the meaning of “worthwhile.” As I’m approaching my car, Meg’s beehive reminds me of Bernd Heinrich’s study of honeybees on sunny late-winter days (in Winter World). He wondered why some bees left the hive on days too cold for them to survive and, after watching periodically, concluded that the hive sends scouts to search for early blooming flowers at every break in the weather. For most, it’s a suicidal mission but, occasionally, a scout returns with news that enables the hive to restock its dwindling supplies. I wonder if there is evidence of that at Meg’s hive. There is. One bee lies dead inches from the doorway. Two others are crawling sluggishly up the hive wall. They are able to climb only an inch before falling back. A fourth has made it into the air. She buzzes by my ear on a straight line away from the hive door. I can’t see where she’s headed. As Heinrich watched, many of those that flew off only managed to fly a few yards before the cold air numbed them and they plummeted into the snow to die. I fear that scout #4 met that fate. Too soon. Too soon. ----
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