6:15 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday). 10 degrees, wind W 2 mph. Sky: in the east, the crescent moon, horns facing west, in the company of a small threadbare cloud. Everywhere else, immaculately clean. A rose blush across the southwest, subtle as a bird's breath. Moon dissolves in sunlight, a polaroid in reverse. Permanent streams: upper, almost open, a weasel, following the flow, tracked the bank, crossed under the bridge, headed into the alders; lower, transformed into a squirrel crossing, all footpaths perpendicular to flow. Wetlands: curtains of sunlight slowly descending west-bank evergreens and out across the snow-pitted marsh. Pileated drums. Red-breasted nuthatches toot an off-key fanfare. No bobcat, seventy-two hours off, lacing shadows elsewhere. Pond: surface, a coyote crisscross; edges, a chickadee chorus. No shoveling, no plowing, no hockey.
White-breasted nuthatches sing, nasal whistling, six to ten soft notes, same pitch, unvaried volume . . . like a muffled pileated without the derision, the carry, or the entitlement. Ornithologists recognize eleven subspecies of the white-breast nuthatch, from the mountains of south-central Mexico north, wherever hardwoods dominate—northeast, southeast, mountain West, up both coasts and around the Great Lakes to the fringe of the boreal forest. Generally, the farther north and the higher elevations, the longer the wings. In the east, wing and bill lengths increase south to north. But the proportion of dark-crowned females increases southward until virtually black in the tropical hammocks of the Everglades, where nuthatches may join white-crowned pigeons on gumbo limbo or mahogany. Backs palest in the East, darkest in the Midwest, medium in the West. Bills stouter and blunter in the east, tapered and daggerlike in the Midwest and West.
White-breasted nuthatch weighs three-quarters of an ounce, a little less than a #2 pencil. Subspecies contact calls vary east to west and north to south, but songs everywhere similar, just like what I hear now . . . what, what, what, what, what, what. A dooryard melody, much closer to home than the pileated, who perches alone on the west end of the marsh, dismantling trees, laughing in the face of sunrise. Recent taxonomy places nuthatches closer to creepers and wrens and gnatcatchers, farther from chickadees, with whom they associate in winter flocks. Overwhelmed all winter by an irruption of red-breasted nuthatches, white-breasted nuthatches come into their own in early March, singing before the sun and under the horns of the crescent moon. Over time and, perhaps, with another geographically isolating Ice Age, a few races of white-breasted nuthatch may evolve into new species.
The smell of skunk heavy in the air. Chipmunk appeared in the front yard yesterday, stood straight up like a soccer goalie assessing play, looked all around, and then retreated underground . . . to subterranean pantries filled with sunflower seeds. Two days ago, mid-afternoon, a confused raccoon inside the Taftsville Covered Bridge. Wandering aimlessly. Perhaps, ill. All indelible signs that March tilts toward spring, toward frogs and salamanders and enchanted-voiced thrushes . . . and the day the pandemic is in our rearview mirror.