6:52 a.m. 39 degrees, wind N 1 mph. Sky: nearly empty baby blue, a single rose-colored cloud, spindly, and frayed. Permanent streams: water song from babble to lull; lower stream, a line of leaves caught in rocks, coiled like a snake. Intermittent streams: mute but moving. Wetlands: thin ground fog, a remnant of weekend rain. Pond: mist rises and vanishes; mergansers, hooded, cut paths across the surface, telegraphing ripples that spread in every direction. Winter attire, brown and gray, could be males or females, adults or first-year-birds. Too far to identify. Alder leaves, green and black, and drying out; still of some interest to chickadees, which work through the sparse foliage. Yesterday's three elegant leaf-stripes erased by passing cars; leaves reassembled on the rim of the woods, enmeshed in quotidian details.
Robins in small groups, noisy and active. Across the marsh, unseen, a pileated laughs, a long, rollicking, hear-splitting salutation to sunrise. Thrush on the driveway again. I can't coax song, though I try . . . repeatedly. Dogs sit patiently and wonder what's happened.
Chickadees eating goldenrod seeds, sparrow-like, and insect eggs under a piece of frayed bark, creeper-like. At home, spider-pluckers along the edge of the porch ceiling and feeder frequenters, one seed at a time, pounded open on a nearby cherry limb and eaten or deposited in a tuft of tree-branch lichen. With a map in their heads, chickadees find what they hide, up to twenty-eight days later. The hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with spatial memory, is large in black-capped chickadees, proportionally larger than that of birds that don't store food; and within their family (Paridae), a pert and perky group that includes titmice and Old World tits, the black-capped (Poecile atricapillus) reigns supreme. Their hippocampus is proportionally larger than related species that cache less food.
On bone-chilling nights, to conserve energy, a black-capped chickadee lowers its body temperature, goes into a self-induced torpor, a sort of nocturnal hibernation. And then wakes up latte-fresh, ready to exercise its brain, ready undercover its hidden treasures.
Chickadee: default bird of the Northeast. Black bib and throat, white cheeks, buffy sides, white belly, and gray back. Is there a more recognizable, common, personable front yard or wilderness bird? Unmarred trust. Indefatigable and captivating. Feeling blue about the Covid-19 and the dark rubble in its wake, consider a chickadee, one of Earth's most creative marshalings of stardust . . . Does not suppress the spread of the Coronavirus but helps you to forget about it for a moment.