We had some bitter cold this week. The snow creaked under foot on the way into work, and a house finch sang from a nearby tree top. A dark-eyed junco chased a sparrow across the path. Even with long-johns and other modern insulation my body heat seeped away, yet the little birds.

Most little birds survive, anyway, and the exceptions wouldn’t draw attention to themselves. Unlike mice and voles, these birds can’t burrow in the insulating snow to escape from the weather, but they can get under cover of branches. The trees themselves sweep the capricious sky with no recourse to hiding. They rely on thick bark or resin, plus dormancy this time of year.



It’s strange that such radically different beings as darting chickadees and looming red maples are both life. Both share features such as using DNA as their code of life. Death treats them differently, though, and trees often have dead tissue still protruding from live trunks. Even if birds survive the loss of a limb, there’s no way for them to grow a replacement. Birds are also unable to clone themselves after being cut in half, as how certain stumps will be ringed with new samplings rising from the roots.



Like many strengths, our centralized nervous system and highly structured bodies are also vulnerabilities. My fear of falling trees kicks in when the wind gets too feisty and the canopy dances about. At some point something will kill every one of us, even the thick oaks with the protection of being on sanctuary land. Some bacteria may approach an immortality of sorts, and the way plants clone themselves makes the question of their mortality a question of how to define an individual. At least until the sun gives out.

Birds and mammals live such straightforward lives in comparison. We’ve each figured out a basic life cycle and kept the tweaks to a minimum. There are plenty of other traits to vary, like parental investment. That day at lunch I encountered one of the resident mother-fawn pairs near the trail. They stuck their snouts in the snow, searching. Their faces were dusted with white and the young one had a clump of burdock crowning its forehead. Their ears flicked back and forth as they foraged, then aimed back at me as they wandered away. In the sanctuary, the cold is much more dangerous than a human, and even that is pretty manageable with bird feeders stocked with seeds nearby.

Winter neighbors

Blue jay.


House finch with bands on its legs as witness to a previous human contact.


Northern cardinal.


Young white-tail.

Our winter snowpack is transient. We are rarely in the path of the lake effect snow pulled off of the Great Lake to our north. Snow cover appears and disappears quickly with changing weather.

So it feels special when we walk through a forest that has been dressed in wintry splendor. Bear loves to bound along and suddenly land with all his legs stuck in a snow bank. When breaking new paths, snow shifts under every step, and branches and roots lie in wait. Forward momentum requires a certain amount of vertical force. Instead of the delicate paw prints of weeks ago, squirrel tracks are trenches plowed from one tree base to another.

We have a ghost herd of deer that take cover in the woods all winter. They set the dogs barking in the mornings before fading away. The forest is studded with the depressions their bodies have melted into the snow as they rested. Their visible tracks show us that the dogs’ sudden turns and meanders are not as random as they appear. Noses down, the dogs spoil the network of trails, joyous with their murderous intent which is fortunately never realized.

I figured my lunch walk at work would be a better venue for trying out my new camera lens. The sun dallied in and out of the clouds, holding out the promise of good lighting. I headed for the youngest section of the forest where lots of birds hang about, attracted by the berries on invasive shrubs or the bird feeders stocked with seeds.

As predicted the birds were numerous. An American tree sparrow flew into the branches above me as I walked. White-throated sparrows and chickadees moved about in the brush. Unfortunately little birds are twitchy. They constantly move as they search for insects and berries or a turn at the feeder, needing lots of food energy to balance the heat which is quickly lost from their little bodies. I lifted my camera to catch a slower moving cardinal, only to discover that the seemingly clear view of him was in reality obstructed by a mass of little branches, all of which the automatic focus tried zero in on rather than on my bird. Sometimes it takes a computer to demonstrate all the complicated tasks our brains perform behind the scenes, like filtering out the irrelevant branches in order to picture the whole cardinal.

I took what pictures I could until the batteries suddenly died. As I stood there, recapping the camera, a red-shouldered hawk flew up into some trees a little ways from me. I put the camera away and pulled out my binoculars to admire the raptor. He or she flew away when I start walking again. Other animals also filter out irrelevant information from the environment. Unfortunately most are aware that humans need to be watched.

Rain and warmth have vanquished all but a few scattered remnants of our snow. This morning hovered between ice and water. Small branches are decorated with suspended droplets, like a cold counterpart to the first flush of spring growth. Leaves crunch underfoot, kept frozen by the mass of the soil. I step over a border of fertile fronds onto a forest pool. Its sodden ice sags heavily. When I reach the stream I find it flowing merrily over a streambed of ice, which appears frothy from frozen air bubbles.

Lately there’s been a great horned owl fledgling hanging out in our woods. We hear him or her squawking at night as we walk next door or in the morning as I’m leaving for work. When I went out the other morning I heard the hooting of a pair of adults instead.

I went back to grab my camera, eager to try out my new zoom lens. Ivy followed me outside, eager to smell what had happened overnight. Crows had started cawing in the direction we were headed, making it seem that they had found the owls and begun harassing them. But as we walked the owls kept up their duet and the crows were arguing among themselves.

I went slowly, scanning the canopy ahead. We startled a herd of deer, and they fled in a long line of dark figures among the tree trunks. These deer are used to being hunted, while the ones where I work live on a refuge. Sometimes I have to shoo those deer out of my way, which offends them. As their white tails disappeared, the owls stopped. I snapped a few pictures of the snowscape which came out dark and unfocused, then headed back.

Chickadees twittered above me, then disappeared. A goldfinch moved quickly overhead, unseen. Crows flying towards the ruckus in the distance were too high and fast through the branches for my camera to focus on. The winter flocks were foraging elsewhere and I had other things to do. Oh well. The light wasn’t that great, anyway.