A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS WINTER
I
The first snowstorm! I would not miss seeing the first snowstorm, not
if I had to climb up to my high, tarry, smoky roof in the city and lie
down on my back, as I once did, in order to shut out everything but
the gray wavering flakes that came scattering from the sky. But how
marvelously white and airy they looked, too, coming down over the
blackened city of roofs, transfiguring it with their floating veil of
purity! You must see the first snowfall, and, if you want to, jump and
caper with the flakes, as I always do.
II
The sorrows of winter are its storms. They are its greatest glories
also. One should no more miss the sight of the winter storms than he
should miss the sight of the winter birds and stars, the winter suns
and moons! A storm in summer is only an incident; in winter it is an
event, a part of the main design. Nature gives herself over by the
month to the planning and bringing off of the winter storms--vast
arctic shows, the dreams of her wildest moods, the work of her
mightiest minions. Do not miss the soft feathery fall that plumes the
trees and that roofs the sheds with Carrara marble; the howling
blizzard with its fine cutting blast that whirls into smoking crests;
the ice-storm that comes as slow, soft rain to freeze as it falls,
turning all the world to crystal: these are some of the miracles of
winter that you must not fail to see.
III
You must see how close you had passed to and fro all summer to the
vireo’s nest, hanging from the fork on a branch of some low bush or
tree, so near to the path that it almost brushed your hat. Yet you
never saw it! Go on and make a study of the empty nests; see
particularly how many of them were built out along the roads or
paths, as if the builders wished to be near their human neighbors--as,
indeed, I believe they do. Study how the different birds
build--materials, shapes, finish, supports; for winter is the better
season in which to make such study, the summer being so crowded with
interests of its own.
IV
When the snow hardens, especially after a strong wind, go out to see
what you can find in the wind furrows of the snow--in the holes,
hollows, pockets, and in footprints in the snow. Nothing? Look again,
closely--that dust--wind-sweepings--seeds! Yes, seeds. Gather several
small boxes of them and when you return home take a small magnifying
glass and make them out--the sticktights, gray birches, yellow
birches, pines, ragweeds, milfoil--I cannot number them! It is a
lesson in the way the winds and the snows help to plant the earth.
Last winter I followed for some distance the deep frozen tracks of a
fox, picking out the various seeds that had drifted into every
footprint, just so far apart, as if planted in the snow by some modern
planting-machine. It was very interesting.
V
When the snow lies five or six inches deep, walk out along the
fence-rows, roadsides, and old fields to see the juncos, the sparrows,
and goldfinches feeding upon the seeds of the dead weeds standing
stiff and brown above the snow. Does the sight mean anything to you?
What does it mean?
VI
Burns has a fine poem beginning--
“When biting Boreas, fell and doure,
Sharp shivers thro’ the leafless bow’r,”
in which, he asks,--
“Ilk happing bird--wee, helpless thing!--
* * * * *
What comes o’ thee?
Whare wilt thou cow’r thy chittering wing,
An’ close thy e’e?”
Did you ever ask yourself the question? Go forth, then, as the dusk
begins to fall one of these chill winter days and try to see “what
comes o’” the birds, where they sleep these winter nights. You will
find an account of my own watching in a chapter called “Birds’ Winter
Beds” in “Wild Life Near Home.”
VII
You will come back from your watching in the dusk with the feeling
that a winter night for the birds is unspeakably dreary, perilous, and
chill. You will close the door on the darkness outside with a shiver
as much from dread as from the cold.
“List’ning the doors an’ winnocks rattle,”--
you will think of the partridge beneath the snow, the crow in his
swaying pine-top, the kinglet in the close-armed cedar, the wild duck
riding out the storm in his freezing water-hole, and you will be glad
for your four thick walls and downy blankets, and you will wonder how
any creature can live through the long, long night of cold and dark
and storm. But there is another view of this same picture; another
picture, rather, of this same stormy, bitter night which you must not
miss seeing. Go out to see how the animals sleep, what beds they have,
what covers to keep off the cold: the mice in the corn-shocks; the
muskrats in their thick mud homes; the red squirrels in their rocking,
wind-swung beds, so soft with cedar bark and so warm that never a
tooth of the cold can bite through!
“I heard nae mair, for Chanticleer
Shook off the pouthery snaw,
And hail’d the morning with a cheer,
A cottage-rousing craw.”
VIII
This winter I have had two letters asking me how best to study the
mosses and lichens, and I answered, “Begin now.” Winter, when the
leaves are off, the ground bare, the birds and flowers gone, and all
is reduced to singleness and simplicity--winter is the time to observe
the shapes, colors, varieties, and growth of the lichens. Not that
every lover of nature needs to know the long Latin names (and many of
these lesser plants have no other names), but that every lover of the
out-of-doors should notice them--the part they play in the color of
things, the place they hold in the scheme of things, their exquisite
shapes and strange habits.
IX
You should see the brook, “bordered with sparkling frost-work ... as
gay as with its fringe of summer flowers.” You should examine under a
microscope the wonderful crystal form of the snow-flakes--each flake
shaped by an infinitely accurate hand according to a pattern that
seems the perfection, the very poetry, of mechanical drawing.
X
What a world of gray days, waste lands, bare woods, and frozen waters
there is to see! And you should see them--gray and bare and waste and
frozen. But what is a frozen pond for if not to be skated on? and
waste white lands, but to go sleighing over? and cold gray days, but
so many opportunities to stay indoors with your good books?
See the winter bleak and cheerless as at times you will, and as at
times you ought; still if you will look twice, and think as you look,
you will see the fishermen on the ponds catching pickerel through the
ice--life swimming there under the frozen surface! You will see the
bare empty woodland fresh budded to the tip of each tiny twig--life
all over the trees thrust forward to catch the touch of spring! You
will see the wide flinty fields thick sown with seeds--life, more life
than the sun and the soil can feed, sleeping there under “the tender,
sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow”!