7:10 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday). 25 degrees, wind NW 1 mph. Sky: thick and mostly off-white, flurries, tiny-flakes oozing out of the damp air. Overnight, an inch of snow transforms the valley into a velvet landscape, outlines the dark green sweep of conifers, a blissful and transitory enrichment, more engaging than an ice storm. Permanent streams: under wraps, sight-tight. Maybe airtight. Who knows? Aqueous sighing under a mantle of ice and snow. I’d need a stethoscope to be sure. Wetlands: a fairyland of glazed reeds and sober evergreens. Pileated drumming and calling, again. No one answers this morning. Pond: tracks transformed to pockmarks. A green bench on the white surface straddles the plowed loop—a seat for a young hockey player to lace up skates, an obstacle for the deer to jump over, a bridge for the otter to slide under, a surface for ravens to play cribbage on.
Just north of the driveway, raven in a red oak croaks, a salutation to the shy sun. Three quick notes, hollow as an echo, repeated after a short pause . . . again and again. Calls escort me downhill. Then, fade away like yesterday's news.
Up early, turkeys lay long lines of tracks (none lead to the feeders). Female pileated absent from roadside maple—snow fills the rim of the cavity and no fresh chips. The whining wings of doves, six flushes from the driveway, a choreographed exodus. Small heads, long tails, easily disturbed, fly like angles. A huntable commodity in Texas. A cherished, protected bird in Vermont. South of El Paso, in the spring of 1972, at a biological research station in the Chihuahuan Desert, just beyond the city limits of Kermit, a town so remote and so dry water had to be trucked in twice a week, I ate doves every night for ten days. A fit-in-your-hand chicken. While I collected pocket mice and kangaroo rats for a research project on corpus lutea, Dr. Packard, my faculty advisor, collected doves for dinner, which were everywhere by the thousands: surprise, surprise . . . dove tastes like chicken.
In and around the alders, adjacent to the marsh, two red-breasted nuthatches toot. Chickadee calls, a truncated chorus—dee, dee. Like quickening pussy willows in a vase, I whistle the chickadee's song, two notes, the second an octave lower than the first, hoping spring blooms in his syrinx. We trade renditions. Sedated by boredom, the dogs lie down. But chickadee, unheeding, ignores my encouragement, ignores my goading, continues the dee, dee . . . apparently, spring, a consolidated measure of daylength, thawing, and planetary elixirs, cannot be coerced.