Snow!! It has snowed here twice in the past week. Given that it’s mid-January, snow is hardly news, and yet – after an abnormally warm December - there’s an element of relief in seeing the white stuff.
The little boys next door spent their midweek snow day making a snow figure, although the snow was so wet their creation was more iceman than snowman, and their ambitions outstripped their ability to push the giant ice ball around the yard; Mum did the heavy lifting.
I greet snow with the enthusiasm of a child. Snow transforms the world, coating every tree branch in sparkling stars, turning an overturned wheelbarrow into abstract sculpture. The broken-down old maple by my driveway, which spends the year sullenly shedding rotted branches, is transformed by the snow that lies lovingly along its lower limbs into a friendly giant.
When the snow falls, I feel the urge to snuggle deeply into my house, to light a fire, roast a chicken, or bake bread. On such days the world – in the form of the local wild birds – comes to me, and I spend hours on my sunporch watching the birds at the feeders. While my neighbors prepare for the storm by stocking up on milk and toilet paper, I’m at the local hardware store stocking up on bird feed.
Is there anything more joyful than the sight of a cardinal in fresh-fallen snow? I wonder if this is a learned response from all of the Christmas cards that pair red birds in snow with cheerful greetings? Or does the trick work the other way round, beginning with some primal response to the color red in the human brain, and ending with the purchase of Christmas cards? It doesn’t seem to matter what the bird is – a robin the UK, a cardinal in the US – so long as it’s red. Interestingly, in both countries folklore tells that a robin or a cardinal often appears to the recently bereaved, as a sign that the spirit of the departed is still close by.
It's not just the cardinals that come, of course. They are accompanied by the house finches, house sparrows and chickadees who regularly visit my feeders. But my garden regulars are far outnumbered by the juncos, white-throated sparrows and song sparrows who spend the winter in the scrubby patches that surround this hamlet.
I’m delighted by the juncos, their dark upper body separated from their pale lower body by a sharp line that reminds me of the Plimsoll line on a cargo ship. I hear in my mind my grandfather explaining the Plimsoll line, named in honor of a British lawmaker who championed the cause of vessel safety. The Plimsoll line, or waterline, marks the safe limit of loading of a ship: just a little extra weight of cargo and the Plimsoll line sinks below the water, as all too soon will the ship. The juncos seem to perform their own safety calculations; no matter how deep the snow gets, they sink in as far as their bellies, but no further.
As the snow continues to fall there is suddenly an invasion of birds, all dark wings and harsh cries. Hundreds of red-winged blackbirds, cowbirds, starlings and grackles descend on the feeders and the seed I have scattered on the ground. I’ll admit that my first instinct is to chase them away, for they bully the smaller birds and strip the feeders bare, but as the snow piles deeper I’ll make my peace with them.
Last winter they brought along an unusual visitor: a bird with a pale orange breast, which I finally identified as a first year male Baltimore Oriole. Why had this bird stayed when its family and friends had migrated south at the end of summer, and how had it survived without its usual diet of insects and fruit? I rushed out to the shed for my oriole feeder, neglected since summer and covered in dust, but the bird ignored its flamboyant orange plastic and my offerings of oranges, cherries, grape jelly and orange-flavored suet. Perhaps the desire to spend cold winter nights in the warmth of the dark flock outweighed his desire for foods that would mark him as an outsider.
Immature male Baltimore Oriole in midwinter.
Seeing the Oriole, I realized that the snow reveals as well as it conceals. Absent the cold and the snow-covered ground, the Oriole would have been invisible to me, just part of the crowd of black birds that wheels and turns over the distant fields. And so, while others fret about digging out cars and getting to the shops, I’m content to sit in my sunporch, marveling at the birds and the snow.