Marcia Bonta

To encounter the unexpected is why I go out day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year, walking the same mountain trails. But I rarely have a Discovery Channel moment. At most, I might find a new wildflower, an unusual butterfly, or a rare bird.

Still, I’ve had my moments. Take the day in mid-April when I heard a turkey gobbling near the Far Field Road. Immediately, I lay down against the road bank, clad in my usual jeans and navy blue jacket and, grasping my Lynch’s Foolproof Turkey Call, I rendered my poor imitation of a clucking hen turkey.

A tom turkey strode into view and walked past my outstretched legs as he peered around for the clucking hen. Although he passed a mere 15 inches from my feet, he didn’t seem to notice me. I found that surprising since turkeys are supposed to have superb eyesight.

Pausing about 20 feet beyond my left side, he spread his tail feathers and puffed his side feathers in and out like the inflating and deflating of a balloon. Then he thrust his neck forward and gobbled loudly. I had the turkey call resting on my chest and using my right hand, which he couldn’t see from his vantage point, I was able to whine and cluck with it.

For nearly half an hour he gobbled and displayed, all the while looking up the bank, below the road, and directly at me. I answered his every gobble with whines and clucks, most of which were poorly executed, because the rotten rubber band holding the scraper to the box had snapped after my first cluck. But the sometimes odd sounds I made did not seem to matter to that turkey.

Finally, he walked within five feet of me to gobble and display and I had a superb view of his six-inch-long beard, his bright eyes, and his magnificent tail feathers. He often appeared to be looking directly at me, but I never moved. Several times, he also emitted a rattling sound like castanets, which is described by researchers as a threat call before turkeys begin to fight. Was he seeing me as a male rival or, more likely, a female that he hoped to vanquish and then court? Apparently, he was more interested in what I sounded like than what I looked like.

At last, he strutted past me again and climbed the bank above my head. Still gobbling, he tramped around in the woods, sounding like a heavy-footed human. I answered him with the call for several more minutes until he drifted away, his gobbles receding in the distance.

Only then did I move, because mindful of the upcoming spring gobbler season, I didn’t want him to associate a human with the noise he had heard. On the other hand, I doubt that any self-respecting turkey hunter would make the noise I had made. And I did wonder if I had called up the proverbial “dumb turkey.” Still, he had given me a never-to-be-forgotten encounter with a wild creature on his own turf with no blind or camouflage between him and me.

Despite being surprised by the turkey’s reaction to me, I had, to some extent, set him up by using a turkey call. That was not true of my next encounter.

On a late spring day, I was showing my husband Bruce invasive and native shrubs I wanted him to photograph for a talk I was scheduled to give. After photographing invasives such as Japanese barberry, multiflora rose, and privet on the former clearcut, I headed for a place where I knew the native red elderberry shrubs were already bearing fruit. Bruce was in a hurry to get back to his work at the computer, so I rushed heedlessly along our trails intent on finding the shrubs.

As I descended a steep section of the trail slightly ahead of Bruce, suddenly I spotted little coyotes ahead of us. I froze and so did Bruce. Instead of running away, they proceeded to silently wrestle with one another a mere 40 feet from us. Occasionally they looked up, and once a pup sniffed the air, advanced toward us, and then retreated. Altogether, I counted five little ones.

We inched closer, Bruce clicking his camera, as they continued wrestling and tumbling about, sometimes paired, sometimes threesomes, and sometimes all five piling on. They had reddish-brown coats and black-tipped tails. Their legs seemed too long for their bodies and their pointed ears too large for their faces. Although they were as cute as any puppies, their bodies were rangy rather than puppy-plump.

Eventually they ran up an old creek bed and played a few rounds of “king of the mountain” on fallen trees before they slipped beneath two large, old tree trunks in a sea of hay-scented ferns, which effectively hid their den entrance. I waited, but they didn’t emerge again. Still, I had had the longest, closest look ever of young, playing coyotes.

And those red elderberry shrubs I’d been searching for? Once the coyotes disappeared, I found the shrubs along the same stretch of trail where we had been watching the pups. As I neared the largest of the shrubs, a male rose-breasted grosbeak landed on it and ate all the berries, a sight that would have ordinarily made my day but had been upstaged by the coyote pup sighting.

Looking for one thing and finding another is also the theme of my third unexpected encounter. Early on a warm August day I was watching female spined micrathenas spinning their daily webs. Because there are so many of these webs across our trails in August, I had been studying them. The spiders were said to bite their prey first and then wrap it in silk, something I had previously observed them doing. I had also been listening for their low-pitched buzz, which is supposed to be audible to humans two feet away. While the females are large and showy with spiny abdomens, the males are tiny and have flattened elongated, whitish abdomens.

Hoping to spot a male courting a female in a web, I instead found what looked like an egg sac, hanging from a single silk thread and spinning in mid-air. I fumbled for my hand lens in my fanny pack and went down on one knee, like a petitioner, to try to catch the swaying white sac, which was about a quarter the size of my littlest fingernail, in the lens.

It looked like the egg sac of a spined micrathena, especially through the lens, but I wasn’t certain. I was focusing intently on trying to keep the swinging sac in view when I heard a slight noise behind me. Assuming it was my son Dave out taking photos and trying to startle me, I paid no attention to the sound.

Then something nudged me in my rear end.

In the same instant I dismissed Dave as the culprit, I spun around, still on one knee, and came face to face with a large porcupine. I stumbled and fell forward as I half turned around and tried to scramble out of its way at the same time, all the while hoping it wouldn’t fill my posterior with quills. My second attempt to get to my feet was successful and I quickly moved down the trail.

But the porcupine seemed to be as startled by the encounter as I was. After all, porcupines don’t see very well and this one had clearly blundered into me.

It turned and shinnied 25 feet up into a fork of a large chestnut oak tree. Its nostrils flared out as it sniffed my scent, and it bared its orange front teeth, full of bravado now that it was out of harm’s way.

These and other adventures in nature I have had over the years keep me out in all kinds of weather like hunters stalking their prey. Only I’m stalking stories that I can tell. Before there was civilization, preliterate humans sat in small family groups around campfires and told stories of what they had seen while hunting and gathering and living out among the wild creatures. Some still do in remote areas of the world. And, as I’ve discovered, some of our hunters are also superb story tellers, not only telling stories of their hunts but of the other wildlife they have watched while sitting in their tree stands.

I admit that many hunters have called in turkeys and may have had similar experiences to mine with the tom turkey. And I’m certain there have been folks who have seen frolicking coyote pups.

But is there anyone out there who has ever been poked in the rear by a porcupine?
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All photos were taken by Dave in Plummer’s Hollow, except for the photo of the coyote pup, which Bruce took. The first turkey photo is of a hen in the field, that had small chicks with her; the second is a close-up of a jake (two-year-old male) shot by one of our hunter friends during Spring Gobbler Season in April 2008. The spider is a female spined micrathena.

As a bonus, here’s a video Dave shot with his digital camera last July in the spruce grove.

From the Undiscovery Channel on Vimeo.

Last April was the coldest on record. Birds that should have left stayed, and those that had returned during the warmer March days endured.

At our bird feeding area, we hosted nine New World sparrow species. Migrants, winter visitors, and permanent residents by the dozen mingled on the ground, the back steps, and porch, eating birdseed as fast as I spread it. Eight species were the usual suspects; one was not.

We had had as many as 60 dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) at our feeders all winter. These white-breasted, dark gray birds of the Sparrow Family Emberizidae had been trilling their song for weeks. Usually they have migrated farther north in Pennsylvania and beyond by mid-April, but last year they stayed for the entire month.

So too did the several wintering white-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis), which were already singing their pensive “poor Sam Peabody” song, or, since large numbers of them breed in Canada, “Oh, sweet Canada” song. In fact, we heard one singing at the edge of First Field on May 22 during our first Important Bird Area (IBA) count!

At least one eastern towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus), also a member of the Sparrow Family Emberizidae, had spent the winter on the mountain for the first time, but he had chosen a thicket more than a mile from our home, so the male that appeared at the feeders was probably a migrant back from the southern United States.

We also had three wintering song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) that had been joined by several migrants during the cold spell in April. They too had been singing for several weeks, and their distinctive “Hip! Hip! Hurrah boys! Spring is here” song, along with the dark spot on their brown-streaked breasts, made them easy to identify.

Five fox sparrows (Passerella iliaca) had appeared in mid-March, but four had left for their nesting grounds in Canada by April. Still, one of those large, rusty-brown, rufous-tailed sparrows remained through the cold spell, and even sang his brilliant musical song after the Good Friday snow.

Then there were the usual three rusty-capped sparrow species. I heard the first singing American tree sparrow (Spizella arborea) on March 21, and most of those so-called “winter chippies” had left for their northern Canadian breeding grounds, but two still came regularly to the feeders in April.

Their look-alike congener, the chipping sparrow (Spizella passerina), first appeared on March 27. Although both the chipping and tree sparrows have rusty caps, only the American tree sparrow sports a dark spot on its breast. In addition, the chipping sparrow has a clean white line above its eye and a black line through it, while the tree sparrow has a gray line rimmed with rusty-brown. Then too the tree sparrow sings a sweet, high song, but the chipping sparrow rattles on a single buzzy note, sounding more like an insect than a songbird. The first field sparrow (Spizella pusilla) returned on March 26. It also has a rusty cap and a plain breast, but its bill is pink, and it has a white eye ring. Its lovely, descending trill is one of my favorite spring songs.

By then my husband Bruce was thoroughly confused. No matter how many times I tried to point out the differences between those “lbjs” or “little brown jobs,” as birders refer to most sparrow species, he could not confidently tell a field sparrow from a song sparrow or a chipping sparrow from a tree sparrow.

Imagine his disbelief then, on April 5, when I looked outside in late afternoon at the birds mobbing the feeders and the ground beneath them and noticed a different rusty-capped sparrow. Its cap was a deeper chestnut than that of a chipping sparrow. It had gray instead of white above its eye, a dim white patch below its throat and no spot in the middle of its blurry-streaked chest like a song sparrow. Its wings were a reddish-brown without the wing bars of chipping, field, and tree sparrows. A swamp sparrow (Melospiza georgiana) had joined the sparrow throngs. Despite its rusty cap, though, it is most closely related to the song sparrow and Lincoln’s sparrow (Melospiza lincolnii), the latter of which is an uncommon migrant in Pennsylvania and does not breed in the state.

Here on our dry mountaintop we had had only fleeting glimpses of the elusive swamp sparrow during migration, so I was pleased to have more than two weeks to closely observe what was probably a male swamp sparrow because of its richer chestnut crown and cap color and because male swamp sparrows migrate ahead of females. He did, however, shed his shy, retiring nature at the feeding area and was incredibly feisty as he competed for food.

Pennsylvania has two subspecies of swamp sparrows — the inland M. g. georgiana, which is most abundant in the freshwater marshes of the glaciated northwest, and the Coastal Plain swamp sparrow M. g. nigrescens of the lower Delaware River tidal marshes. But, as ornithologist E. H. Forbush once wrote, “Any watery, muddy, bushy, grassy place where rank marsh grasses, sedges and reeds grow — any such bog or slough where a man will need long rubber boots to get about — is good enough for Swamp Sparrows… But in migration they may appear almost anywhere, though seldom distinctly seen and recognized by ordinary observers, because of their retiring habits…”

First called “reed sparrow” by Pennsylvania naturalist William Bartram, it was bird artist Alexander Wilson, a Scottish immigrant in Philadelphia, who, in 1811, named it “swamp sparrow.” It breeds in Canada south of the tree line from British Columbia to Newfoundland and in the United States east of the Rockies except for much of the cultivated prairies belt and south to Virginia. It can winter as far north as southern Ontario but mostly in the southern United States.

Although research done in the Erie National Wildlife Refuge by Russell Greenberg in 1985 and 1986 found that the later arriving swamp sparrows, which are smaller and socially subordinate to song sparrows, were relegated to wetlands because song sparrows had already settled on the drier territories, swamp sparrows are also physically suited to wetlands. Their legs are longer than those of song sparrows. This allows them to wade in shallow water for long periods and pick both insect and plant food from the water’s surface. They also move through the bases of dense shrubbery, unlike song sparrows, which seem unable to move through thick vegetation and search for food floating on water.Earlier observers of swamp sparrows described them as wading “in shallow water like a sandpiper,” and “splashing through the water like little muskrats.” T.S. Roberts wrote that a swamp sparrow “climbs up and down the coarse stems of the reeds and bushy shoots in a nimble, mouse-like manner…” In summary, shallow standing water, low dense cover, and elevated song posts provide ideal habitat for breeding swamp sparrows.

But in migration, although they prefer thick vegetation near water, they also visit old fields, farm hedgerows, blackberry thickets, and even residential shrubbery — habitat that we have around our feeder area and nearby. They don’t always avoid woods and mountains either, especially if they include small swamps, bogs, or swales in forest openings such as our small swamp at the base of First Field.

Nevertheless, song sparrows always occupy our shrubby environs, even those wet areas near our springhouse, so the swamp sparrow left when it warmed up on April 19. I like to think that he ended his migration in a northwestern Pennsylvania swamp where his musical “weet-weet-weet” trill attracted a mate. He would have declared his territorial boundaries from several elevated song posts and even shifted his boundaries as surface water shifted.

She would have sat on another perch, fluttered her wings and softly mewed. He would have quickly searched for her and formed what is usually a monogamous union for the season.

The female swamp sparrow selects the nest site and builds her nest in three to four days. At Pymatuning Reservoir, most swamp sparrow nests are constructed between cattail stalks or on bent over clumps of leaves and are hidden in or under dense vegetation. The nest is rough on the outside and neat on the inside and is composed of local grasses, sedges, cattails and other plant materials.

She lays an average of four strongly marked, pale green eggs at Pymatuning Reservoir anywhere from May 20 to July 18 according to ornithologist Melissa Hughes. She then incubates the eggs 12 to 14 days. After that, she broods the nestlings, and both parents feed them. It takes another 9 to 11 days for the altricial young to fledge, although if they are disturbed at 7 days of age they can already flutter to the ground and later from branch to branch. The parents may continue to feed them for another two weeks. Most swamp sparrows in Pennsylvania raise two broods a season.

At any time during egg-laying, incubation and nestling stages, a host of predators can interfere. Blue jays are the major predator, but other suspects include minks, northern water snakes, garter snakes, voles, raccoons, and common grackles. Hughes reports that eggs were often stolen one or two at a time at Pymatuning, and she suspects either garter snakes or voles. Flooding sometimes kills broods too. In general, unusually harsh weather as well as cats, dogs, hawks, owls, shrikes and rodents kill swamp sparrows throughout the year.

But wetland loss remains the greatest threat to this species. When a beaver pond was drained at the Erie National Wildlife Refuge back in 1985, the number of breeding swamp sparrows went from five to zero, and the dried-up land was claimed by song sparrows. The extensive wetlands in northwest Pennsylvania are particularly important to swamp sparrows because they provide many breeding territories lightly impacted by humans that produce high quality abundant food for swamp sparrow families.

They mostly eat weeds and fruits in the winter, but during the breeding season they also consume a wide variety of insects such as damselflies, dragonflies, beetles, ants, bees and aphids. Fledglings and adults eat plant food as well and especially like the fleshy insides of high bush blueberries. During late summer and fall the seeds of sedges, smartweed, panic grass and vervain are popular.

By late April my sparrow April was mostly over. Not only had the swamp sparrow left but also the American tree, fox, and white-throated sparrows and the dark-eyed juncos. Field, chipping, and song sparrows and eastern towhees had set up territories in the yard, overgrown fields, and shrubby areas. True spring had arrived at last.
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Photos: Dark-eyed junco by tcd123usa; Towhee by Henry McLin; American tree sparrow by ericbegin2000; Field sparrow and first photo of swamp sparrow (the same individual discussed in the article) by Dave Bonta; first large photo of swamp sparrow by Fritz Myer; second large photo of swamp sparrow by Scott A. Young. Thanks to the photographers for licensing their photos under Creative Commons for free, non-commercial use with attribution.

This is the time of year when essence of skunk sometimes reaches my nostrils as I wander over our mountain. That’s because March is prime mating season, and male striped skunks are abroad looking for receptive females.

The females are still holed up in their communal winter dens six feet underground, and sometimes one lucky male has spent the winter with as many as 11 females. In fact, a Pennsylvania den holds the all time record of 18 females.

“He secures rights to this harem,” says Luanne Johnson, who has been studying the striped skunks of Martha’s Vineyard since 2004.

Most males, though, den alone and must go from den to den in search of mates. A female skunk is in heat for only four or five days and those that live alone usually mate with several males. If she is already pregnant, she fights off other males, and she raises her young by herself. Although mating can occur any time between mid-February and mid-April, mid-March is the optimum time in Pennsylvania.

In 63 days, more or less, a female striped skunk will have a litter of 2 to 10 young in a den she has either dug herself with her long-clawed forefeet or in an abandoned woodchuck or fox den she has refurbished. The den can be from 6 to 25 feet long and has one to three chambers 12 to 15 inches in diameter lined with dried leaves and grasses.

Although the pups are born blind, helpless, and hairless, their distinctive black and white pattern is already evident beneath their skins. Even before they can see-on average at 22 days of age-they can emit scent. They are weaned when they are six to eight weeks old and follow their mother single file on her nightly hunting forays. By late summer some disperse, but others stay with their mother until the following spring when they can mate.

The striped skunk, Mephitis mephitis, lives in southern Canada from Nova Scotia to British Columbia including the Hudson Bay area, south to Florida, west to California, and into northern Mexico, excluding only corners of the southwest desert where water is scarce. Pennsylvania’s south-central counties of Bedford, Fulton, and Franklin also have a small population of the eastern spotted skunk, Spilogale putorius, but, by and large, the striped skunk, also called “lined skunk,” “polecat,” or “wood pussy” is the common skunk species in Pennsylvania.

Recently, based on DNA studies by Dr. Jerry Dragoo of the University of New Mexico, skunks have been removed from the weasel family Mustelid and placed into its own family Mephitidae, which means “noxious odor,” and includes the nine New World skunk species and two Southeast Asia stink badger species.

Dragoo, affectionately referred to as “Skunk Man,” has little or no sense of smell, so as a mephitologist he can easily study and live with skunks. When he wants one for his research, he chases it down, picks it up by its tail, and is liberally sprayed, because, as skunk expert Richard G. Van Gelder discovered back in the 1960s, you can only grab a skunk by the tail and escape being sprayed if you surprise the animal. Otherwise, it is able to evert its anus and expose the nipples from its huge and squishy scent sacs, which are then ready to fire even if you do pick it up by its tail. Dragoo explains on his website, Dragoo Institute for the Betterment of Skunks and Skunk Reputations, that the spray is either “emitted as an atomized cloud,” which he calls the “’shotgun’ approach,” or “as a stream directed at the predator’s face…the ‘.357 magnum’ tactic,” with a range of 10 to 15 feet.

But Dragoo, Luanne Johnson, and Travis Quirk, who is studying striped skunks near Manitoba’s Delta Marsh, agree that skunks are timid animals that would rather run and hide than unleash their ultimate weapon. And a skunk will give plenty of warning-stomping its front feet, arching its tail, chattering its teeth, and shuffling backwards– before facing a predator, rapidly twisting its rear end around, and letting loose.

What it lets loose is a barrage of sulphur compounds called thiols, which cling to the victim and continue to release more bad smells as they slowly react with water from the victim’s body over several days. William Wood, a chemist from Humboldt State University in California, studied skunk “perfume” in 1990 and found that previous analyses of it had missed a couple compounds and misidentified two others. In addition, Wood added three new components and a previously unknown chemical to the mix. Best of all, he devised a way to change the chemistry of the spray and render it odorless. Forget tomato juice. It doesn’t work. Instead, mix one quart of 3 percent hydrogen peroxide, a half cup of baking soda, and a tablespoon of liquid dish soap and apply it to the victim, he advises. Quirt and Johnson say it works.

Photo by fieldsbh (Creative Commons)

Both of them are studying the eating habits of striped skunks. In addition to the bad rap they get about their smell, skunks are also accused of eating birds’ eggs and chicks. Quirk is concerned primarily with waterfowl losses due to skunks and Johnson with endangered and threatened shorebirds, specifically piping plovers, least terns, and American oystercatchers. But the researchers agree that omnivorous skunks don’t intentionally target birds’ eggs and chicks.

“They don’t seem to go out and hunt them methodically. They’re just ambling down the beach, and they bump into them and then they’ll eat whatever’s in front of them,” Johnson says.

She adds that neither she nor her field assistants have ever seen a striped skunk kill a chick. Since she has ear-tagged 120 skunks and put radio transmitting collars on 49, which she has continually tracked on their nightly rounds, she should know.

Striped skunks, which find food by using their keen sense of smell and hearing, eat just about anything including garbage and carrion. That’s why they thrive in a wide variety of habitats, including lawns and golf courses where they dig up grubs. But they prefer forest edges, old fields, and brushy farmlands where they do more good than harm, eating an incredible diversity of insects such as beetles, crickets, moths, ants, and grasshoppers, and specializing in such harmful to agriculture insects as bud worms, June beetles, army worms, cut worms, and scarab beetles. They dig up yellow jacket nests and scratch on beehives to entice honeybees outside so they can eat them and are seemingly unperturbed by their stings. They also relish spiders, toads, frogs, snakes, young rabbits, chipmunks, shrews, voles, salamanders, crayfish and earthworms.

Striped skunks roll caterpillars on the ground , especially those of the gypsy moth and other hairy or spiny species before they eat them. They do the same with toads. And when they do stumble on the eggs of ground-nesting birds, they roll them between their hind legs until they break on a rock or other hard object.

“They are accomplished mousers,” Johnson says. “If they find them, they will run them down.”

They also like an array of plant food — blueberries, wild grapes, blackberries, black cherries, raspberries, Virginia creeper, poison ivy and nightshade berries, grasses, nuts, roots, grains, and, at our place in late winter, spilled bird seed.

Striped skunks fatten up before winter and sleep through the coldest weather. But their body temperature only drops from 98 to 88 degrees Fahrenheit, and they frequently appear during warm spells. Nevertheless, from November to March, females lose from 32 to 55 percent of their weight and males from 15 to 48 percent. In the winter of 2006, Johnson make an unusual discovery while tracking a yearling male. She found him sharing ” the hollowed out base of an old beech tree with a raccoon for several days…I got the signal on my skunk from the spot, but a little raccoon face was staring out at me. ‘Any port in a storm’ as one of my sailing friends likes to say,” she told me.

Photo by cruadinx (Creative Commons)

During the summer striped skunks without young often sleep in different spots every night, according to Johnson, such as underneath shrubs, old boats and decks.

“They’re moving around a lot,” she told a reporter for the Martha Vineyard Times, “and a lot of places kind of function as little skunk motels, where skunks will come and go.”

And that’s when they get into trouble with humans because they will sometimes den under outbuildings or homes. Dragoo, the Skunk Man, spends a lot of time relocating such skunks between May and September. Although they rarely release their scent in their dens, he says, it remains in their feces even after they are removed from an inappropriate place.

Great horned owls and barred owls aren’t bothered by skunk musk and are major predators on striped skunks. Eagles, crows, vultures, coyotes, and bobcats also kill them. But automobiles are their biggest killer along with a wide variety of parasites. They are also major carriers of at least two rabies’ variants. For this reason they don’t make good pets.

But they do make excellent study subjects even though they are nocturnal and the researchers must track them at night. That’s how Quirk became a mephitologist. Another researcher refused to work on skunks because nighttime field work made her claustrophobic so Quirk volunteered instead.

“I’m so sleep-deprived,” Johnson says.

It’s worth it though. She constantly makes new discoveries, for instance, that striped skunks travel farther in one night than researchers suspected. A nursing female she tracked made a full three-and-a half mile round trip in her nightly search for food.

Unlike many researchers, Johnson names her skunks because it makes it easier for her to remember them and because she has found that they have different personalities. One is a snoozer; another is wary, but all of them are cute. Quirk, who raised orphan skunks, calls them “sweethearts.”

And Dragoo? Seven research skunks live at his place. Charlie, Bugbane, Stinky Pete, and Rosebud live outside and Siren, Shadow, and OnRey live inside. None of them have had their scent glands removed. One writer, Mark Wheller, who visited Dragoo, was initially wary of them. But he was won over when he was near Dragoo’s inside skunks.

“Close up, skunks are about as cute as animals get,” he wrote, “right up there with raccoons and bunnies.”
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Sketches by Louis Agassiz Fuertes (public domain)

Web-only bonus: Here’s a short video Dave shot of a skunk foraging in the picnic area at Canoe Creek State Park on March 13, 2008.

February can be the best and worst of times. Last winter we had more best than worst. Many days were cold, crisp, and bright. Those that weren’t dumped enough snow for my snowshoeing pleasure. Unusual bird sightings and close-ups of several mammals added to my appreciation of this shortest month of the year. In addition, we had three birthdays to celebrate — our two-year-old granddaughter Elanor’s, her father Steve’s three days later on Valentine’s Day, and her Uncle Dave’s ten days after that. So when it was storming outside, we had birthday cake to eat inside.

But inside is not the life that I prefer. Even when it was two degrees below zero I was out and wondering why the local schools kept closing. Four decades ago, we lived on a farm in central Maine for five years. One winter day, when it was 40 degrees below zero, I unplugged the car engine heater, bundled baby Mark in layers of clothes, and drove Steve to first grade and Dave to nursery school in our Volkswagen bus that never warmed up above zero degrees during our half hour ride. No one there ever talked of calling off school because of the cold.

Three decades ago, several years after we moved to our mountaintop farm in central Pennsylvania, my husband Bruce went off to a January conference. Usually, he dropped the boys at school on his way to work because I stopped navigating our steep, gravel, mile-and-a-half, north-facing hollow road once the ice and snow arrived, which, in those days, was around Thanksgiving. But the boys had to get to school one morning when it was zero degrees, and back then school wasn’t cancelled because of the cold.

I didn’t want them going alone, so I walked them the two miles down to town, where we stopped at a restaurant to warm up. The hoarfrost that hovered over the river clung to my hair, and other patrons gave us startled looks as we entered the restaurant. After drinking hot chocolate, the boys walked on to school, while I returned home. We thought it a great adventure, and it remains a happy memory of childhood for them. How many such memories will today’s children have of facing and embracing the cold?

But on the two days last February, when the thermometer bottomed out at two below, I and the birds embraced the cold. Thirteen songbird species crowded the feeders, but a “thump” on our bow window brought me running. A Cooper’s hawk sat below the window and flew off as soon as it saw me. All the little birds had fled.

When I went outside it was two degrees above zero and windy. Both a song sparrow and a tufted titmouse defied the cold along the trails. A flock of black-capped chickadees fed on the hemlock cone seeds in our hollow.

The following day more birds were about. Chickadees and titmice even sang. A pileated woodpecker drummed and a red-bellied woodpecker called. Juncos foraged on the ground in exposed areas where the snow had melted and a pair of white-breasted nuthatches landed on nearby trees.But I hiked on to the Second Thicket in search of a bird that had never over wintered here before, although he or another of his species had tried to the previous winter — a male eastern towhee. Following a highway of deer tracks, I threaded my way up, over, and around a nest of fallen trees and finally sat against a log listening for “toe-hee,” which I heard after a couple minutes. He had survived the cold. That was one of the best of times.

The worst of times came the next day when it was a mere two degrees. I walked down the road to escape the wind, and found 50 American goldfinches feeding on the cones of one black birch tree. A few more goldfinches and chickadees foraged on hemlock cone seeds. Behind the hemlocks, among old hurricane-felled deciduous trees, titmice and northern cardinals dug in frozen, exposed leaves while white-breasted nuthatches and a red-bellied woodpecker mined tree trunks.

I crunched over the hundreds of fallen hemlock cones and paused to sit beneath a small hemlock overhanging Waterthrush Bench. It was so cold my pen refused to write. Idly, I glanced up at the undersides of the hemlock tree, and my heart froze as I saw woolly adelgids along the stems. I whipped out my hand lens and studied those telltale, woolly tufts. Then I looked more carefully and found other infested branches. Farther up the hollow road, other hemlock trees had woolly adelgids.

Difficult as it has been to mourn the loss of older relatives and friends over the years, such deaths are expected as is my own in not too many more years. But to lose a whole species! First, we lost our butternut trees. They were few and scattered, but we were attached to the one overhanging the guesthouse. It was one of the last to go.

Now my beloved hemlocks. I mourned as I contemplated the hollow, especially during the winter, without them. How dreary it will be without their evergreen boughs bent beneath the snow. Only a few white pines will brighten the monochromatic winter palette.

Being naturally optimistic, though, my mood changed when I saw an immature northern goshawk at the Far Field. Years ago I had seen a similar immature nearby and was struck at how often nature almost repeats itself.

Last February seemed to be a month for raptor sightings because later in the month a male northern harrier flew up from the valley and over the mountain as I sat on Coyote Bench, and a female American kestrel perched on a power pole in the middle of First Field. Both the Cooper’s hawk and a sharp-shinned hawk made frequent appearances in the yard and around the feeders, but neither scored when I watched.

Then came the Valentine’s Day snow. It began with an icy covering of pellets atop a thin layer of snow that had fallen overnight, followed by intermittent snow squalls. By afternoon, the wind had picked up, the thermometer had plummeted, and a blizzard of snow fell. On that day, all the schools and even the colleges were closed. Birds flocked to the feeder area. At least a foot of snow covered the ground by nightfall.

It was windy, clear, and cold — two degrees — the next day. Our son Dave broke a snowshoe trail for me in the dry, powdery snow, and I followed it up First Field in brilliant sunshine. The Norway spruce grove at the top of the field, its boughs bowed down with snow, was empty of birds or animals. While I was reveling in the snow, Bruce was trying to start our tractor with attached snow blower so he could clear our road. But the battery on the tractor was dead, and after 24 hours of charging, it still wouldn’t start. Instead, the next day Bruce draped the bulldozer with a tarp and set a torpedo heater beneath it to warm up the bulldozer engine. After several hours of this, at 11:00 a.m., the bulldozer coughed to life. Need I mention that such problems usually make February storms the worst of times for Bruce.

That day I followed him on foot an hour later, eager to see those still verdant hemlocks snow-covered. The hollow was heaped with snow. In some areas the stream disappeared beneath the white cover. In other places, the stream flowed around snow-covered rocks or slid beneath shards of ice.

It was the first day of the Great Backyard Bird Count, started by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology several years ago to document where and how many birds and bird species were around in midwinter in North American. (See my February 2002 column.) I counted chickadees, titmice, white-breasted nuthatches, and downy woodpeckers. Farther down the road, I found a hairy woodpecker and heard a pileated. Where Bruce had scraped down to the ground with the bulldozer blade, juncos foraged. So too did a white-throated sparrow. A female cardinal searched for and ate fallen tulip tree seeds. Altogether, I had made a good start on the Great Backyard Bird Count.

The next three days I did the count on snowshoes as Dave broke more and more trails for me. A common raven croaked across First Field one day, and a red-tailed hawk flew from a tree overlooking the field on another. Golden-crowned kinglets were scarce last winter, but I finally found one on Sapsucker Ridge Trail where I had broken my own trail. Breaking trail in virgin snow on a bright Sunday morning was a special pleasure. The blue shadows on the snow, the distant views of bluish-white, snow-covered mountains, the fallen trees piled high with snow, the clouds racing in the wind, opening and closing patches of blue sky and sunlight like the lens of a camera, and the bits of bird life still striving and thriving despite the wind and cold–all this and more rewarded me for getting outside.

I cleaned the snow off a fallen tree and sat on it, buffered by my hot seat, as the birds moved closer. Three chickadees bounced on the tree limbs above me, gleaning minute insects from thin branches. A white-breasted nuthatch landed on a small, dead snag nearby, and poked and prodded the wood. Bird shadows passed over me as the sun appeared for a few minutes. At the Far Field six juncos harvested weed seeds. One, which specialized in broomsedge, was missing most of its tail, but it could fly.

Beyond the Far Field, the sky darkened. Looking out at the valley, I could see an advancing whiteout. Then it was on me, a heavy, blinding snow shower that lasted only a short time before the sun shone again on Laurel Ridge Trail. So it went — on and off snow and sun — the rest of the dayWhen it warmed up to 11 degrees on February 19, Bruce came inside to say, “I think I heard a bluebird singing.”

Could it be? I rushed outside, binoculars in hand, listened, and scanned the electric wires. Nothing! Then I heard it. Again I scanned the wires. This time I saw, perched on the wire above the old bluebird box, a male bluebird, his sky-blue back silhouetted against the snowy field.

It was the last day of the Great Backyard Bird Count. The snowshoe trails had firmed up, making the going easy. A cardinal sang a quiet “pretty” at the Far Field, and a chickadee managed a “fee-a-bee” song. But most birds were more interested in eating than singing. On Pennyroyal Trail above the Far Field three cedar waxwings fed silently in the European buckthorn tree. In the snow beneath, a pair of juncos and a white-throated sparrow gleaned the fallen fruit. Altogether, I had tallied my all-time high of 26 bird species for the Great Backyard Bird Count.

A temporary thaw came after the Great Backyard Bird Count ended. By then the hungry deer were digging up large patches of snow so they could eat the fallen leaves. An opossum made daily trips to our bird feeder area from the woodchuck den it was sharing on the slope below our house. A fat porcupine debarked a tree branch below the First Field; the first chipmunks emerged to court and mate. The number of juncos at our feeders reached 80. And we had our first ever American crow at the feeder. A winter cranefly, its long, elegant legs supporting a thin, translucent body, picked its way over the softening snow.

My legs were not so elegant. When I tried to walk in my old snowshoe tracks that I could barely discern under a couple new inches of wet snow, I frequently missed the tracks and sank into the four inches of snow left from the Valentine’s Day snow.

There was no doubt about it. Snowshoeing was over for another year. We had survived the best and worst that February had to offer, and spring was on its way.

All photos taken in Plummer’s Hollow by Dave Bonta