6:41 a.m. 18 degrees, wind NNE 1 mph. Sky: dense rose and mauve in the east, a hint of pink in the south, everywhere else a tangled blue, white, and gray. Permanent streams: ice on backwaters and along the hem of the main channels, more closed than opened. A strand of song, occluded by ice, dubbed-over and hollow. Wetlands: without frost, quiet, except for two furious red squirrels. The chase: up and down pines, the scratching of bark, a maddening chatter, a leap from one trunk to another, tails in play, flicking and twitching. I close my eyes and listen. Another jump, airborne. And a second. Toenails strike brittle bark. Everywhere, pinecones hang like holiday ornaments, upper branches sagging. Red squirrel freeloading, a twenty-first-century crisis rarely spoken of. Pond: sealed over, ice thickest in the south cove, a curved white border near the middle. Thinner ice elegant feather patterns. Dogs curiously sniffing an otter's trail, a dent of frozen grasses and weeds, plastered by a dripping coat. Ends in the water, now closed off by ice.
A hairy woodpecker calls from the bleak, granite outcrop where a hermit thrush sang his heart out last May, obediently infatuated. The thrush's voice, intoxicating. The woodpecker's, not-so-much.
I was visited by a cardinal the other morning, only the fourth or fifth time in more than twenty years—red among the gray squirrels.
In 1971, when William Bartram wrote Travels, the cardinal was a bird of the moss-clad South, splashing color from canebrakes, thickets, and river edges. At that time, cardinals were unknown in the North. By the late 1800s, they had become fashionable cage birds. Thousands were sent to the Northeast and Europe, where they perched like canaries in wire baskets, a sad vestige of Wild America. Their incarceration ended with the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.
Over the last century, cardinals expanded their range northwest along the Mississippi River and its tributaries and northeast along the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Some ornithologists claim the bird's range change a sign of global warming—nonmigratory cardinals don't store fat. Others suggest a response to the popularity of bird feeders, as well as two centuries of habitat change as thickets and clearings, the cardinal's preferred territory, replaced forests. In 1886, cardinals were casual north of the Ohio River. By 1895, they reached the great Lakes; by 1910, Ontario. In 1914, they nested on Staten Island. The first cardinal documented in Connecticut was in 1943, in Massachusetts in 1958, in Vermont in 1962, and in Maine in 1969. Today, they nest in Nova Scotia.
In the 1960s, cardinals zipped in and out my parents' Long Island shrubs, brightening the most dismal winter morning. They gathered sunflower seeds beneath the feeders; males waged war on the living room window and the side view mirrors—breath condensing on glass.
Named for the robes worn by Roman Catholic cardinals, the bird caught the American public's attention. Cardinals became the official bird of seven states: Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia. Missouri, home of the St. Louis Cardinals, chose the bluebird, instead.