Even in his summer coat, Bear is a furry dog. Plant parts regularly stick to him, such as raspberry canes that drag along on the ground, or sticky leaves that mat his fur. Lately whenever we walk in the woods, Bear becomes festooned with little green burrs. His hitchhikers come from robust burdocks, unassuming enchanter’s nightshade, and several other plants currently unknown to me. The stalks with their dried burrs lie in wait all through the year for their more mobile neighbors to brush by.


Enchanter's nightshade

Not that plants are as motionless as they appear. Their movements may even occur over the course of a day. Many of our early spring flowers open in bright light, thwarting my attempts to photograph them. Other movements, though slower because they are a result of plant growth, actually move the plant along the ground. Wild strawberries and poison ivy send runners into the driveway, anchoring into the ground and growing leaves until we drive the ends into the mud.

Other than champion growers like kudzu, most plants need help to actually colonize new areas. Some plants harness wind and water, but many exploit animals. Hitchhikers can be tenacious, and I often end walks picking little sticky balls out of the folds of cloth they’ve knit in my shirt. Other plants use edible fruits to bribe their transporters, sometimes with a convenient laxative effect on the consumer providing the seeds with natural fertilizer.

The most successful strategy of the last several millennia has been to exploit one specific animal, Homo sapiens. For this relationship, the attractive characteristic does not have to be in the fruit or seed. Plant strategies that run the gamut from poisoning leaf grazers to attracting fruit foragers can entice humans to carefully save a plant’s seed and tend to each new generation. Early colonists to the Americas brought a medicine’s cabinet worth of species, some used very effectively while the use of others was perhaps counterproductive. They also brought a diversity of food plants greater than that found in most contemporary gardens. Many of the hardier (i.e. easier to grow) plants escaped cultivation, and coincidentally fell out of general favor. For example, chicory, queen anne’s lace, plantain, burdock… all were purposefully planted in the new world, and now flourish in the edges of our lawn. A dog may be able to carry burdock for miles, but humans brought it across oceans.


Burdock

The soundtrack of summer is heavy with insects. Male crickets and katydids play long, repetitive concerts in the forest. Busy pollinators bring fields to life with the buzzing of their work, similar to the hum of offices except that it directly creates food and new generations. New generations of office equipment require new resources and make the obsolete equipment into waste.

Forests and fields make plenty of waste, it just gets put to use. Excrement and dead organisms enrich the soil. Compost is a human adaptation of a very old process. Like a wild sourdough, the trick to a good compost pile is to create a hospitable environment and allow the ubiquitous agents of decay to populate it.

This evening I walked out to our bin in the hot, steamy air which is much more conducive to decomposition than outdoor recreation. The pile smelled more earthy than putrid until I disturbed the surface with a pitchfork. Almost all the kitchen scraps which had spent the week in the pile had lost their identity. Straw-colored stalks and matted leaves clung to form, but dark clumps of nearly finished compost filled in the gaps. Lush green potato plants grew up the sides of the bin, satisfied with the state of decomposition.

Unfortunately we’ve been more focused on the baby than our kitchen, especially during the long labor when food was left all around the house. It’s not that nature abhors a vacuum so much as that a vacuum represents an opportunity, and when we exclude most scavengers but have plenty of food around, there’s an open niche for what can get through. Which in this case was an invasion of tiny ants. They’ll disappear when the counters are clean, only to form long lines for foraging when banana peels take too long to make it to the compost.

Our society is rather fastidious, perhaps too fastidious considering all the power humans exert over our environment. We spent last week at my parents’ house along the River Between Two Countries. A dead carp had washed up on their beach and emitted an aroma of fishy decay that hung about their lawn. We weren’t the only ones to notice the smell. As we discussed whether to push the carcass out into the water and let it wash up on someone else’s shore, a large bird swooped low past the house. We crept out to startle several turkey vultures off the bleached body. Thus began a regular stream of vulture, crow, and even gull visitors. All of them busy cleaning the beach while trying to stay out of our sight.

The other day I wandered into the forest without the dogs, a nice break from the task-oriented world of early parenting. The exuberant green of early summer had given way, under an onslaught of insects and summer weather, to a more matured visage. The vegetation frayed at the edges, and even the once robust umbrellas of mayapples staggered about in tatters.

The brittle soil waits for the rain that never seems enough when it comes. For the previous two years we lived here, frogs reproduced in pools created by the spring rains. By this May, these vernal pools had become thick masses of black mud that pulled at my boots. The dark liquor on top was no hospitable environment for masses of jellied eggs, or darting tadpoles. Wood frogs which rely on these ephemeral bodies of water had to breed elsewhere, and hopefully not across too much inhospitable territory in this fragmented landscape. According to AmphibiaWeb, the average wood frog only has 3 or 4 years to reproduce before death. Some amphibians managed to breed, judging by all the tiny frogs and toads that have been crossing our paths.

Babies abound in the woods. Ruffed grouse chicks meander across the driveway. Miniature rabbits infiltrated my garden, to the detriment of my beans. The wetlands where I work are very productive. Young muskrats graze on strips of lawn, only bothering to move away when I lean in for a closer look. I suppose they’ve had no opportunity to learn the dangers of man, though considering my coworkers there’s not much danger for them to discover. Other wildlife takes a dimmer view to our presence. As I walk the trails, the hiss of crossing guards halts my progress – Canadian geese escorting their gray goslings from one pond to another.

Raising young is time consuming, which is why the vast majority of organisms don’t bother. They compensate by creating vast numbers of offspring which the world will winnow out. Most of the mass of frog eggs won’t make it to a reproductively mature adult, though wood frogs are a common species. Even with parental support, many song birds don’t make it to reproductive age. Migrants have come here specifically to breed but they face many obstacles. Back in June I watched the phoebes catching bugs at a frenzied pace to bring to a changeling. A brown headed cowbird had laid an egg in their nest which grew to a burly chick that bullied its nest-mates. As I watched, the nestling opened its wings angrily, knocking its adopted parent off to find yet more food. Fortunately, phoebes arrive so early that they can often renest, and the young fledglings from this second brood are still hanging around the house. Despite all the challenges, parenting succeeds often enough that we’re all here.

Berries of summer

Blue cohosh, developing its color.


Raspberries growing in the bits of sun along the driveway.


Jack-in-the-pulpit berries emerging from the remains of the flower.


A fertile frond of a sensitive fern. These structures dry and stick out from the snow all winter.

Parental leave

Like many of the birds in the forest, we're busy with our nest this month - and a nestling! I'll get back to the blog in July, when our baby is a month old.

[Io moth]

Every night we have a horde of nocturnal visitors disoriented by our porch light. Yesterday morning one stayed behind. I opened the front door to find a beautiful orange moth huddled up against the edge (fortunately the door opens inward). I grabbed my camera and snapped a few shots, after which I would have left him alone except that I didn’t want to leave him where he could easily be stepped on. So I started gently prodding him.



Suddenly he popped his wings open to aim two false eyes at me. In his world, a big predator would only be interested in him as a tasty morsel. In reality, I was probably saving him from a careless dog paw, but I had no way to signal him my benign intentions. I couldn’t just pick him up because of his delicate, dusty wings, but eventually I was able to encourage him out of our footpath and under the porch.

My affection for the creatures of the forest is mostly unreciprocated. For the majority I am a neutral or even threatening presence. I construct walls between human and nature in my mind and cast myself as a benefactor instead of a predator, but moths are working with a different world view.

Of course I am a benefactor to a few, select species. Mosquitoes rush to greet me. Burdocks and bitter docks flourish in the edges of our erratically maintained lawn. Then there’s my garden.

Later that day, thinking about these relationships, I entered the garden to find an interloper. An adult rabbit who had come to sample some of my plantings was frantically looking for an exit. Bemused, I slowly herded the sleek herbivore toward the gate while he flung himself repeatedly against the mesh. Finally he found a hole and burst free. Ivy, always ready for a rabbit chase, ran up and, as I turned back to survey the damage, I joked, “Get ‘im!”

Unfortunately she did. I yelled when I heard the squealing and Ivy came with the rabbit stretched out in her mouth. I think she was as surprised as I because she dropped her prize and let me pull her into the house. The rabbit was still breathing, but I left him alone. I couldn’t heal him, and the presence of another predator would only cause more distress. A little while later the rabbit’s distress was permanently gone.

I took him out in the woods, beyond where Ivy would venture by herself. I figured some scavenger will have a nice surprise, or more likely a horde of scavengers. In the forest, there’s always someone looking to benefit from another’s misfortune.

Green.
Morning stretches before me,
the day nods its head like the wild geranium scattered about
not yet ready to welcome the sun.
Birds rush to finish the chores
of warbling their territories into being -
for their next trick let them sing up some bugs.
Squirrels huff.
In the distance the human world awakens.
Dogs and traffic.
Machine hums that rise above the forest
and settle around it.
Sun glows warm yellow behind the trees,
balancing the chill in the air as a welcome friend
and not the adversary of harsh noon.

Let others believe in grand acts of creation. For me a new world emerges in fits and starts, until the forest breathes green. And as above, so below. I stepped out the other morning to fog shrouding the canopy. Dark, rain-drenched tree trunks contrasted against the bright green of sodden leaves.

Bird song drew me onward. The capacity of the forest had greatly expanded since the time of the winter flocks and the branches were alive with birds of different sizes and colors. I identified twenty species without much effort, plus there’s a handful more I know are around. The songs seemed to come in waves, for example one ovenbird would set off the rest in a cascade of singing. They proclaim to each other an exclusive right to a specific territory, yet they share these patches of the forest with different species.

All but one of the species I encountered are native to this area. Though there is some competition, they have coexisted for a long time and could continue to do so. Their modes of living are as diverse as their colors. The scarlet tanager couple courting in the spruce forest probably traveled over two continents to be here, while the black-capped chickadee singing in the distance was nearby all winter. Food is a potential source of competition, since many of the birds will be feeding insects to their young. Species can focus on different prey or on different hunting styles. Although both are flycatchers, eastern wood pewees forage lower in the canopy than great crested flycatchers.



In contrast to the action in the tree-tops, the forest floor at first appeared to be uniform greenery. Even the flowering jack-in-the-pulpits were mostly green. A closer look revealed subtle signs of diversity – leaf shapes, textures. Bloodroot hovered above the ground like cumulus clouds. The fading trout lily leaves were streaky, more like cirrus. Remnants of early spring rubbed shoulders with up-and-coming plants. Diminutive jewelweed sprouted from wet ground, and the duo of goldenrods and asters were preparing for their fall show. As is appropriate for such a meeting ground, the old world also met the new. Honeysuckle and multiflora rose claimed space, along with other invaders. This progression, more narrative than cyclic, is harder to predict.

The trees have filled out in leaves and warblers.

I’m not much of a birder, as I’ve said before. I don’t go out of my way for new species, or pester birds until I can positively identify them. I stopped trying to record my first observations of spring migrants when I realized that there are many dedicated birders in this area doing basically that. Meanwhile I find myself distracted for days by work or unrelated interests.

Let them make the efforts. There is limited scientific use for opportunistic sightings. It’s hard to show absence without a systematic effort since a bird might be where you didn’t look. Even with surveys birds don’t always vocalize or otherwise make their presence known. The other problem with data collection as a hobby is that sample size tends to be fairly low if the effort is small. The sample size of a first arrival record is often one, which may mean very little for the population as a whole.

I still notice birds everywhere I go. Spring migrants are old friends whose return signals that life is continuing on in its current version of normal. Wood thrushes sing haunting melodies that drift into our bedroom and brighten up our morning along with the sunrise. Scarlet tanagers bring splashes of tropical color to the woods and kingfishers rattle over dark ponds once again claimed for kingfisher kind. Common yellowthroats take up their stations along the pond. Their song is as welcome as the turtles returning to their logs to soak up the sun.

These things happen without me. Unlike so much in modern life, I don’t need to do anything except delight in them. Still, there is some twinge of anxiety at inaction – otherwise why all the blog posts and photos? There’s this innate conviction that having a record makes the subject more real, or more permanent. This is an attractive thought when considering a landscape which is impermanent in geologic time, and perhaps even in human time the way development and climate change might go. Perhaps it would provide some comfort if these species assemblages melted away like the glacier that stood here some 10,000 years ago.

But records are necessarily incomplete and reflect a human bias alien to so many of the beings that would be missed. I have to feel that the existence of impermanent things still has meaning, even if twenty years from now the deer eat all the trilliums or if garlic mustard, despite our best effort, smothers all the trout lilies. Otherwise what hope do any of us mortals have?

Rain has called the landscape to life. Green fills in above and below. The woods are full of warblers and the bugs, the main attraction, have come out in force. These annoying little creatures are busy turning all the new growth (and some other things) into high quality bird food. Woodpeckers, cardinals, and other winter hold-overs join in the excited chatter. Does the forest feel crowded to them or livelier, as it does to me? Perhaps it's uncomfortable for the birds which flock in the empty winter days but need to carve out their space as the canopy fills across the forest. Or maybe the bounty makes them generous.

Sitting by a pond, with the rush of traffic incessant,
red-winged blackbirds buzz and cluck their private worries
into social chatter.
Sun burning alternates with wind
that unsettles the surface of the pond
making eddies of worries that break up the reflection
of peaceful willows caught in a moment
between waking and full summer glory.
I suppose their pause is an illusion
busy factories working inside a still exterior.
Blackbirds posture and call.
Tree swallows dash about in aerial acrobatics.
I want to be more like the willow trees
smooth exterior but deep inner workings
yet I fear I more resemble the water
agitated into a thousand superficial movements.

Some April flowers

Clumps of tiny violets are scattered in the lawn and leaf litter.



Trilliums opening just in time for a little burst of winter temperatures (and precipitation).



Mayapples unfurl like umbrellas to shade the forest floor.

Cycles

Shrubs and trees explode in color. Forest flowers open to the unrestrained sun even as leaves emerge from tight buds to eventually shade out the forest floor. Everything is so familiar to me despite the three seasons we’ve been through since then. The script is the same even when the players differ.

That’s true in broad strokes. Late snow cover, early warm days – you can ignore climate change and still the stresses on living things are always at least subtly different this year from last year. Our feelings on the climate are skewed by the present, but trends can involve decades and more. So-called hundred year floods influence real locations of nutrients and plants. Our understanding is limited by the time frames individuals operate on, and since we may not experience rare events multiple times in our lifetime (or our working adult life) we’re often surprised by happenings that are frequent on a geologic time scale.

Crucial events often happen quickly, rarely, and in random places. Predation is like that. So many adaptations are meant to avoid predation, yet actually observing one animal killing another can take a lot of work and luck. Especially with larger carnivores which need to eat less often than a phoebe catching bugs out of the air. The only evidence left may be tufts of bloody fur, clumps of plucked feathers, or unpalatable dragonfly wings as delicate as gossamer.

The world around us is shaped by unseen events and the long-term action of natural laws. History echoes in DNA, dramas played out over eons. Species dance together, for example flowers and their pollinators. Sometimes both groups mutually benefit from their interactions and sometimes one group tries to gain unfair advantages. Other dances are purely antagonistic, like when plants develop defenses to ward off herbivores. Even here competition can become cooperation, as when the toxin caffeine causes humans to spread coffee plants across the tropics.

The history explaining why a community lives in a specific area is also grand compilation of individual stories. Skunk cabbage seeds are swept along by streams, aspen seeds on the wind. Shakespeare enthusiasts import European starlings which now flourish in our fields and cities. Ants carry trillium seeds along through the forest. The world around us has always been in flux, just sometimes in more extreme ways than others.

Watching

Spring wildflowers in the forest hide in plain sight. I only recently started to notice the pale hepaticas among the ubiquitous mud and leaf litter. Fortunately the bumblebee that whizzed by me this morning is not working with the same color spectrum that we see. Insects are the desired audience for these flowers, but the single trout-lily leaves popping up everywhere have no need to attract attention. They leave that drama to their older or just healthier compatriots.

The pleasure of spring flowers strewn like tiny gems across the landscape is worth a closer look, but birds make it easier to watch them this time of year. Males of different songbird (not a technical term) species are walking that fine line between advertising their presence and avoiding predators. Many dress in eye-catching plumage, or at least spiff up their non-breeding plumage so that, for example, male robins sport a darker head and breast. There are always variations – eastern phoebes are little gray and off-white birds that don’t even bother differentiating the plumage of males and females. However they make up for it with their insistent singing of their own name: “Feebee!” This is another way songbirds draw our eyes, by singing species-specific songs from relatively conspicuous perches. I say relative because finding a flycatcher that is about the size of a cell phone in a mess of branches or bramble is not always an easy task.

We’re not the intended audience here either, and sometimes we can be ignored when too males are locked in showy combat. Recently I was able to walk close to two red-winged blackbirds that were going at each other with noisy wing beats. They tumbled about some cattails then spilled out onto the foot path where they irritated a robin so much that he joined in the fight and chased them off.

Most of this is drama, not violence. Individuals bluff and test each other to determine who has control of what resources. Eventually both the singing and the fighting will calm down as neighbors settle in and mostly ignore each other. Until then, there’s plenty for us to observe. Most of our warblers haven’t even arrived yet – not to mention all the trout lilies, trilliums, mayapples, and other flowers I’m looking forward to seeing soon.

Happy Spring

It’s the vernal equinox today. Day-length is changing more rapidly now than it will for another half of a year. Everything else seems to be changing quickly as well. Snow has been banished from most surfaces, leaving a flattened landscape littered with the debris of winter. Chattering flocks of red-winged blackbirds descended on the wetlands at work. Their “kon-ka-reeee” joins with the songs of cardinals, robins, song sparrows, and others as they try to carve out a territory nice enough to entice one or more females to settle down within their sphere of influence.

Echoes of the winter remain. The ghostly corpses of tadpoles lie at the bottom of the muddy inlet that feeds the pond at work, reminders of the January thaw and subsequent refreeze. We haven’t all made it this far, but those of us that have are energized by the increasing amounts of sun and warmth. Chipmunks traded their hypothermic torpor for manic runs through the leaf litter, on the lookout for mating opportunities. Moths slip into the house at night and mourning cloaks, a butterfly species, rise from the driveway when we pass.

For those of us in the northern hemisphere who divide our year into quarters, the vernal equinox is the official start of spring. But every creature is using different criteria to try and perform their life functions at the optimal time. Red maple flowers emerging from their buds, but the more precious leaves will stay tightly bound until the threat of an early spring snow is over. Organisms cannot safely start some processes on the basis of warmth alone. Thus many species have internal calendars just as they have internal clocks. Our absent song birds must leave their wintering grounds early enough to arrive, set up shop, breed, brood, and hatch their offspring in time to raise those hungry mouths on the abundant insects that are coming.

Non-humans don’t know the calendar date, but it seems to me they “know” the time of year in a more full-bodied way than we do. We have relatively weak seasonal responses. Our energy lifts, but we don’t enlarge our reproductive organs like many birds. The mild-mannered robins that flocked all winter have grown testy. They sing long, warbling songs as they perch bold and red in bare branches. The songs are announcement and challenge, and it’s not uncommon to see males going at each other with fluttering wings. They’re trying to establish their territory before the females show up. There’s plenty more changes on the way.

There are cracks in the icy armor of winter. I've seen them plunge deep into a frozen pond, or expose the gray asphalt of a parking lot. The higher landscapes are still snowbound. In the valley, Gorgeous City lies exposed, its remaining snow confined to piles along edges. Ornamental flowers break through to raise pert little buds to the sky. Rainclouds lurk on the horizon, but for now birds clatter and sing among the barren branches.

Early morning glistens with ice, but as the day progresses the snow cover sags under the warming sun. It’s maple season, the time of year that sap rises up the maple trees and people are busy tapping into the sweet bounty.

We allowed a neighbor to tap our trees the first year we lived on the land. I regretted it when as he drove around during the mud season in an ATV, compacting the soil. Fortunately this was in a part of the forest with few spring wildflowers. Still, there are plenty of maples in this region which grew up in the open, in old pastures or as borders, while our maple trees have had to compete for resources and therefore are less productive.

Those of us that have the luxury of not living hand-to-mouth have the opportunity to cultivate relationships with the nonhuman world not based on economics. I want to be able to appreciate the forest for its own sake, not for what it provides people. So while I put a lot of energy into gardening on previously cultivated land, it’s hard for me to justify wild harvest. The natural world is under siege from all sides. I don’t want to be a force of destruction in the place I love so much, or to take more than I give back. Since that first year, the maples in our forest have kept their sugars to make leaves, flowers, and samaras, feeding fungi, insects, birds and rodents.

Snow travel

I was wearing muck boots instead of snowshoes when I took Bear for a walk today, so when we detoured into the woods I sank in with every step. The dogs leapt joyously about like little springboks, but then woodland travels are recreation to them instead of occupation. A wide path behind our house was dotted with the deep imprints of resting deer and laced with their tracks. With no food bowls, these deer probably didn’t appreciate a deep cover of late winter snow. I often find deer beds in the spruce stand, where the ground cover is thinner because the evergreen branches intercept a good amount of snow. Worse for small animals who use the snow for shelter and cover, but better for those of us too big to tunnel.

Deer and most animals find paths of least resistance, and even the dogs readily follow an existing trail in the snow. Deer tracks often follow the driveway, or the trails at work. One aspect of roadways that make them so deadly to our fellow creatures is that they are inviting for travel, although frequent vehicle traffic may make them less so. A common combination of mowed areas and sheltering tree lines makes them attractive as hunting grounds for certain raptors. Hence the ease of seeing red-tails on the highway up to Snowstorm City, but there are less pleasant consequences as well. One study found many dead rough-legged hawks near roads, some of which had been shot by humans who also prefer easy paths.

Late winter is a dangerous time for herbivores because food supplies have been heavily exploited but the cold and often the conditions still require extra energy. Females have the additional burden of carrying one (or more) fetus which will be born in late spring. Deep snows would make stressed deer vulnerable to predation. Winter die-off, while very unfortunate for the individual, can function to decrease competition for scarce resources in the remaining population and results in healthier herds.

At one point, human hunters almost eradicated white-tailed deer in the northeast, but nowadays we’re busy encouraging them to overpopulate. When not feeding them directly, we provide more food to get them through the winter by managing for young forests, which have tasty young trees and sprouts, and planting edible (to deer) landscaping. We’ve decimated or extirpated predator populations. Human predation on deer for sport is less than optimal as long-term population control because humans like to target big, healthy males, whose genes would benefit the population, and are reluctant to kill females who are the real reproductive powerhouses. Ten does can have as many fawns with one buck as with ten. Killing fawns also reduces the reproductive future of the population, but while fawns are the easiest prey for non-human predators, laws and mores prohibit human hunters from taking them.

Although white-tailed deer are native species, their ascendance negatively affects many of our native plants. Their browsing on young trees can inhibit forest regrowth and provide for the increase of less palatable exotic species. Fortunately this edge species spends less time in our forest as the warm seasons begin, because they particularly like to dine on my favorite spring flowers.

Winter sights

I’m not a huge fan of birding by car –over two summers I spent months driving to find birds in a land of bad radio. I do like to keep a look out when I’m in a car anyway. I notice a lot of raptors; mostly red-tails perched in trees near the road but sometimes a smaller hawk or even a northern harrier floating over rolling hills. In a couple of months kestrels will be impersonating mourning doves on telephone wires, or hovering high above some unlucky meadow vole (or grasshopper).

Kestrels are still here, although in reduced numbers. Our winter bird population is poor in species because the ones we keep are outnumbered by those we lose to milder climes. Some of these areas might dispute that description this year with all the snowstorms, but chance weather events are a danger which birds cannot completely avoid. Migrating can make the long-term chance of catastrophic weather events much less. Fortunately for those of us feeling the February blues, migration gives us a few surprises from the depths of the arctic that don’t involve ice and snow.

Snow buntings littered the edge of the field as I drove down our road last week. Come spring, these creamy white and brown birds will trade our forest-edged fields and beaches for the tree-less tundra of the high arctic. Males will wear down the tips of their feathers to expose pretty black and white birds beneath the bland façade we see. No need to be striking (and more exposed to predators) when they’re not interested in carving out territories on our lands.

Predators can better afford to be striking year-round. On a recent drive up to Snowstorm City, a hawk soaring just above the highway struck me as more patterned than the red-tail I was expecting. She alighted onto a nearby tree and her dark patches revealed that she was a rough-legged hawk, another arctic visitor. Both of these species have benefited from the increase in open land created in this area through European settlement, but the mammal-eating rough-legged hawk has been hurt more by the conversion of grassland to cropland. Maybe she’s feeling her own version of the February blues. Maybe it will be a relief to get away from the land of snow and ice to what she experiences as a land of grass, flowers and skittering mammals. Just as it will be a relief to me to go back to birding on foot.

Lilliputian neighbors

Protected mouse runway.



Evidence of a rodent taking advantage of birdseed on the porch.




Interface between the worlds above and below the snow.

Mice

A week ago I went to pick up the coffee mug I’d left in our car when I noticed mouse sprinkles on top. It’s bad enough that mice are hanging out in our car, but I’d rather they didn’t use my coffee mug as a perch.

My glimpses of live mice tend to be as they dash across a trail or down a hole. Occasionally I encounter stunned juveniles that the cats have been batting around the house. Deer mice and white-footed mice are common and populous throughout North America. I can accept that my cats kill mice in the house since that’s the human-cat contract that underlies the whole domestication of cats. However, outside I feel the predators that don’t have their lives catered to don’t need extra competition.

Mice must hide from aerial predators – hawks and owls, as well as mammals as small as the short-eared shrew and as large as foxes, or even coyotes. Mice move under cover of snow and night. In the morning tracks appear on the snow surface, moving from woody cover to woody cover. Snow melt exposes their long tunnels, still roofed or collapsed into trenches. While some larger-bodied rodents such as chipmunks lie in torpor underground next to their personal food stash, mice are out searching for edibles to stoke their internal fire.

Smells don’t travel as well in the cold, yet our woodland mice sniff out seeds, insects, and sometimes small dead bodies for sustenance. They found the bag of grass seed carelessly left in the shed and left a mess of husks and mouse sprinkles. We should have known better, but then we stuff our lives full of tasks while mice have the long winter night to focus on a few essentials.

Potentials

Minds tend to extrapolate the present into the future. It’s hard to remember the forest clothed in summer, and easy to imagine winter will stretch on like the snow cover stretches into the forest as far as the eyes can see. It laps up against tree trunks and rolls over fallen branches. The surface of snow unites the forest with the pond, making the world seem like one big shallow sea.

Why shouldn’t it, since snow is water in another guise? Yet the difference between liquid and solid water is not merely academic, and oxygen-breathing mice can build tunnel systems in the crystalline structure of snow that shelters them from both the freezing air and predatory eyes. This is a feat they can’t replicate in liquid water or ice. But the solid state is impermanent.

As if to prove the world is never as it seems, this week a storm system brought heavy rains down on the snow that had survived a recent warm snap. The rain swept the land clean of snow so that what had been a virtual sea idly covering the land became active water with places to go. Rivers swelled. Water roared down gorges and flew into the air as great veils of mist.



In the forests and bogs by my job, low areas teemed with muddy water. Creamy sheets of ice lay at or below the surface. The snow melt exposed green moss and rusty dried ferns. The world was saturated by rain and saturated in rich colors. Over it all hung the salty exhalations of decay from disturbed wetland soils.

Just as the snow had the dormant potential to be liquid, undeveloped land can have the potential to hold lots of water. Water can move pretty easily on roads and flat lawns, but bogs have depressions to fill and vegetation, both alive and deceased, to get in the way. It’s hard for the mind to see flooding that’s not happening. Unlike the bloom of summer, the water retention potential of natural areas is best noticed when it’s already gone.

The winter forest can seem very empty compared to its spring and summer counterparts. I have to look harder to appreciate it. The forest does not ring with song, but find a winter flock and the trees seem full of chirping and foraging chickadees. Male goldfinches have donned duller plumages, but cardinals are paint drops scattered in the snowy landscape.

In the relative quiet, it’s not unusual to hear the tapping of a foraging woodpecker or the repeated kuk of a pileated woodpecker which, thanks to creative use of the sound in jungle movies, puts one in mind of a much more steamy setting rather than a forest of naked trees under-layered by snow softening in a winter sun. I’ve been seeing these birds around lately. I often think that a blue jay is crossing the pond at work, then notice that the black and white wing pattern is more striking and the head is bright red. My favorite encounters are out in the woods when in a rush of wings, a bird which is roughly the length from my elbow to my fingertips folds up against a large tree trunk nearby.

Sometimes what appears to be a mated pair will land on trees near each other, two stately birds whose only difference is the male has a red mustache. Pairs seem to keep to the same territory year-round, defending it more rigorously during the breeding season. Young birds may disperse during migration, such as the two female hatch-year birds which the banders I know caught last year. Both people came away bloody.

Like all flying birds (as opposed to flightless birds), pileateds weigh much less than they “should” based on mammal standards but are very strong in the ways they need to be. The big chunks of forest at work and at our house provide good habitat for pileateds, which through their excavating work provide services for other forest dwellers. Old nest holes are a good resource for smaller cavity nesting birds from wrens to chickadees. Many non-birds also take shelter or residence in these holes. The rectangular cavities pileateds excavate to get to beetles and ants can provide food for other insect-eaters.

There are plenty of other woodpeckers around these two pieces of forest, but the pileated is the largest and most sensitive to forest maturity. Trees in this area have gained a huge amount of ground since the early years of European clear cutting, and pileated woodpeckers have rebounded from widespread hunting and habitat loss. But not all wooded areas are equal. Density of pileateds appears to decrease with forest fragmentation. That is, the more forests are broken up by other habitat like fields, farms or lawns, the fewer pileateds can live there. Several other species have decreased numbers in the fragmented habitat we create everywhere, although some wildlife species prefer this kind of habitat. These are the ones you see everywhere, like deer and robins.

Not just any forest will do, though. Pileateds need big trees to nest and roost in, and they need trees full of tasty insects. There’s a saying that a healthy forest is full of disease, and that’s certainly true from a woodpecker’s point of view. Age of the forest is less important as long as there are some old dead trees still standing. Snags, as standing dead trees are known in forestry, are certainly not lacking in our forest. Some trunks shed clumps of bark but others are identical to the living trees surrounding them until I look up to where they break off suddenly. Often then I’ll notice many holes from insects benefiting from the death, and sometimes holes made by their pursuers. These signs of life ring out, even in the silence.

Signs of life

Gray squirrel in a moment of indecision.


Evidence of insects and a foraging woodpecker.



A snag (standing dead tree) much loved by woodpeckers.


Life from death.

The winter world is introspective. All around us beings slumber, and our energies move inside after three long seasons of gardening. The last couple spinach crops are frozen under a layer of snow. Fortunately there's a lot to do as we move back into our radically remodeled house.

I take breaks to walk outside, where everything was so still yesterday. Snow rested along top of motionless branches. Muffled sounds came from distant beings doing distant things. Geese honked as they made their evening movements, traffic rushed along, and two pops of gunshot rang out. This is the country, after all.

My footsteps exposed green ferns through the snow. Like my spinach (still edible as of a few days ago), life bides its time in the cold. I wondered if enough light bled for the spruce and pine needles up above to photosynthesize, or if they idled on stored energy like our solar-panel driven electric system under the solid gray sky.

The winter flocks were elsewhere, and not even a chickadee called in the silence. Squirrels and rabbits were present in signs, tracks crossing my path on unknown errands and their lingering scents which my nose is unable read. If the absent birds left scent trails I had no way to know, my weak nose sniffling in the cold, sterile air. No matter how many winters I go through, I always seem unaccustomed to it when it comes back around.