7:41 a.m. 30 degrees, wind SWS 1 mph. Sky: taut gray and snow-filled. Then, bright white and snow-filled. Big wet flakes transition to slush and back, again. Two inches and heavy. Sticks to bark, branch, and twig—a valley of intersecting white lines. Permanent streams: black watery threads cinched in white, snow platforms poke into the channels creating convoluted margins like tidewater Maryland. Peninsulas of slush, partially submerged. Wetlands: snow fill deer trails, white paths etched in beige reeds, a crisscross of popular avenues. Red squirrels sleep in. Not crossbills . . . another noisy flyover. Pond: a frozen palimpsest becomes hard to read. Remnants of deer and otter spoor reduced to bumps and depressions, nearly effaced by snow. The patience of water: an immaculate, white oval awaits the next mammal. A coyote? A long-tailed weasel, soft and white sausage-shaped with angry teeth and a black-tipped tail like a matador's cape?
Crow with an unusual accent, caws above the marsh. Snowflakes burn my eyes. Tracks of a solitary red squirrel cross the road and disappear into the pines—the squirrel, himself, silent as stone. Six grays assemble at the feeders, tracks angling in from the four corners of the globe. On the trail toward the lower pasture, unruly alders and tired goldenrods overrun with chickadees. Check everything, miss nothing. When all else stays hidden, chickadees my thankful afterthoughts.
Yesterday, on the road to Pomfret, a route I've driven so many times in the past four years that I must have inscribed a trail over Howe Hill like wagon wheels on the Great Plains: a northern shrike, a mouse (or vole) clapped in hooked beak, passed in front of my car. At first, I thought, what's that blue jay carrying? Then, a forty-mile an hour insight . . . jays are blue in the sunlight, not gray, and rarely fly around with mice in their mouths.
Shrike, a songbird with attitude. Behaves like a falcon—big-headed, hooked and notched beak. Notches separate the vertebrae of mice and birds, up the size of grosbeaks and jays. Last February, in happy-go-lucky pre-Covid days, along the edge of the Colorado River, I watched a smaller, more thickly masked loggerhead shrike drop down from sagebrush and grab a western harvest mouse. The shrike bit the mouse at the base of the skull and then returned to the sagebrush. Mouse, jammed into a fork in the twigs and taken apart, piece by bloody piece. Ten feet in front of me. An OMG moment.
Rare as an Indianhead penny, shrikes were shot because they impaled songbirds on thorns, sometimes in front of us. But predators lift the veil from the beauty of the Earth, make life far more interesting by what they do . . . survive at the expense of others. A natural history lesson played out by rattlesnakes and wolves and owls and hawks and much-despised blue jays, which reach into another bird's nest and swallow the hatchlings. But if predation is seen unbiased, as part of the whole natural selection landscape, you glimpse death as part of the continuous process of planetary self-editing. You glimpse an organ of Earth. Not flawless, but perfect.
A shrike, how cool! Lucky you!
Thanks for recognizing the fierceness of the natural world--too many want "pretty scenery" and quail at the bloody tooth and claw. That's why Robinson Jeffers is my favorite poet, and "Hurt Hawks" is one of his strongest poems, saying that we humans also need to accept our role in the wildness.
http://www.101bananas.com/poems/jeffers.html