Winter Sumac

Barred Owl in Flight

A scream breaks the silence of the January night and she is off and flying through the dense wooded land.

In Flight

Hunger Moon

"To some Indian tribes and to our colonial forefathers in New England, the full moon in February was known as the Hunger Moon; it indicated the time of greatest hardship. Winter was still in full swing, food stored the previous fall was either getting wormy or running out entirely, and hunting and fishing were harder and less productive. If you made it through the Hunger Moon in those days, things soon started looking better; spring wasn’t too far off, and your chances of survival for another year improved. Like the proverbial hedgehog, groundhogs know this one big thing: stay indoors until the Hunger Moon is past, and then some." - The Retired Ecologist


"Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. " ~Henry David Thoreau

Barred Owl Night Shot

Thanks to Bruce DeGraaf for graciously showing me the powers of post-production.

Carolina Wren

Female Red Cardinal

Grey Squirrel

"The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest." - Thoreau

Mourning Dove in January Sunshine

Female Red Cardinal

Why doesn't the Red Cardinal ever pop up in Thoreau's writings? Easy. He never caught a glimpse of these scarlet beauties because they only nested in Massachusetts in 1958, nearly a century after the great Massachusetts writer's untimely demise in 1862.

Thoreau's Journal: January 18, 1852

"This is a very mild, melting winter day, but clear and bright, yet I see the blue shadows on the snow at Walden. The snow lies very level there, about ten inches deep, and for the most part bears me as I go across with my hatchet. I think I never saw a more elysian blue than my shadow. I am turned into a tall blue Persian from my cap to my boots, such as no mortal dye can produce, with an amethystine hatchet in my hand. I am in rapture at my own shadow. What if the substance were of as ethereal a nature?"

Moonlight

"Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day. I soon discovered that I was acquainted only with its complexion; and as for the moon, I had seen her only as it were through a crevice in a shutter, occasionally. Why not walk a little way in her light?"

Thoreau - "Night and Moonlight"

Snow

Thoreau's Journal: 25-Dec-1856

A strong wind from the northwest is gathering the snow into pictutrersque drifts behind the walls. As usual they resemble shells more than anything, sometimes prows of vessels, also the folds of a white napkin or counterpane dropped over a bonneted head. There are no such picturesque snow-drifts as are formed behind loose and open stone walls. Already yesterday it had drifted so much, i.e. so much ground was bare, that there were as many carts as sleighs in the streets.

Savanah Sparrow on a Plum Island boardwalk through the sand dunes.

Deer Island Ice Build-Up On the Shore

The ice had frozen on the Merrimack River, then thawed over the warm front during the middle of January 2008. It consequently became brittle sheets on the shore as the tide continued to rise and fall. The following week, after the nor'easter, it was again exposed to a deep overnight freeze resulting in the accumulation of these numerous thin layers of ice. A marvelous and beautiful phenomenon!

Northern Mockingbird - Plum Island, Massachusetts

The Winter Dunes of Plum Island

Plum Island, Massachusetts

White-Tailed Deer - Parker River Wildlife Refuge: Plum Island, MA.

American Tree Sparrow - Plum Island, MA.

"The snow buntings and the tree sparrows are the true spirits of the snowstorm." Thoreau

Ipswich Sub-Species of Savannah Sparrow - Plum Island, Massachusetts

Common Goldeneye - Merrimack River, Plum Island

Cooper's Hawk - Fitchburg, MA.

Courtesy of Cindy Cringan, this immature Cooper's Hawk, during the height of a January Nor'easter, found himself some lunch in the form a pigeon in Ms. Cringan's backyard.

One More . . .

Up Close and Personal

Night Shot of Barred Owl - Fitchburg, MA.

This is one of a long series of night shots, the first successful ones I have managed to create out of pitch black forest atmosphere. This gives me and you an authentic casual shot of this magnificent female juvenile Barred Owl preening herself. She was on the hunt on the evening before a big January nor'easter.

Great Blue Heron - Great Meadows - Concord, Massachusetts

Great Meadows - Dragonfly

"A Barred Owl" by Richard Wilbur

A Barred Owl

by Richard Wilbur

The warping night-air having brought the boom
Of an owl's voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,

Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
"Who cooks for you and then "Who cooks for you?"
Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,

Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

Black-Capped Chickadee

"The chickadee and nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar companions."
Thoreau - "A Winter Walk"