Snowbirds and snow angels

No bird loves snow like a junco. That is a scientific fact.

Their other common name - a more fitting one than "junk-o," my sister thinks - is the snowbird...or even better, the slate-colored snowbird.

A snow angel made by a snowbird.

The trail of the snowbird.

After the recent snow, I was watching them hop through junco-hip-deep snow with joy. They like the patterns that they create in new fallen snow. This much has been proven.

As an added bonus to the satisfying work of snow-angel-making, weed seeds become even more visible on the pristine white snow surface. Henry David Thoreau, in a December 1856 journal entry, called it their "clean white napkin" to eat off of.

"December 1st, 1856 - Slate-colored snowbirds flit before me in the path, feeding on the seeds on the snow, the countless little brown seeds that begin to be scattered over the snow, so much more obvious to bird and beast. A hundred kinds of indigenous grain are harvested now, broadcast upon the surface of the snow. Thus at a critical season these seeds are shaken down on to a clean white napkin, unmixed with dirt and rubbish, and off this the little pensioners pick them. Their clean table is thus spread a few inches or feet above the ground."


A patch of red-top, a warm-season grass, in seed. Note all the junco footprints below.

Proof that this stem had been ridden to the ground: it lined up with one of their wing-print snow angels when I bent it down. Note the seeds.

Further proof of their snow-love can be found in their favorite winter sport: riding grass stems. They hop on a red-top seedhead (pictured above), and riding them to the ground they pick up any fallen seeds off of the "clean table" of the snow. A type of winter fun, no doubt, much like Robert Frost's swinging on birches, but with the added bonus of a meal at the end. Maybe they are not the only bird with a sense of winter joy: a (rare) reader of this journal commented on the same behavior by chickadees.

In the face of all this indisputable proof of a bird that enjoys winter, snow, fun, and (I daresay) beauty...how could we not ask ourselves these questions that Thoreau concludes his journal entry with...

"Will wonder become extinct in me?" he muses. To this he adds (weirdly): "Shall I become insensible as a fungus?" How is he so sure that fungi are insensible?

fine print: virginia creeper sap

"fine print" is a new recurring feature to quickly post new things I learn while walking around...

"I take pleasure in noting the minute things about me...One seldom takes a walk without encountering some of this fine print on nature's page." - John Burroughs

An obviously-not-recent photo of a Virginia creeper vine (taken in the fall). I found one with sapsucker wells. The sap was sticky and sweet and I saw a nuthatch eating it.

Found a white-breasted nuthatch drinking from some liquid on a vine yesterday. Upon closer inspection it was a sticky sap leaking from a small hole in a 1-inch-diameter Virginia creeper stem. The hole, drilled by a yellow-bellied sapsucker, was one of many all leaking sap. I tasted it, and it was the consistency of syrup and was actually sweet!* Who knew?

*I looked it up and it is also supposedly poisonous! But only a little bit. USDA says it has oxalic acid crystals in it (like skunk cabbage) that should make your mouth burn. I felt no burning.

Notable hermits: Alvah Dunning

Alvah Dunning (1816-1902) was known as the Hermit Guide of the Adirondacks. "He could lure the timid mink from its hole by imitative chippering."

My criteria for a Nature Hermit is simple: a person who appreciates nature so much that they are compelled to live in it. It doesn't matter if you are solitary or live with a family. Whether you grew up there or came later. Whether you stayed a lifetime or less than a year. If you lived IN nature by choice, because you weren't content only to visit in your free time, then you are a nature hermit.

That said, I read something recently by W.H.H. Murray about guides in the Adirondacks in the 1800's. (It was in an anthology.) The "good" guides, as he described them, seemed to fit my bill:

"Born and bred as many of them were, in this wilderness, skilled in all the lore of woodcraft, handy with the rod, superb at the paddle, modest in demeanor and speech, honest to a proverb, they deserve and receive the admiration of all who make their acquaintance. Bronzed and hardy, fearless of danger, eager to please, uncontaminated with the vicious habits of civilized life, they are not unworthy of the magnificent surroundings amid which they dwell...The wilderness has unfolded to them its mysteries, and made them wise with a wisdom nowhere written in books. This wilderness is their home. Here they were born, here have they lived, and here it is that they expect to die. Their graves will be made under the pines where in childhood they played..."

Another Adirondack guide and his so-called "sport" (what they called the rich city fellows that hired them).

And then there was Alvah Dunning. He was moody and cantankerous, according to the Adirondack Museum's website (a profile worth reading). But he was also (according to a 1921 book by Afred Donaldson) "probably the most wily and resourceful hunter, fisher, and trapper the Adirondacks ever housed. He lived in the woods all of the time, and for the most part alone. The human voice was less familiar to him than the noises of birds and animals, and he often seemed able to understand and speak their language. He could lure the timid mink from its hole by imitative chippering, and trick a frightened deer back to the water's edge by deceptive bleating with his throat and splashing with his hands." (My Italics.)

Now that's a Nature Hermit!!!

I'm not saying he was perfect. He hated wolves and women, and maybe, just maybe, killed the last moose in the Adirondacks. But he also was a nature lover who "knew every tree, every flower, and every forest animal" according to those that knew him, and he disapproved of killing for sport alone. Quote the hermit: "In the old days I could kill a little meat when I needed it, but now they're a-savin' it for the city dudes with velvet suits and pop-guns, that can't hit a deer if they see it, and don't want it if they do hit it." He went to his grave eschewing modern technology, and firmly believing that the Earth was not round!

More Adirondack guides and their "sports".

All photos and info came from Wikipedia and the Adirondack Museum. Here's some newspaper articles written about Alvah, and here's a whole bunch more info on other Adirondack guides in the Adirondacks, where I found this nice picture of a bark hut on Tupper Lake (1899):

A possum wanders by

Hello, I have a dirty nose.

"There's a weird creature in the field. I think it's a possum."

This was followed by the closest encounter with an opossum I've had in a long while. It was nosing around in the old sunflower field, in between snow patches. Nosing very...very...slowly, as opossums often do. I would think that this slowness alone was a symptom of some kind of possum-ailment had I not seen other, healthy opossums foraging at the same...glacial...pace...previously. Similar to the impossible pace of a sloth. But this individual was also shivering a little at the mouth, and it let me get a little too close without seeming even a little alarmed. I took some nice pictures of it. Then I started to feel guilty. Like I (a warm and well-fed human) was happily snapping pictures of a dying man. I left the possum to live out its last hours in dignity.


The possum in perspective. Why do all my shots have Point Mountain in the background?

Good bye. I left the possum to live out its last hours in peace.

The dandelions of winter

Why are there dandelions blooming in my yard?!

The temperature has been in the 20's F and below for weeks. I wonder if it is just partially formed flower buds from the fall that have been busted open by extreme cold.

There are two dandelions in this photo.

And now, after last night, these flowers are covered by 5 inches of snow! Pollinated by snow fleas?

A snowy Christmas

This morning, for the 3rd time in the last couple of weeks, we've been inundated by snow geese! Here they are with Point Mountain (Hunterdon County, NJ) as a nice back-drop.


This is presumably just another visit by a part of the vast Merril Creek Reservoir flock, which I still haven't found time to go see firsthand. Quite a spectacle!

Half an acorn

I've been finding a lot of half-acorns lately.

This was a rediculously productive year for the red oak tree in my yard. In October, there was a solid carpet of acorns on the ground beneath it, and that was after an entire garbage bag was carted away for other uses (feeding woodrats). The squirrels (and my sheep) have gradually thinned out this acorn layer until there is now mainly just a carpet of acorn shells below.


But there are also chunks of acorn meats. Lots of them. Mostly the lower (pointier) half, with the upper (fatter) part missing, chewed off. Each morning I've been gathering these meats and feeding them to the sheep - about enough to fill my two cupped hands. And by the next morning there is a whole new crop of nut meats for the gathering.


My theory was that the fat end of the acorn (the part that is missing from most of the meats) might be more nutritious. Maybe during super mast years, the squirrels just eat just the good parts and leave the rest. Kind of like the brown bears that eat just the skin of the salmon. But this diagram (below) makes it seem like the fat end isn't so different from the pointy end, and the pointy end even has more goodies, like the root. But you never know. In any case, this phenomenon (if it happens in the woods, too) probably provides a steady source of acorn meats over the winter for other animals during big mast years. Even when the squirrels have hidden them all last fall.