Strictly For the Birds

February 1 and  2, 2011
Close to Home

If the race had never lived through a winter,
what would they think was coming?
HDT Journal, 1850


On the last day of January, I took a short walk along the river on the Betar Path. It was so cold that tears were streaming down my cheeks, though the air itself was still.
There's no way I could have been more bundled up, and still able to walk. We are usually experiencing a January thaw by now – where is it?


The little brooks that cross the path were still in the icy jaws of winter, as was the River, which has thawed and refrozen several times now.

It was the sort of day to walk briskly, just to avoid freezing in place. Stopping at a river overlook, I turned to face the sun, and became a windowsill cat, happy to feel the sun.

 The forecast for the next two days was for a large winter storm to come barreling up from the south.

With that in mind, I went a-walking on that cold – but sunny ! – day.

Not much company today on the path -- not even the usual dog-walkers. (and windowsill cats are smart enough to have trained humans to set up litter-boxes !)


Not a good day for a picnic, either.

So I strode along, swinging arms and legs, knowing I’d be hobbled indoors for the next day or two.

***

The first day of February began with dark clouds and freezing-rain.
“A louring sky,” Thoreau would have called it. The day was more dreary than bad, but this was just the precursor to the bigger storm.


The radio and tv had been blatting about it constantly, calling the coming storm a “potential snow-i-cane.” As if we had never seen a snowstorm before.

“Oh, all that hype is strictly for the birds,” my Mom would say.

(I had never thought twice about this frequent family expression, but here’s some interesting history on it.)

Speaking of the birds, we were concerned about them finding food on this sleety day and the days to follow.

Mom and I been putting out suet for the birds on our little apartment balcony, and leftover popcorn when we have it. We’re not supposed to have bird feeders, according to my lease, but we can’t resist hanging one little suet cage in the winter. The birds who visit us provide endless entertainment. We call it The Bird Channel.

Today we had nothing but odd leftover pieces of various loaves of bread – so I came up with an experiment, to while away the time indoors.

It was not especially scientific.
(hey, it’s been many moons since Biology 101)
(and I was a Fine Arts Major, anyway).
There were tons of variables (noted in retrospect) that were not accounted for.

But here’s what I did – I put out samples of three types of bread, cut into small squares:

Hannaford in-store bakery marble rye

Panera sourdough,

And Arnold country oat bread.

[Let it be hereby noted that I did not, nor shall ever receive, any payments or compensation of any kind for the perceived avian endorsements or pseudoscientific analysis to follow.]


There was a lull in the precipitation, and so I popped out onto the balcony, and set out the specimens.

Which sample would be consumed first?

The hardy juncos – true snowbirds – stood before these offerings for a while, deciding. Perhaps the pieces were too large for them.

Down swooped a bluejay, who had no problem loading up five pieces at a time and jetting back to the woods’ edge.

After only ten minutes, it was apparent that the Hannaford bread just wasn’t cuttin’ it with any of the birds.

Quite unscientifically, I changed the position of the samples, thinking that the position relative to the usual food source might be affecting the results.

Nope. Same trend continued.

The Panera was gone in about 20 minutes.
The Arnold came in second,
and the Hannaford bread was still there an hour and a half later,
when the snow began to come down in earnest
And some visiting sparrows decided they’d rather have the good ol’ suet.

Draw your own conclusions. Birds, after all, have different food preferences than we do.
But I know which bread I’ll be buying more regularly in the future…

The January Sunsets

January 30, 2011
Ice Meadows on Hudson River

Today I went with Jackie and Marie upriver to the Ice Meadows. They are marvelous places to explore and botanize in the summer, but it’s this time of year that they earned their name. For here is where the combination of terrain, waterflow and climate all combine to allow formation of frazil ice.


I’m still not exactly sure what it is; it’s a type of ice that flows like a liquid and seems to congeal and break up at a whim. Unfortunately, I was about 2 weeks too late to see the fresh crop of it this year. It has snowed heavily since then. Still, you could see the wrinkles and folds in the river created by this frazil backing up and reflowing.

The trail there is well-trodden at this time of year, making snowshoeing fairly easy.

Unless you try bushwacking it out to the river's edge...

Marie came along because one of her archaeology buddies had sent her a pretty cool video about frazil ice. (google "Yosemite Frazil" to find it on YouTube.)

We all made another stop upriver at The Glen, where we walked out on a bridge where the road crosses the Hudson. Here is the Frazil Factory of the river.

The bridge vibrated as Sunday ski-traffic went whizzing by, and I didn’t linger there!


Later on, Jackie and I rode north, looking for other river vantage points. Clouds came in, the road began to whiten, and we were running out of daylight.  I suggested we head back. We pulled over onto a side road to turn around.


The first unusual sight was a phone booth. Wow, haven’t seen one in so long … must record for posterity …

Across the street was a small lane. It led down to what looked like a millpond.

All at once, the sun came out, though snow was still falling –
without a word,
we both jumped out of the car and walked down the lane,
cameras in hand.

It was a charming sight. We stood on a much smaller bridge this time,
no cars whizzing by,
just the sound of snowflakes falling.

After some time just gazing at this scene, we headed home.
Even from the Northway, the sunset was something to behold.
Jackie was snapping photos out the windshield
while I gamely kept the car between the lines,
catching only glimpses of the colors of the west.

The sunsets, I think, are now particularly interesting.
The colors of the west seem more than unusually warm,
perhaps by contrast with this simple snow-clad earth
over which we look and the clear cold sky, --
a sober but extensive redness,
almost every night passing into a dun.
There is nothing to distract our attention from it.
…The January Sunsets.
HDT Journal, January 11, 1856

The White-Headed Eagle

January 28, 2011
Moreau Lake State Park

I bought me a spy-glass some weeks since... I buy but few things, and those not till long after I begin to want them, so that when I do get them I am prepared to make a perfect use of them and extract their whole sweet.
HDT Journal, April 10, 1854

[Note: Thoreau had worked himself up to spend the princely sum of eight dollars for this spy-glass.]

I think I have got the worth of my glass
now that it has revealed to me the white-headed eagle.
Journal, April 23, 1854

For a few months in winter, Moreau Park participates in a weekly Eagle Watch. It takes about 2 hours to make 4 or 5 stops along the Hudson River and make 10-minute observations at each spot. Results are reported to the DEC. The state agency has been tracking these birds, which come down from Canada at this time of year. When the northern rivers starting freezing up, the eagles come south, to fish here at open spots on the river near the dams.


It’s a Friday morning activity that is a good way to get outdoors in winter, although it involves a lot of standing still, which on a cold day can be pretty chilling. Sometimes no one signs up, sometimes there a big crowd. Gary, the park naturalist, usually leads these watches. I’ve been tagging along for several years, going when I can.


One time it was just me and Gary, standing in cold cold rain along the river’s edge, scanning the sky in vain. Another time, twenty people showed up, endured the two-hour stint, and saw no birds of ANY kind. That's when you realize that one of the requirements for any naturalist is lots and lots of patience.
Today was cold and overcast, yet a fairly enthusiastic bunch showed up.
We start at Sherman Island Boat Launch, one of my favorite views of the river, any time of year.

At other stops nearer the dam, we observed black ducks, mallards and mergansers, sporting fearlessly in the wide-open water. Here’s Mary checking the treeline. You have to look carefully since all the trees have snow in the branches that could be the "white-headed eagle."  Hmm, no eagles here either.

It’s usually at the last stop, Spier Falls Boat Launch, that we see an eagle. We were cold and tired, and about to call it a day.

Suddenly Mary (henceforth to be known as Eagle-Eye Mary), asked me to look waaaaay upriver, to confirm something she had spotted. With my small binocs, I saw, perched in the farthest pine along the farthest shore as the river bent to the left, a tiny blob topped with white. It was indeed an eagle ! (You'll have to click to enlarge this photo, which was taken at full zoom on my camera.)

I have no idea how she saw it in the first place. The rest of us checked it out after Gary set up the spotting scope. THEN it was definite.

The observers were jumping for joy, even to see this tiny vision so far away.

On the way back along the river road, we saw another eagle rise up from the river ice, and perch in a maple across the river. So that made it a two-eagle day.


It’s a thrill that never gets old. There’s always someone along who has never seen one before. And I realize how lucky we are to see them so regularly. When I was growing up, they were considered almost extinct in the lower 48.

***


On one particular Watch a few years ago, we had seen an eagle across the river on a beautiful sunny day, but I could not get a good photo of it. Man was I frustrated. Gary would have liked some “evidence” of our sighting. So later that day, I sent Gary this "improved" photo – of what it feels like when you see one – even though in reality, it was just a tiny speck. He laughed for a long time when he saw it. Huzzah for PhotoShop !

 

Cold Amusements

January 24, 2011
[Stayed indoors this morning]

It was to be the coldest night of the year – followed by the coldest day -- one reason I had been glad to get outdoors the day before.

Forecasters were blaring “Wind Chill Warnings” on the hour.  The coming cold temperatures were  a topic of conversation all weekend.
 It’s something that happens every year --  yet if you went by the non-stop “Weather Alerts”  on television and radio,  it was a breaking news event!

(See the Journal  entry below, to realize that this sort of fuss is really nothing new…)

The wooden rafters of our apartment building began to snap loudly at around 10 pm Sunday evening. That only happens when it gets very cold. At odd intervals, you’d hear a startling THUMP above.  I drifted off to sleep, toasty warm on flannel sheets,  wondering just how low the thermometer would go.

Suddenly it was morning – and there was light was shining in my eyes.
That’s odd, I thought, since my window faces west.  Shaking off sleep, I saw that it was the moon – its pale beams were hitting my pillow.

Well there's that heartbeat of the moon the horoscope talked about !
Six a.m., too early for an evening-shift worker to be up and about.  Back under the covers!

The temperature stood at minus 20 degrees. 

 

HDT’s Journal:  March 19, 1859 -While it is moderately hot or cold, or wet or dry,
nobody attends to it,
but when Nature goes to an extreme in any of these directions
we are all on the alert with excitement.

E. g., when I went to Boston in the early train
the coldest morning of last winter,
two topics mainly occupied the attention of the passengers: Morphy’s chess  victories,
and Nature’s victorious cold that morning.
The inhabitants of various towns were comparing notes,
and that one whose door opened upon a greater degree of cold than any of his neighbors’ doors chuckled over not a little.
It was plain that one object which the cold was given us for was our amusement,
a passing excitement.
It would be perfectly consistent and American
to bet on the coldness of our respective towns,
of the morning that is to come.
Thus a greater degree of cold may be said to warm us
more than a less one.

Walking This Afternoon

January 23, 2011
Otter Point, Moreau Lake State Park

Henry Thoreau and I both went walking this afternoon - only not together:


(from Thoreau’s Journal:)
Jan. 23 1857 –
The coldest day that I remember recording, clear and bright …
Ink froze.
Had to break the ice in my pail with a hammer.
Thermometer at 6:45 am, -18 degrees;
at 10:30, -14 degrees
(Smith’s, –20; Wilds’ –7, the last being in a more sheltered place);
at 12:45, -9 degrees;
at 4 pm, -5 1/2 degrees;
at 7:30 pm, -8 degrees.


Walking this afternoon, I notice that the face inclines to stiffen,
and the hands and feet get cold soon.
On first coming out in very cold weather,
I find that I breathe fast,
though without walking faster or exerting myself
any more than usual.

It seems that eons have passed since the long, leisurely walks of summer. Instead, when I do get outdoors these days, it’s hurried and quick, face bundled, eyes down, choosing my steps with care.
The weather has been unpleasant for many days in a row, and I've fallen into Hibernation Mode --preferring to remain in my warm cave if given a choice.

So of course, when Jackie suggested we meet to walk this weekend, I was already mentally setting some conditions on my participation.
“If it’s not snowing”
“if it’s not too cold”
“if my car starts”
“if my little toe gets better” (yes, I bashed it again a few days ago – you’ve done it too : at first you see stars, and then cautiously look down, but it’s always still hanging on somehow).


All in all, some pretty lame excuses.

No matter that I knew that Henry Thoreau, plagued his whole short life with tuberculosis, had been out walking on this very same day 154 years ago, loping around Concord to get those temperature readings from his neighbors …

And though I was looking forward to much-needed fresh air, I was also prepared to cancel on a moment’s notice, if Jackie called.

No call came.

I wondered whether to make the call myself, when my eye fell on today's horoscope:

How could I resist such poetic advice?
Smiling at the summons to spend "more time than usual" outdoors,
I loaded the snowshoes into the car, and drove to our meeting-place at the trailhead.

As I drove southward, the sunny sky dimmed like a cataract, and the distant grey haze became tiny snowflakes falling all around.

Excuse Number One was here!


I arrived first at the trailhead and sat in the car, watching the windshield whiten. Moments later, Jackie’s car pulled up, and  just as I was about to say, “well, let’s just go for coffee” – she was already putting on her snowshoes.

That’s the value of a good friend, they get you to go outside your
self-imposed limits.

As if to reward us, no sooner did we enter the woods, than the snow stopped and dim sunlight appeared.
We ended up having a splendid walk. I struggled a bit with the deepness of the snow – even with snowshoes, if the snow if fluffy enough, you sink down quite a ways. We took turns breaking trail, and Jackie had lots more energy than I.

Excuse Number Two was still a possibility. It was about 9 degrees.
I’ve been out on short walks in that temperature, but we stayed out for about an hour and a half. Ironically, we were more concerned with getting overheated from exertion, which is a real danger in those conditions.

After the initial coldness in fingers and toes, just a few minutes of tromping through deep snow soon gets you feeling toasty warm all over.

My hat was flaps-down, and eliminated most peripheral vision. A scarf helped keep my nose from going numb, but also helped to royally fog up my glasses. Then there was no vision at all. At times I was walking by feel alone, literally in a haze. It was good just to be outside and moving.

There were some tracks and trails everywhere, but all seemed made hours ago – except for the stitchery of mouse-tracks that went on for great mouse-distances, betraying their recent epic voyages from tree to tree.

In a way, we were like those mice, only our tracks were bigger.

The woods were very still and beautiful, and we sloped down to the coves along the river.
At the edge, you can look out across the river – a marvelous sight even on a grey day.

One pauses at coming upon such frozen serenity.

Good friend or no, I stubbornly stayed ashore while Jackie fearlessly walked out on the cove ice. She wanted to check the deer carcass, which was put there by park personnel as a sort of enticement for the wintering bald eagles.

So far, they haven’t seen any eagles during the official Friday Eagle Watches at the Park, which take place only a few miles upriver from where we now stood.


Jackie came back after a few minutes, and we just stood there, looking at the sun peek out behind Three Brother Island.

Suddenly, in the air off to the left – big wings !


and it was a bald eagle, who casually flapped his way past us,
past the deer, past the Island, in a matter of moments.


I barely had time to raise the camera with clumsy cold hands.

Sure, maybe if we hadn’t been right out where he could see us, or hear us, that eagle might have come down for a landing in that cove, but it was still treat enough for us.

We walked out to the point of land that Jackie calls Rippled Rocks. Even covered with snow, they live up to their name.

It was by no means a long walk, in time or distance, but one filled with wonderful things that made it seem a grand excursion.

Revivals

January 1, 2011
Moreau Lake State Park

A Happy New Year to All !

Yes, it’s been a while since you’ve seen any activity here. ..

Back in the middle of November, things happened -- one after the other -- things that made it difficult to keep up the blog. Things have settled down since then, and it’s time to revive this blog.

In the next few entries,  I will cover the days between then and now in an attempt to catch up. And perhaps even tackle a retrospective of the past glorious year, as my blogging friends have already done.

For now, let me leap across time to the present moment,
or rather, to the day before yesterday,
when I took a wonderful afternoon walk withJackie at Moreau.

It was the day of New Year’s Eve, and for once,  I had the entire day off.
After the previous two weeks – a blur of extra hours and odd work shifts -- I was certainly looking forward to going to Moreau and being able to take my time.

It’s been cloudy and blustery for a while, too, and today dawned sunny and warm.
(By "warm," I mean well above the usual 15 degrees. It got all the way up to 38 today!)

I celebrated by not wearing the ever-present windbreaker. (But I DID stash it in my pack, having learned THAT lesson a long time ago.) It’s amazing how leaving off one layer of winter clothing can make you feel so much lighter.  No need for snowshoes yet, either.

Jackie and I headed for an area we call The Valley of the Porcupines. It’s an area of small rocky pits where these critters prefer to make their odiferous dens.

If you pass near one of these dens, you are more likely to smell it before you see it ! Of course, the troughs in the snow, created by waddling porcupines,  are a sort of giveaway, as well.

A  few days ago, after our version of the Great East Coast Blizzard of 2010 (during which we received an underwhelming FOUR  inches of nice fluffy snow), I went walking on this same trail, admiring beautiful crisp fresh tracks of all sorts of animals.

There were deer beds, in which one could see the imprint of the animal’s winter coat.

Up at the dens, I was fortunate to see very fresh prints of a porcupine.
Instead of the usual trodden-down hedgehog highway –

You could see the texture of the skin on the soles of his feet – as if he was wearing little sneakers.

  

And where there are porcupines, there are likely to be fishers, bounding through the snow.

Jackie is so right when she confessed, “every year, I have to relearn any tracking skills I thought I knew” -  I feel the same way. Adding  to my confusion  is the fact that many walkers here bring along their pets – who oftentimes end up off the leash .  In some parts of the park, you’d have a tough time puzzling out whether it was Reynard or Rover who crossed  your path.

That’s when you have to consider other factors like location, stride, even motivation.

Today Jackie and I spent some happy hours just wandering about, following all sorts of trails in the snow,
trying to puzzle out some of their mysteries.

Another mystery was the fact that we saw insects. Alive.

First there was a small swarm of “gnats” – dancing up and down like puppets on a string, similar to the spring flights of the ephemerae. A few landed on the snow and I got a photo

of one of them.

Then another photo, this time there were two of them – hey wait, what ARE they doing? In winter?

Jackie came over to take her own photo of the gnats, and instead captured a glimpse of a stonefly !
(follow this link to her blog to realize the good fortune of seeing  this creature.)

Later I saw a translucent spider, scurrying along, to hide behind a twig,

And something that I thought was a tiny twiglet – the resemblance was perfect –except for the fact that it was moving along like an inchworm  –

When we saw some ancient logs encrusted with lichens, another creature showed up when I reviewed the photos at home – springtails. Well, those we have seen in winter before, but the others were a surprise.

Perhaps these delicate creatures were, like myself,
revived by the relative warmth of the day.

We stopped back at the newly-renovated Warming Hut for a late lunch, sitting in Papa-Bear-sized chairs by the fireplace.  Then for the first time this season, we took our first shortcut ACROSS the lake.

The sun was sinking down past the western ridge, and everything had a hazy glow about it.

Today the ice was thick enough (6 to 8 inches)  to walk on safely. The ice-fishers have been out on the ice for over a week, despite some mighty  dubious conditions.

Another dubious thing – we found two fish left out on the ice, by fishermen who had since gone home.

The first, a small sucker – perhaps used as bait? Not knowing anything about fishing, I had to stop and take a close look.

This may be the offspring of the suckers we saw spawning in the shallows last spring, as we had watched on a delightful April day from the far shore of the lake.

Jackie said, “wait a minute, he’s still alive.”  His gills were moving, as he lay staring (as fish are wont to do) at the edge of the ice-hole, just inches away. So near and yet so far!

After posing this unfortunate for the obligatory photos, I sang “Born Free,” while Jackie got her new gloves all fishy by picking him up and plopping him back into the watery hole.
I don’t know if he survived, but we thought he deserved another chance at life.

We walked on across the frozen lake, and I saw another dark shape atop the ice, near another hole.

This time it was a pickerel !
We returned this one to the deep, as well. I had never seen one close-up.
What a combination of fierce reputation, and sheer beauty !

You can read a marvelous passage about them in Walden.
Standing on the ice of my own Walden, I saw the words of Thoreau literally come to life, right at my feet.

From the chapter “The Pond in Winter:”

Ah, the pickerel of Walden!
 when I see them lying on the ice,
or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the water,
 I am always surprised by their rare beauty,
as if they were fabulous fishes,
 they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods,
 foreign as Arabia to our Concord life.
They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty
which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock
 whose fame is trumpeted in our streets.
 

They are not green like the pines,
nor gray like the stones,
nor blue like the sky;
but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors,
like flowers and precious stones,

as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. 
They, of course, are Walden all over and all through;
are themselves small Waldens in the animal kingdom --Waldenses.
 It is surprising that they are caught here — that in this deep and capacious spring,
far beneath the rattling teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs
that travel the Walden road,
this great gold and emerald fish swims.

I never chanced to see its kind in any market;
it would be the cynosure of all eyes there.
Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up
their watery ghosts,
like a mortal translated before his time
to the thin air of heaven.