6:35 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday, fifty-one minutes earlier than the winter solstice). 28 degrees, wind SSE 4 mph. Sky: a pall of blue-gray, textured and bruised, air damp. Yesterday's fresh snow, three inches on a faux glacier. Permanent streams: trackless, silent clefts, all features softened. Wetlands: to the west, clouds brighten, offset snow-gazed evergreens. Bongo riff of pileated, drumming in the shadows, reverberates over the marsh . . . a daily dose of courtship. Pond: all blemishes, cracks, and tracks sealed by snow.
Crows caw from distant points. One, a thousand feet above the lower pasture, the black gesture of the morning, flies northwest, aided by the wind's unintended philanthropy. Disappears over Robinson Hill, calling to the end. Below the crow, chickadees and titmice whistle, the annual parlaying of simple notes into big dividends. Growing up on the south shore of Long Island in the 1950s and 60s, titmice were not expected. With its' big estates and towering trees (think Great Gatsby), the north shore supported titmice, which visited feeders or foraged amid the rubble of extensive maritime woodlands. As a breeding species, titmice reached Massachusetts in the late 1940s; New Hampshire in 1973; and Vermont in 1976, when I was a graduate student, the resident naturalist at a New Hampshire Audubon sanctuary in Hancock, living unfettered by the laws of fashion, custom, and logic. During my lifetime, they expanded their range more than three hundred miles north and, in the past forty years, reached virtually everywhere in Vermont, except for the northeast corner of the Northeast Kingdom. Absent from Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and Block Island, only six miles off Rhode Island, apparently, the tufted titmouse is a landlubber.
Why such success? Titmice benefit from a warming climate, maturing suburban trees, the regrowth of abandoned farmland, and the exponential increase of bird-feeding stations. On Earth, empty spaces soon fill up, continents drift, rivers change course, mountains erode, ocean levels rise and sink, animals move through time and space. Because birds fly, and because they're beautiful, we thrill to the magic of their movement, one of the pulses of our dynamic planet.
Margaret Atwood shares your love for and awareness of birds--thanks for caring!
https://www.audubon.org/news/margaret-atwood-insists-birds-matter-everyone-whether-they-realize-it-or-not
Ted, could you post some photos? I am a great lover of birds and enjoy seeing the Daybreak photos.