7:17 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday), 14 degrees, wind ENE 1 mph. Sky: light cloud ceiling cracked open, pastel blues and gray-pink, low humidity unveils Mount Ascutney. Room for the sun to break through, at least in the morning. Permanent streams: ice reappears in wide, shallow, slow-moving sections. Elsewhere, churning water holds ice at bay. Wetlands: cold sink with frost. Spruce and hemlock shed some tracings of snow. Pond: quiet sameness.
Short-tailed weasel: delicate five-toed prints, silent footfalls on soft snow. Paired tracks, short leaps, springlike, out of the woods, across the road, into the alders. Headed toward the marsh, the upper stream as a guide. Maybe to hunt voles in subnivian tunnels. Needs plenty of food. High-strung, perpetual motion. A hummingbird of a mammal. Heartbeat: four hundred times per minute. A long, thin body sheds heat. Surface area to mass ratio very high. Curls in a disc to stay warm. Eats (almost always) to produce it. Stores hapless rodents in burrows and cavities. Lines temporary den with victim's fur. Always on the move, a small, itinerant hunter, itself vulnerable. Particularly to an owl.
One winter morning in the mid-nineties, a long-tailed weasel chiseled frozen venison off a deer carcass I had position by my studio door. While I watched, a barred owl, wings up, feet extended, talons spread, swooped down, as though on a pendulum. Grabbed weasel by the shoulders, talons in the chassis, and then looped back up—the fluidity of an owl. No pause. Weasel dangled, an airlift of vital resources. A pestering raven divebombed to no avail. Then, the owl entered into an urgency of pine, dark and somber. Where one predator ate another.
Raven foiled, stuck with venison.
Crow over the pond, two ravens over the marsh. Both calling. White-breasted nuthatch calls from maples, a muffled pileated of a call. Red-breasted from pines. Both visit the suet cage until dislodged by a hairy woodpecker. Chickadees and jays busy and noisy.
Quietly tapping, pileated takes apart roadside maple. A semi-circle of woodchips, some six inches long, litters the snow. Flushes over the driveway, a roller-coaster flight, black and white wings flashing. Lands on the trunk of a skinny maple. Hops higher. Hops and hops until it reaches the top and then launches to another hardwood closer to the house, the tree I saw him on yesterday. Red crest erect, a beacon of color in dim woods. A second pileated calls, a loud nuthatch of a call, a derisive laugh hurled in the face of January.