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.