6:58 a.m. 36 degrees (silence of the crickets), wind NNW 9 mph, tall, slender pines, a grove of creaky doors in need of oil, pick up the crickets' slack . . . moaning, groaning, swaying. Sky: a jalousie of blue and white, empty rolls, which I diligently scan for big birds— waterfowl, loons, herons, cormorants, hawks, gulls. A tailwind, perfect day to fly. No luck. Patiently, nose to the earth, dogs scan for odor, which they find . . . which they always find. Permanent and intermittent streams: tranquil flows, quieter than the wind; rafts of fresh oak and aspen leaves caught on rocks of lower stream. Wetlands: a solemn and seemingly vacant legion of reeds. No sign of deer or ducks or blackbirds. Pond: rolling surface produces flickering light show; three hooded mergansers, winter-clad males, bolt the north end, out and over the marsh, the wind quickly erasing evidence of passage.
DOR: female American toad, strings of eggs like maple buds, in place for spring.
AOR: grit-picking robin, flushes
Nineteen turkeys in the yard. Ten under the oaks gorge on acorns. Nine under the feeders gorge on spilled sunflower seeds. In anticipation of next spring, one male rehearses, tail fanned, wings lowered and quivering, a serious student of multiplication.
Happy-go-lucky chickadees, the mortar that binds the Hollow, eat weed seeds, insect eggs, cold-stunned insects, hazelnut catkins, spiders and spider eggs plucked from the eaves of the barn, fat from between the bones of broken deer, suet and sunflower seeds at the feeders. A catholic diet that promotes abundance, vitality, maybe even cheerfulness. A possible contingency of climate change: more narrowly adapted species (Blackburnian warbler, let's say) perish in the black hole of extinction, while bibbed and bonneted chickadees radiate into new species that (hopefully) continue to entertain their neighbors, whomever they evolve to be.
In the meantime, effervescent chickadees spread joy across a grim landscape, an anodyne for the ills of 2020. We are both the stuff of stars.