Author Archives: Sandy Stott

By Ashton Nichols

Like many, if not most, readers of The Roost, we have recently had the coldest cold-snap in recorded memory. In our neck of the Eastern woods, the mercury has hovered in the single digits for days, and it has reached 0, and 1, and 2 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s -18, -17, and -16 (or thereabouts) Celsius for you more sensible European counters) at night. The days have not been much better, single digits for almost a week and more cold forecast into February.

Today we had a warming spell: 15 at sunrise, then 20, 25, and now 35 outdoor degrees on my indoor/outdoor thermometer. In our wood-heated home, the indoor temp is a wonderfully warm 67 F. We were standing at the kitchen window, just a few minutes ago, drinking our afternoon coffee when my wife said, “Look at those birds, they are bathing in the snow in the birdbath. “

And there, sure enough, were a dozen or so English sparrows, sitting on the hard frozen surface of their summer birdbath, with 2-3 inches of recent powdery snow on top, and they were shuffling and fluffing, and pecking, and doing all of the things that birds do in the summer when their birdbath is full-up with clean fresh, and always unfrozen, water. But now it was icy cold winter.

We had never noticed this phenomenon before, so we stopped what we were doing, and we stood at the kitchen window, and we watched those cute little birds taking their icy cold birdbaths in the fluffy cold snow all around them. They shook their chests as hard as they seemed able, they kicked the snow up onto their fluffy breast feathers, they hopped a little and ruffled their feathers a lot, and they made nice little circles of open space on the hard-frozen water beneath them.

English Sparrow Snow Baths

I went outside to make sure that the water had not started to melt and, sure enough, it was as hard-solid as an ice skating rink, with only the tiny sparrow claw-marks and striped feather strokes pushing the snow away from the frozen ice surface beneath. After I came back inside, the birds would return for a minute or so, then something would spook them and they would fly off again, into the nearby trees, waiting for the chance to return to their snowy ice bath; after all, it was still winter.

Birds bathe, not because they want to be clean as we humans do, but because they need to get the dirt and the lice and the mites out of their feathers, partly so they do not weigh more when it is time to take to the air, but probably most of all because those other little living critters must make them crazy as they nip and nibble and latch onto the bird’s skin underneath that tight surface-covering of feathers. Ornithologists also report that bathing is essential in order for birds to retain necessary oils in their plumage, oils without which the birds could neither fly nor survive.

So here were out little creek-side sparrows (we live within sight of the creek), with no birdbath-water in sight, bathing in the snow on an icy birdbath in order to retain those precious oils and keep those nasty parasites at bay. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have said, these little birds were “miracles of rare device.” As Henry David Thoreau did say, “I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment [. . .] and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.” That is how we felt today, watching our local sparrows snow-bathe in front of us: honored and distinguished, lucky to have chanced upon this little moment of sparrow-life that still seemed so special to us.

By Corinne H. Smith

“I have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenter’s shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack factory, and the turpentine clearing; but when at length I saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, I realized that the former were not the highest use of the pine. It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most. It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” ~ Henry Thoreau, “Chesuncook,” The Maine Woods

I used to live in a second-floor apartment that had a view of a driveway, a garage, a woodshed, a hillside, and a sunken backyard complete with garden cottage. Standing in the midst of it all was a full and picture-perfect Douglas fir. A Christmas tree allowed to go wild, perhaps. She stood almost three stories tall.

I called her Momma Tree because she supplied shelter for many of the birds in the neighborhood. Cardinals, blue jays, juncos, chickadees, sparrows, and mourning doves all hid in her dusky green depths, at one time or another. When the nearby bird feeder was stocked, everyone politely took turns launching to it from her branches. Oh, a few squabbles erupted every once in a while. The noisy blue jays often seemed to be the culprits behind the disputes. But Momma Tree was a comforting presence to all. It seemed rude to start a fight at her fingertips.

One day, the air was filled with big wet snowflakes. Hour after hour, they kept falling. Hour after hour, they combined to lay down a beautiful blanket of thick, heavy snow. By nightfall, Momma Tree was covered. Her once-perky arms now aimed straight down toward the ground. She still stood tall, but she was burdened. I wasn’t sure if she would recuperate from the encounter.

M-tree points to the west from which came the storm.

The next day arrived with a bright blue sky. The sun popped over the hillside in full blast. When I looked out the window, I saw a poof! of snow falling off Momma Tree. A sunbeam had helped her begin to shed the weight. I plopped myself down with a cup of tea to witness the rest of the show.

If you asked for an explanation from the guys on The Big Bang Theory, they would assess the scene as a sample of pure physics. Sunlight hits a snowy evergreen branch. The warmth on the dark green needles and brown bark turns the adjacent snow into water. The process of melting causes a frozen chunk to release its grip and slide off the branch. Suddenly relieved of this weight, the flexible arm of needles bounces back and upward. Since a body in motion tends to stay in motion, the up-and-down swaying lasts until its momentum can fade to stillness again. In the process, more snow slides off that branch. When the falling snow or the branch hits other branches, a chain reaction takes place. More branches sway, and more snow falls. An occasional light breeze may aid in the process, too. Soon the whole tree appears to be alive, shaking off its cold and unwanted covering as easily as a dog sheds suds after a bath. It’s just that easy.

I watched Momma Tree shuffle off that snow until the sun sank behind the farthest hill. She was almost entirely green again. All of her branches had bounced back but for one. It still carried a frozen mass that looked like a white Persian cat, with its eyes closed in sleep and its nose flush to the tip of the greenery. Its fuzzy legs dangled down on either side of the branch. That part re-froze when the temperature dropped overnight. It took Momma Tree the rest of the week to rid herself of the icy snowcat. Then she was back to normal.

Of course, I know that trees are living things. But until that afternoon, I had never seen a tree actually do something, really undertake a task. Momma Tree had a “living spirit,” all right. I felt honored to have seen her in action. I felt an even greater connection to her from that moment on.

Don’t believe that a tree can move on its own? Watch a snow-covered evergreen on a sunny winter day. The poof! you see as the first sunbeam hits the ice will be your invitation to pay attention.

I moved away from that address in July 2012. That’s the last time I saw Momma Tree. Before I left, I walked out to thank her and to wish her well. I heard the wind whispering through her needles in reply. I think about her from time to time, and I wonder how she’s doing. How many birds is she boarding? How did she deal with this last snowstorm? I will never forget the priceless lessons she taught me: about the aliveness of a tree, and of the value of time spent on one winter afternoon, just sitting and watching.

After the latest storm blew through (leaving a good deal less than hyperbole’s prediction), we thought it a good day to strap on winter’s big feet and snowshoe out to a nearby point for a look at the February ocean. Back in post-thaw January, when the cold returned, the whole salt bay had been iced over, and some of the cast-up chunks of sea-ice had been the size of Volkswagens. What, we wondered, might the rising sun angle have wrought, even amid the long cold and repeating storms?

After the usual remembrance and wrestling with our bindings, we ‘shoed up over the plowed berm and out along the track into the woods. The winter-blue sky was deep and the northwest wind stripped sleeves of snow from the trees, seeding the air with snow-grains that curved and recurved like flocks of tiny birds. Snowshoeing is slow going, and it took us about a half-mile to remember this. But then we stopped trying to stride forward (which catches the toe of your ‘shoe, pitching you forward) and fell into its deliberate lifting rhythm. We were in no hurry.

Under the few inches of new snow, the recent rain-crust cracked, dropping a half-foot at every step in oversized indentations. We were leaving monster tracks; some explorer, stumbling across then for the first time, would be wary – how big must this creature be to leave such tracks? As we ‘shoed on, leaving a path of possible wonder, I fell to thinking about our far western cousin, Big Foot himself. (There have, I’ve read, been sightings of Big Foot in every state, except Hawaii.)

Leaving Tracks

Grainy fabrications aside, all we have of Big Foot are his (or her) tracks. But unless some descendant of the Merry Pranksters is out there in the dark woods of the Pacific Northwest, strapping on outsized feet and striding gleefully through any available mud, there is something/one out there. Big Foot was on my mind because I’d recently read (here is the Thoreau connection) Robert Sullivan’s old Big Foot article in Outside Magazine. (Sullivan, you may recall, is the author of the recent The Thoreau You Don’t Know, one of my favorite modern works about him.)

From the article, originally published in Open Spaces, an attractive journal also from the northwest, a few things became clear: first, Sullivan – always drawn to quirky subjects – must have smelled a book in Big Foot. But, as he visits with various Big Foot searchers (and “researchers”), the loopy nature of the Big Foot community comes clear; circles of rivalry and self-reference form the spin of excitement and myth that keeps Big Foot alive. And yet, despite the outsized estimates of his (or her) size – upwards of seven feet and perhaps 1,000 pounds – Big Foot remains seldom seen. And undocumented.

All this mulling and slow ‘shoeing brought us to the sea, which shimmered under the race of wind and the angled sun. We walked along the bluff above the water, and as we did, we followed also fresh coyote tracks, three or four coyotes if I read the overlays well. Partway out to the point we reached a point of convergence – the tracks radiated out from a short slide down the bank next to an overhang; we must have been right above the den. Pulses a little elevated, we waited. The wind kept hurrying through the woods; the sea sparkled; we were awake to the possibility of other lives.

Then, we walked on. Any tracks we crossed were now heading the other way. Thoreau often sketched the tracks he found into his journal; they were the calligraphy of other lives, their sentences. And from these sentences emerged a sense of a world both real and mythic.

We ‘shoed on, leaving our big-footed tracks.