April showers bring more than May flowers, and birds aren’t the only creatures producing fantastic choruses in the springtime. While birders will set their alarms for 5:00am in order to catch the rainbow of spring migrants arriving in Vermont, herpetologists – that is, aficionados of amphibians and reptiles – will spend the wee hours of the night up to their knees in muck and water to glimpse the bizarre courtships of frogs and salamanders.

Rain and warmth sets the stage for the drama. Just last week, the temperatures began rising above 50°F and light rains were predicted to start around 7:00pm on Tuesday night. Every herper in the Champlain Valley was on alert. Sure enough, the rains came, and my friends and I descended upon Shelburne Pond, where dozens of others, from child to adult to childlike adult, had also gathered in hopes that this would be a “Big Night,” as we say in herp lingo.

Nearly all amphibians need to keep their skin moist, so they won’t venture out of their over-wintering huddles in the forest until a good rain soaks the leaf litter. The spring snowmelt and rains fill in woodland depressions, creating temporary water bodies – or “vernal pools” – a perfect place for laying eggs without being eaten by fish. Spotted salamanders, blue-spotted salamanders, and wood frogs are the earliest breeding amphibians in Vermont. They will travel up to hundreds of feet from their forest dwelling to court, mate, and lay eggs in these predator-free pools.

Pond Road is a hotspot for viewing amphibians migrating to vernal pools. While these migrations are happening in forests all over Vermont, when a road bisects the forested and wetland areas, it provides an easy way to spot these intrepid travelers. All you need is a good flashlight, rain jacket, and rubber boots.

The chorus of spring peepers was almost deafening in some spots along Pond Road, but in the background we could also hear the clattering of wood frogs, enraptured in their eccentric courtship, known as “amplexus.” The smaller males grab a female from behind (holding on is easy due to his enlarged thumbs) and deposits his sperm as she lays her eggs (if he is the chosen one, of course). In the confusion of the darkness, males will sometimes grab each other in amplexus, in which case the male’s body will vibrate intensely as a way of saying “hey, hands-off me!” You can simulate this effect by holding a male in your hands and very gently squeezing on his sides.

Some spotted salamanders, which are almost cartoon-like in their bulky size and large yellow spots, were still engaging in their own stunning mating orgy in a vernal pool down the road. Male spotted salamanders gather in groups to perform for the females by writhing around each other, bobbing their heads under one another’s tails, and clumping into huge twisting masses known as “congresses.” If a female spots a male she likes, she will accept the offer of his spermatophores (little capsules of sperm bundled together) and take them up into her cloaca. She will then find a nice twig submerged in the water and deposit her fertilized eggs around it.

This was probably one of the last glimpses of spotted salamanders in their group mating, as the window for catching this is narrow, and confined mostly to early spring. Like many other migratory phenomena, amphibians stagger their movement and calling during the season. In higher elevations, you may still see the spotted and blue-spotted salamanders and wood frogs. We realized that last week wasn’t quite a Big Night, because we were right in the middle of two major breeding periods. The cold-tolerant species were finishing up, and the temperatures weren’t quite warm enough for the next round of breeders.

But right now in the Champlain Valley, I am keeping my ears alerted for the low knocking sounds of northern leopard frogs (so called because of their dark spots outlined with a light halo), the high buzzing of gray treefrogs, the deep humming of the American bullfrog, and the singular “gulp!” of the green frog.

Beginning in late May and into early June – look for little tadpoles and tiny gilled salamanders to start swimming around in these ponds. Their challenge is to mature and head for the woods before the pools dry up with the summer heat.

In the meantime – Happy Herping!

Get to know your frog calls at: http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/frogquiz/

Learn about Vermont’s Reptiles and Amphibians, and submit your findings: http://community.middlebury.edu/~herpatlas/index.html

Herping in the night.

Ryan Morra is a jack-of-all-trades and soon-to-be Master of Science when he completes the Ecological Planning program this May. He is a high school science teacher, polyglot, cyclist, and forever-developing naturalist with a particular pull towards hepetofauna these days. 

The author finding the ideal balance between proximity and appreciation of fir waves on Mt. Katahdin.

I suspect there is a positive correlation between one’s appreciation for fir waves and one’s distance from them.  From a distance, fir waves etch a pleasing pattern on the landscape, pose interesting ecological questions, and remind us that turmoil can be a form of stability.  Up close, they inflict scrapes and puncture wounds, incite expletives, and remind us to plan the next vacation to California, where the mountains have no trees (and it hardly ever rains).

For now, let’s keep a respectful distance.  Fir waves are a pattern of forest regeneration (sometimes also described as wave-regeneration) found in sub-alpine forests.  Unlike more familiar disturbances, such as micro-bursts or insect outbreaks, fir waves leave a striking pattern of mortality—dead trees lying in a network of undulating rows separated by patches of living trees.

As the name implies, this phenomenon affects forests dominated by fir (locally, Balsam Fir, Abies balsamea).  However, despite the fact that the forest is nearly a monoculture of fir, the forest between the waves of dead trees is far from uniform.   The diagram below depicts the linear, predictable variation in age and height in a forest experiencing wave regeneration.  To understand the forces that drive them, we’re going to have to grit our teeth, roll down our sleeves, and wade in.

Figure excerpted from Sprugel, 1977.

The primary culprit behind this dynamic process is wind.  When a tree falls, it no longer protects its downwind neighbors from damaging winds.  These newly exposed trees now bear the brunt of the weather and quickly succumb, exposing yet another cohort of trees to damage.  This mortality wave advances through a forest following the direction of the prevailing winds and is trailed by a wave of regeneration.  To return to the above diagram, the wave is moving from right to left and it can be inferred that the prevailing winds also move in the same direction.

The speed that the wave advances through the forest is dependent upon the average speed of prevailing winds and is commonly between 1 and 2m a year.  This bracket is relatively strict, as faster average winds would cause enough damage that the forest would be replaced by krummholtz—gnarled, stunted trees—and tundra, while slower winds would not provide enough disturbance to initiate wave regeneration.

The short lifespan of balsam fir, coupled with the with advancing fir waves, set the average maximum age for an individual tree in one of these forests at about 60-70 years.  Although the individual trees in the forest may be young, that does not necessarily mean that the forest itself is young.  This process can be maintained for hundreds of years.

Stepping back to the comfortable distance enjoyed by academics, fir waves take on even greater intrigue.  In 1977, D. Sprugel published the first scientific paper describing the ecological processes that form fir waves.   In this award-winning paper, he introduces fir waves not just as an ecological curiosity, but as a direct challenge to prevailing forest succession models.  At the time, the steady-state climax community model held a lot of weight in the scientific community.  In this model, forests follow a predictable pattern of species dominance following a disturbance, with pioneer species giving way to climax species that result in a terminal, stable community.  Fir-waves are anything but stable.

They are also anything but common.  Fir waves are found only on a handful of mountains in New England, Newfoundland, and strangely enough, Japan.   Unfortunately, Vermont doesn’t make this list.  If you want to take a first-hand look at a fir wave, you’ll have to leave the Green Mountain State for the nearby Adirondacks in New York or the White Mountains in New Hampshire.  Just don’t get too close…you might find yourself wallowing through a fir-wave, contemplating that move to California.  If you do, remember that in some ways this experience is as quintessentially New England as white-steepled churches, Puritans, and maple syrup. That’s what we’re here for, right?

Sprugel, D. 1977.  Dynamic structure of wave-regenerated Abies balsamea forests in the north-eastern United States. Journal of Ecology 64: 889-911.

In an episode from his life prior to the FNEP program, Gus Goodwin lead a group of hearty 12-year-olds on a bushwhack through countless fir waves on a remote Adirondack mountain.  After crawling on hands and knees for hours, the group arrived at the summit with big grins, proving the fact that you don’t always need to have fun to have fun. 

Beating wings fill my view. The snow geese are stark white, and the black tips of their wings pulse in contrast with their bodies. Hundreds – no, thousands – of these meaty birds move in unison. They squawk and honk, thousands of calls melting into an urgent and persistent roar.

At least that’s what I envisioned.

I had never seen snow geese, but I set out confidently to find the birds. I wanted to feel the wind from a thousand birds taking off at once. I wanted to feel their thunderous calls in my chest.

Greater snow geese move in large groups as they migrate, and they often stop in Vermont farm fields to feed on leftover grain in spring and fall.  I assumed that finding a few thousand large, white, honking geese would be an easy task. I was wrong.

I checked for the geese at the Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area in Addison, where they often stop to feed, but left empty handed. A news report I found explained that the snow geese had largely abandoned Vermont fields in exchange for New York fields, so I drove through rich farmland west of Lake Champlain. But I could not find a single bird at any of their usual haunts.

I finally caught sight of three snow geese while driving west on I-90 in New York. I saw them out of the corner of my eye. I was discouraged from my search, and I wasn’t on the lookout for the geese anymore. Against the grey March sky, the birds seemed an apparition. They did not call out, and so far as I could tell, they flapped their wings in silence. The geese were headed north at 50 mph, and I quickly lost sight of them.

After hearing my tale, a veteran birder clued me in: The pictures I found showing thousands of snow geese flying and feeding were likely taken in fall, when up to 20,000 snow geese move through Vermont in large groups. Even though as many as 6,000 snow geese can move through Vermont in spring, theirs is a scattered migration this time of year.

Feeling humbled, I decided that these birds deserved more than a few quick Google searches and a jaunts through the Champlain Valley. I’m learning several lessons in my search for the snow geese. In particular:

Dress elegantly and create a scene from time to time. Thousands of white geese slip through the sky in a cacophony of honks and squawks as they descend on wetlands and farm fields. Vermonters are especially proud that these worldly visitors stop by and show off each spring and fall.

Make travel a priority. Snow geese travel over 5,000 miles each year, from their summer breeding grounds in the Arctic tundra to their winter feeding grounds in the coastal marshes and farm fields that stretch from South Carolina to New Jersey.

Go with friends and be efficient. Snow geese form a “V” for flying long distances, and for good reason: they can fly 71% farther when they’re flying in a “V” formation than on their own. They stick together at feeding and wintering grounds, too, where lookouts keep an eye out for eagles, foxes, or other predators.

Inspire international cooperation. A group of state, federal, and provincial officials called the Atlantic Flyway Council collectively manages the birds’ populations and habitats.

Aim for success.  The Atlantic Flyway has been wildly successful at bringing populations back from the brink of extinction. In the early 1900’s, there were only a few thousand animals. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 made it illegal to hunt snow geese and suite of native birds, including other big, migratory birds like sandhill and whooping cranes. By 1980, there were approximately 200,000 greater snow geese. Today, the population has increased to about 1 million birds.

Be flexible.  The birds’ transition from “bust” to “boom” is due largely to their flexibility.  First, they’ve expanded their winter habitat. In the past, snow geese only used marshes in the Carolinas and Virginia. Warming temperatures have meant that snow geese are using a wider swath of habitat, including marshes in Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey. Second, snow geese have discovered modern agriculture. These birds have a nearly insatiable appetite for grasses, sedges, willows, and other herbaceous plants.  In the 1970’s, snow geese also started feeding in hay- and cornfields, eating grain that was left behind. Biologists took note, and worked with farmers to leave behind a grain for the birds. Today, snow geese take full advantage of the steady supply of grain, and they feed almost solely in cornfields.

Expect repercussions for your actions (or for others’ actions). Snow goose populations have increased dramatically, to the point that the birds are actually degrading their own habitat as they grub for food. When the geese arrive in the Arctic, they forage for food extensively and compromise their own breeding success. The same is true in their winter homes, so the Atlantic Flyway has opened hunting seasons in attempt to bring populations down to 500,000-750,000 birds. Eight states will have a hunting season in 2013, including Vermont. Here, the hunt runs from March 11- April 26, and hunters can take up to 15 geese per day. The State has held similar hunts since 2009, and each year Vermont hunters harvest only about 100 birds.

Leave your audience wanting more. The snow goose population’s fate ultimate fate remains to be seen, but many Vermont birders (including me!) simply want to see the birds.

Liz Brownlee is farmer trapped in a graduate student’s body. If she’s not cranking away at school work, find her playing a board game or breaking in her new steel-toe boots on a walk in Centennial Woods.

There are many ways to rate a day. Perhaps you determine a day’s merit by how many to-do items you’ve crossed off, how many hours you spent outside, how many friends you ran into around town. My personal favorite rating system is the tangle test. By this measure, the best days leave me with bits of the field tangled in my braid as I untwist it in the evening.

Take February 20^th, so good I couldn’t even wait until evening to untangle the mess and try to force my hair back into some semblance of order. As our van pulled away from the LaPlatte River Natural Area in Shelburne, my fingers battled a bird-worthy nest of twigs. Apparently that’s what happens when I, in true naturalist form, try to be a bobcat.

Professor Matt Kolan explained to our wildlife management class that simply following an animal’s trail as long as you can is one of the best ways to learn about wildlife behavior and habitat needs. Beyond just knowing which animals are present, you begin to piece together stories of how they use particular habitat features or interact with other animals.

The bobcat we chose to track for the afternoon trotted along an open trail, directly over a set of gray fox prints. It paused, marking a mound of sticks and snow before moving on. It moved casually, seemingly unconcerned about being exposed, but it did not dally, either.

The tracks led into a thicket of honeysuckle. Army-crawling through slush, innumerable twigs lodging in my hair, I studied how the cat navigated the mess of branches. Contrary to cottontails’ hopes, the bobcat seemed undeterred by the shrubs. The trail weaved throughout the thicket, crossing many older, nearly snowed in tracks and joined at times by another larger set. The stand of honeysuckle, that odious invasive, appeared to be a favored hunting ground for the bobcat.

Perusal of a field guide could have taught me most of this. Bobcats prey on small mammals, such a cottontails. Cottontails require dense, shrubby areas for cover. Naturally, bobcats would likely hunt in areas preferred by cottontails. Simple enough. What may not have been evident, however, is that a reviled invasive species could be serving that important habitat role for both cottontail and bobcat.

Time in the field, dirt time, is the only way to fully appreciate nature’s quirks, to learn that bobcats don’t care whether it’s a thicket of invasive honeysuckle or native dogwood as long as prey can still be found. Days with plenty of good dirt time always pass the tangle test. The bits of vegetation I wrestled from my braid that February afternoon were tokens of a great day, full of learning not found on the pages of books.

Clare Crosby is a first year master’s candidate in the Field Naturalist/Ecological Planning Program. If she’s not getting things caught in her hair, she’s probably doing some sort of less adventurous school work, playing music with friends, seeking out shenanigans, or perhaps being a little too excited about a youtube video involving fluffy animals.

__________

Rattle my bones

Dripping with cultural history and utterly unique, the objects cradled in Connor Stedman’s excited hands burned with sentimental value. Their glow reflected in Connor’s eyes and didn’t flicker for an instant upon the delivery of my first question.

“So, what are they?”

To the untrained eye, they were two pieces of wood roughly the size and shape of tongue depressors, but slightly heftier and square at the ends. Connor explained it was a set of bones: A historically Irish one-handed musical instrument that is played by holding one bone stationary while rattling the other bone against it.

While the traditional instrument was made from sheep’s bones, Connor’s version originated as the South American tree palo santo, or “holy wood” in Spanish. Palo santo’s use as a good luck charm and a cleanser of bad energy dates back to the Inca era. Connor says that he’s never heard of another pair of bones made from palo santo.

Connor carved his bones in anticipation of a local visit by Irish bard Gerry Brady, who described bones as “the only instrument you can play with a pint in the other hand”. Gerry blessed this set of bones himself.

Dripping with cultural history and utterly unique, Connor had produced an item that was quintessentially Connor. I was pleased to find that I was not the only Field Naturalist with a very special item in my backpack.

Lovin’ spoonfuls

The “What’s in your Backpack?” project began with an orange spoonfork. No, not a spork. “Spork” implies tiny tongs on the end of a spoon. My beloved spoonfork has a spoon on one end of the handle and a fork on the other.

The spoonfork lives in my backpack for the obvious reason: It is saving the ocean. Just one glance at my special utensil harkens memories of a sunny but barren office overlooking a harbor in northern California. Here, a captain and a lawyer can still be found toiling over the designs for a device that will remove plastic debris from a floating garbage patch so expansive that, when discussing the size of it, scientists can hardly agree on an order of magnitude.

I worked as a graphic designer for The Clean Oceans Project for a year. From my vantage point on a folding camp chair, I learned that the food service industry is one of the leading contributors to the Pacific Garbage Patch. Coffee stirrers, used creamer cups, and of course, plastic utensils escape the clutches of humanity and migrate there by the millions. Despite my physical move away from the ocean, I can’t bring myself to use a piece of single-use plastic without guilt that borders on self-loathing.

By my estimate, my spoonfork has prevented me from using and discarding at least 56 plastic utensils since I acquired it in August of 2012. Perhaps not many of those would have journeyed from northern Vermont to the ocean, but it’s nice to know that they’re not in a landfill, either. Spoonforks were dispatched by the hundreds as a welcome gift from UVM, and I’m comforted to know that there is a militia of reusable utensils stationed in backpacks around campus, protecting our dumps from an onslaught of plastic picnicwear.

Art and soul

Should you need to do some coloring in the field, Clare Crosby has your back. Clare’s backpack boasts not one, but two sets of mini colored pencils, ranging in size from small to ridiculously small.

The constituents of Clare’s first set of tiny colored pencils resemble the oversharpened stumps of normal-sized colored pencils, but Clare admits that they came that way. She purchased them for field journaling in a vertebrate natural history course, the class “that made [her] fall in love with birds”.

The pencils in the second set are closer to the size of matchsticks. Clare has had them “for forever”, but recently rediscovered them for the purpose of sketching in and out of the field.

Clare has noticeably worn down her pink pencil by coloring birthday cards for her friends, so it’s obvious that she is a lovely person and would gladly share her pencils. However, philanthropy is not the reason that she carries both sets of them. “The big ones are easier to draw with,” says Clare, “but the small ones have more colors.” As a nature artist, Clare needs a broad selection of greens, browns, and other earth tones; it’s a requirement that can be satisfied only by two sets of tiny colored pencils.

What’s in your backpack?

Now, dear Reader, I implore you to invert your backpack and explore the contents. Is there something with a backstory? Something normal that you use in a unique way? Something totally off the wall? Send an email to Kelly@kellyfinan.com. You’re in good company…

Kelly Finan is a scientific illustrator from Hop Bottom, Pennsylvania. When she’s not entertaining comments about her hometown’s silly name, she can be found in the woods, on a snowboard, or in a thrift store cultivating her unusual interest in other people’s stuff.

Staying warm in the winter is hard. Chickadees eat constantly in order to survive long, cold winter nights. Squirrels spend precious time and energy creating complex insulated nests. Deer browse on nutrient-poor twigs to get as many calories out of their surroundings as possible. Yet compared to fish and other aquatic organisms, terrestrial wildlife breathe easy – literally. As fish battle the cold through the long winter, they are steadily running out of oxygen.

Life underwater would be impossible without a unique characteristic of water: its solid form is less dense than its liquid form. In other words, ice floats.  As air temperatures plummet in the fall, ice forms on the tops of lakes and ponds and stays there. In deep lakes, the temperature under the ice remains above freezing and allows fish and other aquatic organisms to remain active.

However, the same ceiling of ice that allows aquatic life to persist causes one of the main problems for fish in winter. When fish respire through their gills, they absorb oxygen that has been dissolved into the water through two main mechanisms. Aquatic plants produce oxygen during photosynthesis, and waves and currents mix oxygen from the air with surface water. When the surface of the water is frozen in place, both mechanisms stall.

Most fish cope with the low oxygen levels and cold temperatures by slowing down. The less they swim, eat and breathe, the less oxygen they need. Some fish go so far as to burrow into the lake bottom and reduce their metabolisms so that they go into diapause, a state of suspended development. Other fish migrate toward areas with more oxygen, like inlets or the upper regions of the water column.

Despite these behavioral and evolutionary adaptations, low oxygen levels are one of the main causes of winter mortality in Vermont’s fish. Different fish species are more and less susceptible to winterkill. Despite being considered a coldwater fish, trout populations can be decimated when oxygen levels drop too far. Other groups of fish like mud minnows and fathead minnows rarely succumb to mass die-offs. Species popular to ice fishermen, like northern pike and perch, generally are moderately tolerant of low oxygen.

Winterkill is fairly common during long cold winters. When the ice melts, winterkilled fish provide a boon of nutrients to scavengers, such as bald eagles and river otters. Fish populations usually rebound within a few years. However, for fish populations already stressed by invasive species, overfishing or low population levels, winterkill can be catastrophic. Most importantly, lakes that suffer from nutrient-loading are most susceptible to winterkills. During winter the overabundant algae and aquatic plants in these eutrophic lakes decompose and use precious oxygen. This causes oxygen levels in these lakes to decrease to dangerous levels long before the ice melts.

So the next time a harsh wind blows in from the north and sends a chill down your back, or when you resort to heroic measures to regain feeling in your fingers or toes, take a deep breath of that cold oxygen-rich air. You have it good.

Claire Polfus is a second-year ecological planner who is very happy with the plentiful oxygen in the winter air, especially when she is struggling up a steep hill on her skinny skis. 

We all have our routines, those mental checklists we complete to make sure that our day will run smoothly. Some are entirely rational, others seem almost ridiculous, but all are part of what makes our own worlds go around. One of my self-affirming habits each winter evening is to look for Orion, to make sure that his giant frame is poised for battle in the night sky as he has been since the ancient Greeks raised his mortal body into the heavens almost 3,000 years ago.

Orion’s nighttime traverses actually began long before the Homer immortalized his character in The Iliad. The configuration of the constellation has been visible from Earth for about 1.5 million years and should stay recognizable for about 1 to 2 million more years. Ultimately, the stars will rotate within our galaxy and change their relative positions to each other, as well as to Earth. In the current wintertime sky, Orion routinely rises in the south to southeast at sunset, big and broad, early enough to entertain those of us who aren’t night owls. Betelgeuse, the supergiant that is his right shoulder, is by far the reddest object on the dark horizon and holds the allure that it may explode at any moment, collapsing under its own weight and rebounding into fiery supernova glow. The odds that this impressive event will occur tonight are “astronomically small,” but it is always worth another look.

Our solar system is anchored 28,000 light years from the middle of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, in a spiraling arm called the Orion Arm or Orion Spur. Also hosting the stars of its namesake, the Orion constellation, this arm extends approximately 100,000 light years away from the center of the galaxy, curving into a wispy piece of the giant pinwheel that we inhabit. Dinosaurs were just beginning to roam the Earth when our galactic arm was last in the particular position approximately 230 million years ago. Orion, in myth or science, had not actually been born.

Despite his regular presence in my contemporary winter routine, I am continually amazed come summer when Orion’s enormous frame actually vanishes from my nighttime glances. From about mid-May to mid-July, Orion is not visible in the night sky because he is hunting the heavens entirely while the sun is shining. The summer sky also holds its own treasures, but it does seem as if the crisp winter air makes the stars brighter and my frigid stargazing with Orion more admirable.

Actually, winter stars are brighter, or rather less clouded, than their summer counterparts. During the winter, the nighttime view from the northern hemisphere is directed away from the center of our galaxy and towards the outskirts of the Orion Arm and nearby Perseus and Sagittarius Arms. Looking all the way into deep space, our view is less obscured by the galactic dust of the central bulge and only a diffuse band of our own arm in the Milky Way graces the skyline. During our summer, when our night view points towards the galaxy center, the gases of the greater Milky Way dull the glow of stars and planets and the Orion Arm appears as a broader and brighter fuzzy band of stars sweeping across the sky.

The cold air of February may drive us into the depths of cabin fever but while we huddle by the heaters, the Earth will continue its tiny rotation in the giant universe, the pieces of its night sky moving together in a predictably off-kilter dance between the nearby moon and the backdrop of outer space. This month, Sunday, February 10^th marked the new moon and the darkest skies. With the guarantees that only a galaxy can offer, Orion will be there this month rising in the south, Polaris in the north. As an extra treat, a bright Jupiter will be visible to the left and below the moon. So pull on that sweater and extra pair of pants and spend a moment with Orion and some of his closest winter friends. It will always be reassuring to know that, for the imaginable future, they will follow a dependable yet spectacular winter routine.

Joanne Garton is a master’s candidate in the Ecological Planning program who loves rocks, building things, swimming, and Scottish strathspeys sets. When not working in the field, she can be found in her home town of Montpelier.

Sundogs over Huntington, Vermont.

My third-floor office is a commanding venue for a nap.  Reclined in a worn swivel chair with my unsheathed feet stacked on the heat grates, I slip into my best unproductive hours.  When my eyes deign to open, the scenery is ripe for a Chamber of Commerce brochure.  The golden chapel domes and brown brick mortar of the university sit regal and prim before the white speckled ribs of New York and the glass pool of Champlain.  It’s plain lovely.  Especially on biting cold mornings, near 10:00, when some change of guard ushers students out from every academic pore to wade the gray salty paths to their next nook.  It’s one vain pleasure up in my aerie, watching without sympathy the cold scholars scurry.

New Englanders are a bundled bunch this time of year, thick in flannel and knitting, under scarf and hood, huddled up and looking down.  They don’t glance up or over or about.  I’m of course the same when I’m between doors.  At those blistering and miserable moments I’m not concerned with scenery or smells; I’m concerned with thawing my fingertips and eyelashes.  But one small pearl of wisdom I’ve learned up in my sanctuary, watching the poor, huddled masses, yearning to be warm, is that those bitter winter mornings are the perfect hours to stop and look up.

Muggy summer sunsets are swell and soft spring dews lovely, but winter skies are epic.  They are also easily missed, so fixated are we on being anywhere but outside lounging with our eyes lilted poetically skyward.  Try it on some clear day, preferably close to sunrise or sunset.  Bundle up and find one wide view, sprinkle with mountain scenery to taste.  You need only a cursory dose of luck too, since your quarry is not rare.   You’ll be set to find nature’s own smoke-and-mirrors light show.

Sun Pillar

The winter sky is full of magic moments: blazing golden columns spearing the sun, iridescent rainbow parenthesizes, ghostly calm halos.  The secret behind these light shows is ice, or rather ice crystals.  On blue days, up through the troposphere (those bottom 30,000 feet of atmosphere home to us and nearly everything we consciously experience) layers of air stack neatly but invisibly upon one another, mostly undisturbed since the winter days can’t puff enough convective heat to stir them.  Each layer fosters slightly different temperatures, humidities and winds.  Each of these unique climates fosters different species of ice.

Ice is a tremendously variable substance.  Ice crystals form when water vapor, cooled below freezing, comes in contact with a nucleating surface – a speck of dust, a crystal of sea salt, a strand of smog – and instantly freezes.  Depending on the specifics of the day, temperature and humidity chief among them, the ensuing shape can be wildly varied.  Run-of-the-mill snowflakes are a minority in this club, which includes spears, columns, needles, cylinders and plates.  The magic happens when sunlight filters through these miniscule lenses and explodes into reflected and refracted patterns, illuminating the invisible.

Halos are easily the most striking dimension of winter light.  Halos spawn from suspended ice columns, with crystals less than 20 microns in diameter (twice the width of a red blood cell or half that of a human hair).  Light passing through the sides of these crystals refracts, scattering into a smear we can see.  Most halos are 22_­^o halos, since the distance between the circle and the sun is a calculated 22^o.  Less often you might glimpse a wider halo, the 42^Oer made from light refracting through the ends of slightly larger columns.

If the angles are not so neatly aligned, sunlight may just bounce off the crystal facets, reflecting back to our eyes in the form of pillars.  The more compact and jumbled the ice crystal layer, the more dynamic and vivid the column, right up to where the sun appears to be retching across the heavens in one terrific golden heave.

Credit: Snowcrystals.com

More rarely the crystals are uniform six-sided plates.  These crystals are much more broad than thick, and as they slowly fall through the atmosphere wind resistance keeps them parallel to each other and to the ground like tardy leaves on a calm fall day.  Without a jumble of different angles, sunlight cleanly refracts through the crystals and delivers to our eager eyes crisp, icy slivers of rainbows to either side of the sun.  These cupping rainbow parenthesis are called perihelion, or less snobbishly, sundogs.  Because the crystals are to our eye nearly edge-on in orientation, the refracted light comes through strongest at the corners instead of a full halo.

Even the rarest of these dazzlers is a common winter show.  An easy evening can be made watching that cold yellow yoke fall behind the Adirondacks, bursting with columns, ringed in halo, and dimpled with colorful sundogs.  Not to mention the glories, red suns, green flashes, tangent arcs, cirrus ripples…they’re there.  Waiting.  We just need to stop the feet, rub the fingers together, drop the hood and look up.

During this arctic grip on Burlington, when almost anything outside seems to groan or crunch or crack, when the cold itself seems evil, a drama begins each morning in frigid waters off Perkin’s Pier. In Lake Champlain, Common Goldeneyes are getting hot.

These perky ducks bob and dive, lunge and flutter, cavort and compete. Nearly four months before our woods will glow with a rainbow of migrating songbirds, Common Goldeneyes are already courting – proof that icy water doesn’t necessarily put a chill on carnal desire.

The male does most of the strutting and gyrating. One of his signature moves is the “head-throw-kick.” While paddling near females, he’ll thrust his head forward for a moment, then jerk it backwards so that his nape touches his rump and his bill points skyward. Finally, he utters a weird grating call and whips his head forward while kicking water outward with his feet.

This is a genuine turn-on for female goldeneyes.

But this odd winter courtship initiates a fickle relationship. We tend to think that these mating rituals produce a faithful pair that goes on to raise a brood together in spring. But ducks aren’t so faithful.

Many duck species are indeed monogamous. Goldeneye pairs now forming will migrate north together in March toward breeding areas across Canada and Alaska. But he’s a rambler. After she lays eggs, the goldeneye male abandons his mate. This is true for most duck species. The bond they established back in those icy waters breaks in spring. He flies off to who knows where. She stays put to raise the young. Sometimes females and their broods of precocial ducklings will join into larger flocks, a gathering of single moms biologists call “amalgamation.”

The males won’t fly off for some spring fling. Far from it. For many duck species, this becomes a long-distance relationship (only lacking email and Skype). Eventually, he’ll come flying back, but not to the breeding grounds. The pair reunites later, where they began, when they return to wintering site like this one off the Burlington waterfront.

I can’t be certain that Common Goldeneyes, with all that splashing and whiplashing, are renewing their vows. Research on this particular species is sparse on the question. But it’s probably a safe assumption. Pair formation, separation and winter reunification are well established among ducks, including the common goldeneye’s closest relative, Barrow’s Goldeneye.

So why does she take him back? The female may simply be choosing to go with what she knows. Perhaps he had staked claim to prime breeding territory up north. Maybe she’d rather not risk ending up with a lower-quality male or even no male at all. A research team based in British Columbia, where Harlequin Ducks breed and spend the winter, reported that pairs reunite even if they failed to fledge young in their earlier breeding attempts. That would suggest reunification offers clear benefits, with males and females hedging against the risks and costs inherent in finding a new mate.

Whatever the case, the scene at the Burlington waterfront, besides offering us a cheap thrill, suggests that at least among ducks romance can be, well, cold and calculating.

Bryan Pfeiffer is a consulting naturalist and author who teaches writing in the Field Naturalist and Ecological Planning programs. 

I stopped running because I was surrounded by hundreds of crows.  It was dusk on the bike path along Lake Champlain.  Great masses of crows were flying in from the east to roost on the cottonwood trees along the shore.  They fed on sumac fruits along the train track; they mobbed the tree-tops and hop-flew from one twig to the next; they perched all over the bare branches of the trees.  In the light of the setting sun, their black feathers shone glossy and strong.  More kept arriving almost continuously from the east, flying in over the barge canal.  As they flew in they gave these weird, multiple-part calls, not at all like the usual “caw-cAW-CAW!”  What were they saying and why were they gathering here?

Crows get a bad rap: harbingers of death, marauding pranksters, cunning gang of villains.  But they are ubiquitous, precocious, smart, social, and we get to see them.  So many other birds skulk in the bushes, maddeningly out of sight.  Crows are in your face, and never more so than when they are forming a winter roost.  I’ve seen two of these big, dense roosts lately: the one on the Burlington bike path and one in downtown Portland, Maine, in a couple of scrawny trees sandwiched between a large parking garage and one of the city’s busiest streets.  The city lights and traffic created a strange juxtaposition with the murmur of this great mass of wild creatures.

Ornithologists have several hypotheses for why crows roost together in fall and winter (during the breeding season, crows do not form large roosts).  The idea that makes the most sense to me is that crows seek safety in numbers.  Great horned owls are a crow’s night-time enemy; if an individual crow joins a large roost, it reduces its risk of becoming owl lunch.  Fear of predation could also explain why roosting crows jostle for position – no one wants to be sitting exposed at the edge of the pack.

Another idea is that roosts form near big food sources, so it’s the location (as in, next to a landfill), rather than the company, that is the attraction.  And yet another hypothesis is that crows can somehow sneakily glean information from one another, so that birds who didn’t find a lot of food today can check out everyone else, see who looks fat, and follow those birds to food in the morning.  But that wouldn’t explain why the fat ones would come to roosts, unless sometimes they are the hungry ones and it all sorts out in the long run.  And of course, these hypotheses aren’t mutually exclusive.  It could be a way of avoiding predation and gleaning information.

It’s hard to study crows because they are crafty, wary, difficult to catch.  Without a way to tell individuals apart (like colored leg bands), scientists can’t easily learn about crow behavior.  But part of me is content with the mystery.  There’s something special about not knowing.  In a world where our facts and figures are only a touch-screen away, the noisy, hectic crow roost reminds me to stop running and appreciate the beautiful unknown.

Nancy Olmstead, a master’s candidate in the Field Naturalist Program, is wrapping up a natural community assessment of 24,000 acres of Maine’s Baxter State Park.  When she’s not running with crows, she’s scheming about how to create her dream job back home in Maine.