On fire

encampment

Walking into town this morning along the railroad tracks, I noticed this structure under the highway overpass. While it might look like a homeless encampment, I suspect it’s the work of local teenagers. This is right below the end of our mountain, where some kids had a clandestine campout last fall and almost set the woods on fire. Fortunately, one of our hunter friends found them in time and helped put out the blaze, before politely suggesting that they party elsewhere. I think this is “elsewhere.”

Tyrone IOOF

Of course, it isn’t just kids who like to get messed up in the name of fellowship. I don’t know if the Independent Order of Odd Fellows is still active in Tyrone, but they built a damn fine building. It looked pretty as a postcard this morning.

I considered wandering around and shooting a bunch more photos of Tyrone, but really, between this photo and the last, you can get a pretty good idea of what the town’s all about. (I have a few other photos here.)

red maple blossoms 2

On the way back, the late-morning sun backlit a hillside of blossoming red maples. This is always one of the first trees to blossom in spring, along with the pussy willows. The end of Plummer’s Hollow was rather badly logged back in 1979 and 1985, and these maples are one of the main beneficiaries.

Red maple used to be restricted to moist woods and swamps, but over the last fifty years it has proliferated in all kinds of forests in Pennsylvania, for reasons that aren’t fully understood. The relatively recent practice of wildfire suppression is often blamed for the decline of oaks, though, and fire sensitivity would certainly explain why red maple used to be confined to wet areas. And while red maples are beautiful trees, they don’t have anywhere near the wildlife value of oaks.

Troegenator

Maple blossoms aren’t the only fire-colored thing right now. ‘Tis the season for doppelbock, according to the Beer Activist. At 8.3% alcohol, one bottle of these is just about all you need. Suddenly, a campfire in the woods seems like a pretty good idea.

Silver linings

The past two mornings I’ve awoken late, and haven’t gotten out onto the front porch until well past daylight. That’s O.K., though, because both mornings I’ve had the unparalleled pleasure of listening to a winter wren sing while I drank my coffee. It’s a liquid, seemingly endless burble — appropriate for a bird that spends most of its life as near to running water as possible. It nests in cave-like hollows under stream banks, especially under the boles or root balls of fallen trees, and probably the rotting end of the big butternut tree that came down a few years ago makes the stream below my front porch at least passingly attractive to winter wrens. (Ultimately, I expect this one to nest farther down-hollow.)

Winter wrens never used to breed here. They were, as their name suggests, winter visitors. But then in December of 1992, a big, wet snowstorm before the ground had frozen brought down over 100 trees in the deepest part of the hollow, many of them right on the banks of the stream. When we cleared the road — a multi-day task — we made the decision to let the logs lie down slope from the road, kissing off many hundreds of dollars worth of lumber. That spring, we were rewarded by our first-ever breeding winter wrens. It’s quite likely that these were the first members of their species to breed here since 1813, when the hollow was clear-cut for the first time. You need a pretty mature, unmanaged forest to get winter wrens. Our elderly neighbor Margaret McHugh, who died in 1991, mentioned at one point, ten years or so after the gypsy moth invasion of 1980-81, that the woods in the hollow was beginning to look awfully messy to her. “I don’t remember ever seeing this many logs on the ground,” she said — with great disapproval, of course. To most people, a dead tree is a wasted tree if it isn’t being put to some human use.

My father told the story of the winter wren at a big, statewide gathering of landowners enrolled in the Forest Stewardship Program that we hosted in the late 90s. “How do you put a price tag on the song of a winter wren?” he asked rhetorically, to great effect. Many of the other landowners shared our biocentric values, and were thrilled at this ready-made parable. But some of the foresters in attendance were clearly bothered. “What if you only harvested some of the logs? How many dead trees do these birds really need?” one of them asked. Well we did harvest some of the trees — the ones upslope from the road.

The return of the winter wren is just one of a number of positive changes here since I was a kid, and I thought it only fair that I highlight a few others after yesterday’s gloomy post. I spent today trying to throw together a sort of balance sheet — a quick-and-dirty assessment of major changes to biodiversity in Plummer’s Hollow from 1971-2007. There’s no denying the negative impact of white-tailed deer, earthworms, invasive plants, and poor land-use. In the last category, the near-clearcutting of the former McHugh tract destroyed 100 acres of the richest woods in the hollow (we were only able to acquire that property after the damage had been done). But other apparent disasters, such as the snowstorm I just mentioned, had a silver lining. The invasion of the gypsy moths in 1980-81, for example, killed a lot of mature oaks, especially on the drier ridgetops, but it created a lot of valuable new wildlife habitat. Red-bellied woodpeckers suddenly appeared and became year-round residents. My brother Steve began to notice more longhorned beetle species than ever before.

We have no shortage of interior forest-dependent bird species, including some that are declining elsewhere, such as cerulean and worm-eating warblers. There may be only half as many wood thrushes as there used to be, but we still have quite a few. And three species linked to more mature forest environments have become regular breeders in the hollow: black-throated green warbler, Acadian flycatcher, and solitary or blue-headed vireo. So the winter wren isn’t the only species that benefits from a hands-off management philosophy.

The Carolina wren is another avian newcomer within the past 20 years, though unlike its cousin, it prefers forest openings and dooryard habitat. The expansion of its range northward is most likely a response to the warmer winters associated with global climate change. A cold winter like the one we just had kills much of the Carolina wren population off, and it takes several years for them to rebound. Another southern species just getting established in our area in the last few years is the black vulture, which now seems to nest in the adjacent valley. We see them soaring up and down the ridge from time to time.

Common ravens were occasional visitors in the 70s; now they are year-round residents. Other breeding bird species we’ve confirmed in the last two decades include golden-crowned kinglet, black-throated blue warbler, and wood duck. And it’s hard for me to remember now, but wild turkeys were once scarce, too. Now they’re all over the place.

Many perennial wildflowers in the hollow have multiplied since I was a kid, probably a result both of maturing forest conditions and, in the last decade, of declining white-tailed deer numbers due to our successful hunter program. Purple trillium, Solomon’s-seal, yellow mandarin, pinesap, and mayapple are all more numerous, and wood betony and spring beauties have made their first appearances within the last ten and three years respectively. Some plants that used to be abundant when I was a kid virtually disappeared when deer numbers skyrocketed in the 80s and 90s, but are now beginning to rebound, including blackberries, raspberries, staghorn sumac, black elderberry, and Joe-Pye weed. The deer-sensitive red elderberry, never a common species in the past, has recently begun to appear all over the place in moister woods, and wild hydrangea and maple-leafed viburnum probably also owe their recent increase to the decline in the deer population.

The carpet of hayscented fern on drier slopes is a relatively new phenomenon here; I remember being excited by the first big beds of it back in 1978 and 79. Though native species, hayscented and New York ferns are behaving like invasives throughout Pennsylvania, spreading like wildfire and impeding the germination of other plants, including trees. A combination of deer herbivory and chemical changes in the soil (due mostly to acid precipitation) seems to be at fault. But at the same time, other, less aggressive ferns are doing well, too. Rattlesnake fern and cut-leafed grape fern both used to be rare, but they’ve become fairly common in the hollow now. It’s my impression that we also have a lot more cinnamon and interrupted ferns than we used to — both spectacular plants.

Where reptiles and amphibians are concerned, we seem to be doing O.K. Wood frogs have declined precipitously in recent years, but as I just explained in a post at the Plummer’s Hollow blog, that may be our fault for making their preferred ephemeral breeding pool a little too permanent, allowing predatory newts to gain a foothold. I’m not aware of any threat to wood frogs generally — though with so many other amphibian populations suddenly crashing around the world, one can’t be too sure. Eastern box turtles, on the other hand, are declining in many places due to habitat fragmentation and illicit collecting for the pet trade, so the fact that our population seems to be holding steady is very good news. We regularly find juvenile turtles, much to our surprise, because we have no shortage of mid-sized mammalian predators that like to snack on the eggs and young turtles.

Changes in mammal diversity here have been the most noticeable and dramatic in the past 35 years. Throughout the 70s, for example, there were no black bears on the mountain. We kept bees up until the mid-80s without a problem. Then the hives were destroyed by bears two years in a row, and we’ve had resident black bears ever since. In recent years, we’ve had two mother bears sharing this end of the mountain and raising litters of up to three cubs at a time. This reflects a state-wide increase in the black bear population, thanks to careful stewardship by the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Two other mammals are also much more common now than they used to be, bobcat and porcupine. Other than one, iffy sighting back in the 70s, bobcats were pretty much nonexistent here when I was a kid. But in the past three years, our hunter friends have begun seeing tracks, and two autumns in a row have had good sightings.

The porcupine population peaked about five years ago, I think, and started declining after that. Part of the reason for this decline may be the recent arrival of another species, one of the few that’s fast enough to flip and kill a porcupine: the fisher. This larger relative of the mink had been completely extirpated by trappers over a century ago, and was re-introduced first to West Virginia, then to north central Pennsylvania. We had our first sightings of a fisher in the hollow two years ago, which might seem like yet another vindication of our decision to foster mature forest conditions wherever possible. Fishers are supposed to be a mature-forest-reliant species. But apparently people are seeing them all over the place, and they are turning out to be much more flexible than the biologists had thought. In the second sighting in Plummer’s Hollow, a hunter watched one chasing a member of another species that’s new here, the fox squirrel. I can’t help wondering whether these big, slow squirrels will be able to hang on with fishers getting established — not to mention coyotes, which arrived on the mountain just a year or two after the fox squirrels.

The coyote is a new animal altogether, never resident in the east until the latter half of the 20th century. It’s not quite a substitute for the extirpated mountain lions and wolves, because it doesn’t prey on adult deer, but we’re still pretty excited to have it around. Eastern coyotes are larger than their western counterparts, having interbred with timber wolves in Quebec, but unfortunately they aren’t nearly as vocal. On rare occasions when I wake in the night to hear coyote song, I feel the way I felt this morning, listening to the winter wren: uncommonly blessed.

The cloud of unmaking

canker tree

Inside the cloud there were trees, there were woods and fields, there was an entire mountain where the last few patches of snow had shrunk in the wash, so that the ground was now almost entirely bare.

woodpecker cherry

Inside the cloud, ants and woodpeckers went about their business of excavating chambers in the heartwood. Things seemed at first as they should be. But the ground, too, grew hollow from the ministrations of earthworms, the descendents of hardy pioneers, slowly unmaking the land and everything that sprouted from it. The dark red stems of Japanese barberry glistened against the yellow fur of last year’s Japanese stiltgrass.

Margaret's woods

Inside the cloud, rain didn’t have far to fall. But it brought nitric and sulphuric acid from power plants a hundred miles to the west. Evergreen leaves of mountain laurel turned beautiful shades of brown and red and copper before falling. Trees slowly weakened as the acid dissolved the minerals and nutrients needed for their growth, and left a soil saturated with aluminum. This effect was especially pronounced inside the cloud, which was more acidic than rainfall alone would have been.

white fungus clump

Inside the cloud, trees made vulnerable by acid deposition succumbed to a thousand different enemies: diseases new and old, native or exotic pests. A warm winter allowed insects to flourish; a cold winter killed weakened trees outright. Weedier tree species such as black cherry and red maple took over from the oaks and hickories, but were much more likely to snap in the increasingly frequent ice storms. The forest slowly took on a patchy appearance, turned to savanna. The fallen trunks and branches bubbled with white fungi.

white fungus twig

Inside the cloud, colors that had lain dormant all winter began to glow. Spring would come one way or another. Even if someday all flowering plants should die out, something would still brighten and appear to blossom. Something would still license the simulacrum of hope.

red maple deadwood

Don’t forget to submit tree-related links to roger (dot) butterfield (at) gmail (dot) com by March 30 for inclusion in the upcoming Festival of the Trees at his blog Words and Pictures.

Spring in the sticks

ground cedar

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
–Robert Frost, “A Prayer in Spring”

gall pond

First day of spring —
I keep thinking about
the end of autumn.
–Matsuo Basho (Robert Hass, tr.)

excaliber

Dead sticks
have no spring

Save Lucky

kitten 2

“Why are people such heartless jerks?” this kitten might be thinking — but she isn’t, because she is the most cuddly, affectionate, purr-fect little snoogie-woogams you have ever seen!

“Is this the Apocalypse?” you might be wondering, because you never expected to read the words “purr-fect little snoogie-woogams” at Via Negativa. But look, I need to get rid of this cat. And I don’t feel like dealing with the Humane Society, who always hit us up for a donation and act as if it is our fault people like to dump their four-footed problems off at the entrance to Plummer’s Hollow. Somehow or another, Lucky here managed to make it all the way up the road on her own, through the ice and snow — and happened to find a bunch of a gun-toting bird-lovers in a charitable mood. (It helps that we had a gallon of sour milk to get rid of.)

kitten 1

See what an appealing little kitten this is? Do you really think she needs to die in the jaws of a coyote or the talons of a great-horned owl — or from a lethal injection at the local Humane Society? What has she done to deserve such a fate?

Please help her live up to her provisional name and spread the word: Lucky needs a home. I wasn’t kidding — she really is very affectionate. I’ve seen her catch a fast-moving small rodent (a meadow vole), so she’d probably make a good mouser. And she seems to know how to act around small children. Truly, a wonderful animal.

kitten 3

UPDATE: We appear to have a taker (see comments). In fact, Suzanne responded within 15 minutes of my putting up this post! Who needs the classifieds?

The bottom corner

I am trying in secret to set the field on fire. It’s going to rain. I crouch down with an old book of matches I found among my grandmother’s things. The head of the first match I try crumbles into white sand against the strike pad. The second, drier, pops and flares into life. I hold the flame against the wiry blond curls of dried grass and it catches, races up one blade and down another. A thin pencil of smoke. My brother spots it and comes running over. “What are you doing?” I tear another match from the book, and another. The first fat drops begin to fall.

*

That was a dream, but it got me reminiscing all the same. There were wild dogs on the mountain back then. The one we called the Red Dog whelped a litter in an old woodchuck den down in that same corner of the field, and then abandoned them when they were half-grown. She never seemed quite right in the head, and some of her pups didn’t, either. We tamed them one by one, running them down in the long grass and when we caught them, petting them for hours and crooning words of endearment. I remember the beagle-looking one I frightened so badly he pissed himself, so that forever after he would urinate wildly whenever he was excited, until the family that adopted him finally took him to the pound. The one my brother Mark befriended developed a taste for chickens and had to be shot. That’s a hard thing for a 4-year-old kid to take, especially one with two domineering older brothers and no close neighbors. He said later it bothered him for years.

*

Early on, my parents wanted to have a pond down in that corner of the field, but the contractor decided it wasn’t clayey enough to hold water and left us with just the test holes. One of them quickly silted in, but the other was next to a spring and remained filled for much of the year — the pond, we called it, though it was barely more than a puddle. A few times we brought a microscope down and spent hours peering at algae and microorganisms. And every March during wood frog mating season we’d sit motionless beside the pond for hours, listening to the strange chorus of quacking calls and watching the orgiastic pile-ons whenever a female showed up. It was an education.

*

Once when we were teenagers, Mark and I went down into that part of the field with every book about wildflowers, weeds, grasses and sedges that we could lay our hands on, trying to attach a name to everything we found. We almost succeeded.

You must understand: we didn’t have television.

That section of the field hasn’t been plowed now in probably 40 years, and it hasn’t been mowed in over 30. Some catalpa trees have seeded in, and a few black locust, but other than that, the over-abundant deer have prevented trees and brush from taking over. We planted some white pine seedlings about ten years ago, but the deer got those, too.

Down under the grass and goldenrod, a thick carpet of moss has built up over the years, dotted with clumps of ebony spleenwort and cutleaf grape ferns; you sink in with every step. It’s nothing like walking in a pasture or a plowed field. This is the kind of spot that can haunt your dreams.

The Owl

A large owl glimpsed
in flight at the edge
of the spruce grove,
wings clipping against
the locust saplings as
it drops from its roost
& glides down the hillside
through trees as brown
as its feathers, a glare
off the snow & above,
the deepest blue:
I think of it again
just as I’m falling asleep.
The wind is shaking the house,
& I am wondering if this
is what it feels like
to be happy.

Forward, March!

icicles

Four days ago the snakes were out. Now once again we have snow, we have abstraction, we have calligraphy. But this is not a step backwards, as so many people like to think.

peninsula

The water in the stream looks black because the snow is white — this was true even before I upped the contrast in post-processing. Winter is about nothing if not contrast. And during no other month are the contrasts as sharp as they are in March, at winter’s end.

blackberry leaf

The dance between winter and spring is well underway. Mourning doves are pairing off, and the sharp-shinned hawks are wickering in the depths of the spruce grove. The woods echo with the calls of red-bellied woodpeckers.

weed

Certain dried weeds from last autumn remind me of wildflowers that will be blooming in another two months. The seed capsules of one unidentified weed in the hollow this morning, for example, were reminiscent of yellow mandarin blossoms. And the arrangement of leaves on the stem of the weed above reminded me of Solomon’s-seal, though I very much doubt that’s what it is.

grackle

A common grackle foraging in the stream made me think for a moment that the Louisiana waterthrush had returned a month early, though there’s no mistaking that baleful eye.

This may well be the last snowfall of the year, so I took special note of all the tracks. In one place, a vole had left a complex arabesque of tunnels in the top two inches of the snow. A little farther along, I saw where a chipmunk had made a very brief foray out from its burrow. And up near the top of the hollow, a winter cranefly strode purposefully over the snow without leaving any tracks at all.

winter cranefly

Turdus migratorius

owl pellet

The owl grips a thin branch of a walnut tree overhanging the driveway and regurgitates a large mass of hair and bones in the shape of its gizzard.

When an Owl is about to produce a pellet, it will take on a pained expression — the eyes are closed, the facial disc narrow, and the bird will be reluctant to fly. At the moment of expulsion, the neck is stretched up and forward, the beak is opened, and the pellet simply drops out without any retching or spitting movements.

I find it there the next morning, frozen solid. Tiny pelvises and femurs, jaw bones and vertebrae, and somewhere the miniscule bones from the inner ear. The owl doesn’t retch, no — owls are silent creatures, and besides, this is more like a turd, albeit one that travels in the wrong direction. I can imagine it making a quiet little blog.

*

“Look for antennae,” says the note beside me on the table. It’s in my own handwriting. I scratch my head.

Nope, nothing there.

*

I was listening to robins singing this morning while I drank my coffee. Despite their Latin name, Turdus migratorius, American robins are year-round residents throughout much of their range. They roam around in the winter in large gangs, foraging for wild fruit (Hercules’-club, sumac, fox grapes, etc.) and generally avoiding areas with heavy snow cover, so it’s common not to see them for a month or two at a time. And the wimpier ones do fly south, so I guess that’s how people started thinking of robins as the archetypal harbingers of spring. I liked what David Lynch did with that notion in Blue Velvet: at the end of this very strange movie about a small-town psychopath, a mechanical bird lands on a branch and the college-kid hero says, “Oh look! The first robin of spring!”

Although actually I prefer Gary Larson’s twist on the spring arrivals motif: bird bath in the foreground, typical Far Side fat kids with their eager faces pressed against the picture window, and their mother saying, “Look children! The slugs are back!” If you grew up in a family of nature nerds as I did, trust me, that’s hilarious.

*

Yesterday, I got into a pointless argument with a friend about whether it was possible to be mildly obsessed. I said I thought mild obsession was the only kind I’ve ever experienced. Full-blown obsession is entirely too much effort.

Take these robins, for example. When they start singing, it is a sign of (very early) spring, because it means they’re starting to pair off and defend territory. But birders like to interpret their song as: “Cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, cheerily, cheer up.”

Yeah, right. Much more likely, they’re saying, “Look at me, look out, look out, look at me, look out!” There’s an obsessive quality to their singing that just isn’t captured by the first interpretation.

*

There are at least two different web-based businesses built around the sale of owl pellets. I had no idea they were such a hot commodity. At Genesis, Inc.,

All of our owl pellets are from the Common Barn Owl (Tyto alba) and come from various locations. The majority come from the Pacific Northwest and are of the Highest Quality in the United States. Each pellet is inspected for quality and size. They are then heat treated and wrapped in aluminum foil. You can order 3 different sizes. The “SOP” are under 1.5″ and are usually between 1.25″ and 1.5″ in length. The next size are the “BOP’s”. These Owl Pellets are 1.5″ and larger. The BOP’s can contain pellets that are well over 2″ but will never be smaller that 1.5″. The BOP’s are the same pellets we fill our kits with and are the most common ones to order. The BOP’s are a great choice! If you can afford the price, the “JOP’s” are excellent! These owl pellets are 2″ and larger (may be limited to stock on hand).

The purchase of Owl Brand Discovery Kits help support humanitarian efforts around the globe.

Here is a highlight of just a few of the projects that you have helped OBDK participate in:

  • Funded 9 short term missionaries to a children’s home in Mexico
  • Promoting humanitarian outreach through our corporate structure
  • Participated in building hundreds of wells in Africa
  • Sponsored, coached, and managed more than 50 Little League players

All through the sale of barn owl pellets. Amazing.

*

I saw something on a tech blog the other night that absolutely horrified me. At the top of each post, right under the title, there was an extra line displaying the word count, followed by an estimate of how many seconds it would take someone to read the post.

I mean, blog.

Walking in the snow

the signboard beech

If you’d gone for a walk up the hollow this morning, you might’ve noticed this beech tree right around the first bend, on the other side of the stream. It’s right above the little three-foot waterfall on Plummer’s Hollow Run, which is flowing pretty well because of the all the melting — on the sunny slopes, at any rate. There’s still plenty of snow and ice in the depths of the hollow, as I had to remind a friend of mine who wanted to drive up here tonight. If you want to visit me right now, you’ll need a high-clearance vehicle with four-wheel drive. Or just plan on walking.

The hemlocks start at the top of the first hill. When I walked up the road after the big snowstorm on Wednesday, chickadees were foraging in the snow-laden boughs, setting off minor avalanches every time they moved.

northern short-tailed shrew 1

About half-way up the hollow in one of the tire tracks that day, I came across this sad sight. The northern short-tailed shrew, though far from uncommon in moist woodlands, is seldom seen alive due to its underground habits. My mother was fortunate enough to watch one of these creatures foraging on the surface for about 20 minutes one February:

It pursued its prey vigorously, its pointed snout questing, its clawed back feet pumping, its front feet digging like a frantic terrier. Once it pulled what looked like a caterpillar from beneath the leaf litter and chomped it down.

A small, plush, charcoal-gray, furry ball, it scuffled over the snow. Its pink nose constantly sniffed while its naked, pink feet scratched the thin snow layer or the open turf. The little creature ate so much that it even paused to excrete.

Feral cats and other predators tend to kill shrews and then abandon them uneaten, due to their strong muskiness — a by-product of the mild poison they emit in their saliva. I’m not sure what did in this particular shrew — possibly a hawk, since I didn’t see any tracks. The bird had probably spotted it when it emerged from a snow-tunnel into the tire track.

northern short-tailed shrew 2

Short-tailed shrews spend much of the winter sleeping in order to conserve energy, but they don’t actually hibernate. Instead, they fill underground larders with seeds, fungal parts, insect eggs — virtually anything edible. Their poison, ineffective against larger prey like mice, is thought to be used to immobilize insects and insect larvae, keeping them alive and fresh for later consumption.

Considering how numerous and how voracious they are, shrews probably have a much larger effect on the forest ecosystem than their diminutive size might suggest. For example, two of their favorite foods are earthworms and, in the winter, fallen gypsy moth eggs. At this latitude, all earthworms are non-native and their proliferation in forest environments has led to radical changes in soil make-up and chemistry, probably paving the way — so to speak — for a number of invasive plant species, while destroying habitat for native plants, invertebrates, and salamanders. It’s funny to think that a major predator of salamanders and snails like the short-tailed shrew might actually be helping to save them by keeping a competitor somewhat in check! (Emphasis on “might”: that’s pure speculation on my part.) As for the gypsy moth, I suppose most people are familiar with the devastation it can cause during its periodic outbreaks. Over the past couple of decades, a suite of predators and diseases have helped keep gypsy moth populations in check in our area; it would be hard to measure the contribution of any one predator. And of course gypsy moths are far from the only insect whose larvae or adult forms prey on trees.

Nearly blind, the northern short-tailed shrew compensates with an exquisite sense of smell and the use of sonar, like a wingless, earth-bound bat. Deep snow creates a lighter, more permeable medium than soil. A thick layer of brown fat between the shrew’s shoulder blades burns like a furnace, as another of my mother’s columns describes. (See why I wanted her to get a website?)

oak apple gall

If you’d gone walking up the hollow this morning, you might’ve seen the first tundra swans flying over, en route to their breeding grounds in Canada. They weren’t very vocal, this bunch, and if I hadn’t stopped to try and get a picture of a pileated woodpecker (obviously without success), I never would have heard a stray clarinet sound and known to look up. That’s always how it is, though, isn’t it? Stop to look at one thing, and you notice something else. I forget what I was looking at when it suddenly occurred to me that the road itself was beautiful in the long shadows of winter.

road stripes

I find it all too easy to keep my eyes on the ground whenever there’s snow. Devoid of life as winter otherwise might seem, it’s actually the one time of year when I can find daily, tangible evidence of the animals I share the mountain with. This morning I admired fresh tracks of wild turkeys, coyotes, deer, a gray (?) fox, a porcupine, white-footed mice, meadow voles, gray squirrels and chipmunks. The chipmunk tracks have diminished a little from earlier in the week, when every chipmunk on the mountain seemed to have gone into a mating frenzy at the same time. Some of them even looked as if they were chasing after their own shadows, they way they zipped back and forth over the snow. But that’s another story.