7:21 a.m. 9 degrees, wind ENE 1 mph. Sky: baby blue, cloud lines and puffs, mare's tails, cream white, and on the move. Permanent streams: the passage of a mink, transcription in the snow. Big night for ice and frost. Hoarfrost blooms on the end of old seedheads. Stems bending toward the water. Behind icy curtains, under icy floorboards, amoeboid air bubbles split—a lesson in mitosis—the magic of shape-changing. Dogs wait patiently; whiskers sprout frost. Wetlands: a sea of reeds, an archipelago of sweet gale, all tinted by frost. Pond: feeder stream ice zipped shut, silent as a shellfish. Deer tracks melted and refrozen—again—a nearly unidentifiable mess. Crystalize bouquets on the end of tired forbs, the weight of terminal hoarfrost.
Noisy flight of doves, a whirling and whirring exodus. Everybody notices. High crows, low jays. Nuthatches in the pines.
Numbingly cold, early winter. On a spindly crown of ash, a male chickadee tilts toward spring. Sings. A simple two-note whistle: fee-bee, fee-bee, fee-bee, the fee higher than the bee. A territorial proclamation, seemingly removed from a quotidian January morning. An early sign that winter democracy eventually ruptures into spring autonomy—an audible cast of the mating lure. Tiny sprout of the coming season, still embedded in ice. The announcement warms my thumbs. An undeterred little bird who reads stars, measures the ambient light, sings a sweet, simple tune . . . a newsworthy event.
How far south do Snow Buntings come? (reading Mary Holland) Assume just northern VT...have you ever seen them locally?
I wish I could see and hear all that you do when my dogs and I walk about in Lyme. I would need to know all that you do in order to do that I suppose. Thank you for these daily newsworthy events; so much kinder than anything I hear or read inside.