It is mid-Winter with the mid day sun high overhead.
The smell is the richness of the wet, brown earth as we are become immersed in the beauty of this day.
A collective undulating sound touches our hearing as a band of wild ducks fly upstream, their wing beats producing a rhythm in keeping with the season.
Suddenly their melodic music is
interrupted by the "Dee-Dee-Dee" call of the black-capped chickadee.
This "little trooper" of Winter fluffs its outer feathers over the
layer of soft down next to its skin as if to say, "I can do better for
your listening pleasure". We become even more amused as these active little
birds polka through trees branches hanging upside down while picking off seeds
and dormant insects from the undersides of twigs. He sings all the while.
Chickadees stay close to home in Winter. They gather in small flocks scouting out several small foraging spots. With them may be tufted titmice (who can be very friendly), brown creepers, and a woodpecker or two, all poking in bark crannies for cocoons and insect eggs and searching for seeds in evergreen cones, weeds and dried grasses.
The day slowly turns on as cloud patterns swiftly come and go. We watch blue jays put away another cache. Being an absentminded storekeeper, it sometimes eats its cache only minutes after putting it away and at other times abandoning a cache to whatever opportunist may discover it months later. These birds mimic many calls of their neighbors and their size and aggressiveness give them an open path to food.
Not to be outdone the evening grosbeak adds a bright splash of color to the scene with its bold yellow and black .
Cardinal coats of red tend to stray only a few miles from their breeding territory all year long. This beautiful songbird has at least 28 songs of its own and somehow stay just to brighten our Winter world.
The little juncos’ (slate-colored with white bellies and pink bills), often called snowbirds are favorites of many people. They are the earliest of migrants, arriving in large flocks to frequent weedy fields and brushy areas to feed on last seasons left over seeds.
We are reminded that Nature’s own time clock can sometimes go astray at the new year’s first sighting of a robin and a red-winged blackbird in January.
Winter birds have specialized insulation. Many develop extra feathers and those closets to the skin (down) provide the most warmth. By fluffing out their feathers birds can reduce heat loss, shut out the cold and keep vital organs functioning. Grouping together, birds enhance thermal protection to keep each other warm.
There is a certain some "thing" special about the nuthatch as it calmly walks down a tree trunk head first feeding on a variety of insects. It stops, holds its head straight out from the truck and is remindful of an acrobat who just flipped from a routine to stand proud and erect for the applause and our applause is the marvel we feel as we watch and listen to this small bird with a strong woodpecker-like bill perform its athletic program. Flipping from tree to tree like a gymnast on the bars, dressed in slate-blue, sometimes with breast coat of white, sometimes with red, this eager and agile bird can catch a falling nut in midair.
Without a doubt, the nuthatch is the epitome of avian accuracy, harmony, fragility, strength!
And that’s the way of it in a nut-hatch shell in the rhyme and reason of Appalachian Mountain Country’s rhythm and seasons.
Copyright © 1988-2000 Barbara A. Smith and John G. Hipps. All rights reserved.
This essay was first published February 8, 1989 in the Free-Press Courier, Westfield, Pennsylvania.