Feeder birds, 1; weather forecaster, 0

Ominous morning clouds over Pinchot Lake

My feeder birds are better at predicting snow than the local forecasters.  Two days ago I wasn’t supposed to get any precipitation when I noticed the feeder birds chowing down in earnest.  That’s never a good sign.  It’s true they weren’t going at the bird seed like little demons, but the level of feeding was definitely higher than was normal for 10 a.m.  The clouds looked ominous, and snow wasn’t far to the south of me.  Perhaps it was just nearness of that coastal storm that set them off.  But no.

Within an hour, the first snowflakes appeared, and not long after that the snow was heavy enough that I couldn’t see the mountain to the west and before long I couldn’t even see to the bottom of Roundtop.  For an hour or so, the snow was pretty intense before it began to taper off.  The feeder birds do not lie.  They know when it’s going to snow.  They are not fooled.

This winter, I don’t have any exotic or unusual feeder birds, just the usual suspects in roughly the same numbers as is typical.  For me, this means about 5 Carolina chickadees, a pair of Northern Cardinals, 2-3 tufted titmice, a pair of Carolina wrens, another of eastern nuthatch, the ubiquitous downy woodpecker and an array of dark-eyed juncos that never seem to quite understand how feeders work.  They are much more likely to just sit around and watch the other birds eat from the feeders. Eventually, they return to the ground where they join the white-throated sparrows.

 I also have a few infrequent visitors—a pair of house finch and another of American goldfinch, the red-bellied woodpecker and occasionally the hairy woodpecker taps on the tree from which the bird feeders hang.  I have yet to see that one in the bird feeders.  I have no sign of pine siskins, let along the even more rare evening grosbeak or the rarer still, redpoll.

Still, I do not complain as watching these little ones flit in and out never gets old for me.  They teach me a lot about the behaviors of the different species, and, as weather forecasters go, they can’t be beat.

Sunrise snowmaking

As the season is now in that time where little is green or growing, I set off this morning looking for tiny things to photograph. I looked at the designs made by frost. I looked at brown and dried things, some of which were unrecognizable in their current state (though I’m sure I knew what they were when they were green). I looked at twisted vines, frost-stunted mosses, and Christmas ferns laying flat on the forest floor.

And then I turned around and saw the sunrise and decided the little things can wait another day, perhaps for a grey day when winter’s poor morning light foils any attempts at photography. But had I not spent those minutes looking for those little gifts of the forest, I wouldn’t have seen the sun rise in all its glory over the eastern mountains.

Awakenings

Wildlife around the cabin seems to be picking up, if still very slightly. Last evening I saw several deer stepping carefully through the snow, avoiding the deepest spots. This morning a rabbit bounced in front of Dog and me on our morning walk.

It’s just a little change, but a welcome one from the blanket of calm white that covers the forest and the fields. They were among the first signs that winter’s long slumber is soon ending or at least easing. The days of deep sleep are over, though it is too early to get up and get going.

The deer are out of their winter holdings, no longer confined to one small space. The rabbits can move more or less freely again. The bluebirds are singing again. The cardinals have sung all winter—nothing seems to slow them down too much. Their songs are more sustained, though, perhaps even more urgent.

It is still too soon for thousands of snow geese to head north, but that grows closer too. Perhaps this weekend, certainly by the next, the ice will be open enough for them to race north as far as open water permits. They will cover the fields and the lakes and skies for a day or a few days.

When that happens, whatever the date, spring will have arrived.

Lovely winter days

The weather right now suits me perfectly. The days warm to near 40. The nights are only several degrees below freezing. Snow showers fall nearly every day. The frigid, blustery nights of midwinter have eased. Daylight lasts, if weakly, into the evening again. I love this. I’d be happy to have a month of weather like this.

This morning I heard a pair of great horned owls calling way down at the bottom of the mountain. They were so far away that I had to stop and listen and hope they would call again for me to be sure I heard them. This is the first I’ve heard them this year. I’m sure that hearing them now is a function of how the morning sky is paling at the time I always walk the dogs. They have likely always called when the stars are beginning to disappear and the eastern sky is just turning from black to charcoal, but it is only now that event corresponds to my own morning walks.

The weather certainly isn’t spring-like, but it feels as though the worst of winter has passed. The days grow a bit warmer, the days lengthen. I feel as though I’ve gotten through the worst of it for this season, so now I can enjoy what’s left of the winter.

Songs on a winter's sunrise

Overnight, a dusting of snow layered atop the last dusting. Dawn’s light arrives a bit earlier each day. Today is the first day it was light enough to take a morning photograph. At this hour, the light is still edged with night’s darkness, but the battle is lost and morning’s light predominates.

I awake to cold weather and a cardinal singing to the clearing sky. It doesn’t take much to make a cardinal happy. This time of year, I rarely hear them sing on a cloudy day, but if the skies are clear, it doesn’t matter to them that it’s mid-January. The cardinal is the earliest bird to arrive at my feeders. The sky is barely light when I first hear their "chip" call as I sit at the kitchen table. It will be minutes later before the rest of the crew arrives—juncos, titmice, chickadees, perhaps the Carolina wren.

This morning I saw more residents of the mountain. Four deer—mom and the two kids, the fourth perhaps a young doe from the previous year. All are fat and fuzzy, almost long-haired in their winter coats. They graze on the small patch of grass they’ve uncovered at the bottom of my lane, calmly raising their heads but not moving as I drive past, almost close enough to reach out and scratch one’s ears.

These deer are well used to people. This morning, Big Dad and his snowcat are grooming the slope next to where they graze. Someone else, Tim perhaps, runs a snowmobile up another slope, and a third snowboy is tooling around in his ‘Gator to check the snowjets. Through it all the deer are calm, barely interested. The grass is more important.

February Thunderstorm

It's not every day or every year or even ever before that I've come home from work in February to a thunderstorm. But that's what greeted me last evening. Moments after I took this photo of the weird light just ahead of the storm, the lightning was close enough that I scurried inside.

The weather during the day brought record-breaking warm temperatures, breaking the old record of 60 degrees by a degree or so. Given that extreme during the day, it's not surprising or unusual that the storm that followed would be atypical as well. As far as I know, my area did not get the tornados that accompanied this storm when it passed to the south. Certainly, I didn't have anything like that at the cabin.

Later in the evening another storm crashed through, this one with high winds that reached 70 mph but even that only lasted for a minute or so.

This morning the sky is golden and clearing, the temperature already on its way back down to a more seasonal number. Snow is even forecast for the weekend. The weather has been so bizarre, especially during the last year or so, that its weirdness is almost starting to feel like the norm. And that's a much scarier thing than a thunderstorm in February.

Going Feral

It's probably just as well that the holidays are over, and my life is getting back to its "normal" routine. When I am alone and at the cabin, I find myself turning feral all too quickly.

It's so easy to quickly ignore society's rules of good grooming and good behavior. I end up wearing stripes and plaids (but they are my favorite flannel shirt and sweater). So what if they don't match at all? Both feel wonderful, so it's only natural to want to wear them together.

It's easy to let the hair go unwashed an extra day or to pad around in the same comfortable socks for longer than is proper. After all, the dogs, who are slobs at heart, don't mind. The cats are fussier but not about these kinds of things.

I find myself admitting, albeit reluctantly, that society's rules keep me from going too far "out there" down the path to being a feral human. The rules force me to leave the cabin, dressed and coiffed appropriately. If I had, say, a month on my own, I might forget how to do even that, and I'm fairly sure I would care even less than I do now, which is a bit frightening.

I am eccentric enough, I suspect, at least by the standards of normal modern life. For one thing, I can't abide pointy heeled shoes--they look like elf shoes to me. And even if I liked them, which I don't, they simply wouldn't work in the mud around the cabin, even on the short walk from the car to the front door. So I wear flat shoes with treaded soles, the only flats in an office with a sea of heels.

I don't scream when I see a mouse or a bat--both of which have mysteriously found their way into our office at one time or another. And naturally, I was the one who ended up catching these visitors and releasing them outside.

The differences run deeper, too, but the tamed and civilized humans around me are already suspicious enough. Sometimes I feel as though I spend my days in the costume of normal life, but I am wild and feral underneath.