7:08 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday). 3 degrees, wind NNW 11 mph (windchill -13 degrees). Sky: pallid and charmless, more white than blue. The snow squeaks. The wind whines. The air stings. Like gates gone amuck, pines crepitate with a brittle, frenzied cacophony. I'm bundled, dressed as one of the roly-poly Teletubbies, the brown one. Micro-flurries drift like black-and-white television static. Permanent streams: lower, an icy highway for a wandering mink. Fresh tracks on powder snow, two by two. Never leaves the streambed. Over fallen trees and tangled branches, belly denting snow. Under the road and the snowmobile bridge, into a jungle of reeds. The owl's marsh, rife with voles and shrews. Wetlands: for the mink, a welcoming freezer chest. For the barred owl, the addition of a high-energy competitor, a transitory strand in the weft and warp of the food web. Pileated keeps to himself. The silence of the squirrels. Pond: crossed by a coyote, otherwise, as Yogi Berra once said, in 1961, after Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris hit back-to-back home runs, It's deja vu all over again.
A red squirrel digs out three shallow caches of pine nuts. Feeds and leaves, breakfast on the run. Gray squirrels, which waited until the sun crested the horizon, assemble at the feeders. Joined by six jays, two hairy and one downy woodpecker, seven grit-gathering doves, two titmice, and numerous chickadees, too jazzed to accurately count. Nuthatches, both species, deeper in the woods, feed themselves without my help.
It's been almost a year since I've left the upper drainage of the Connecticut River. Being stuck at home certainly has drawbacks, but I live in a viewshed of streams, hills, and a sprawling marsh, where chickadees enliven the morning and owls usher in the night. Where the seasons travel to me. Life could be a lot worse.