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It was December, 1925, and a blizzard raged outside Ada Clapham Govan’s Lexington, Massachusetts, window. Somehow, despite the wind, a faint
chickadee-dee-dee reached her ears. The bird’s jaunty call broke through Govan’s despair, and she managed to scatter some breadcrumbs for the storm-tossed visitor clinging to her icy porch rail. It snatched up a few morsels, disappeared briefly, then returned “with every relative and friend” to devour more handfuls of her offerings. “The elation, the spiritual uplift I sensed in that moment,” she later wrote, “marked the re-birth of hope.”
Snow this week will present some special wildlife opportunities
Updated Dec 15, 2020;
Posted Dec 15, 2020
A coating of snow reveals the travel route of some small critter through a pipe under a road. Marcus Schneck photo.
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White stuff across the landscape reveals a lot of secrets from nature.
Start with the basics of tracking. Within a few hours of the end of storm, the critters will begin moving across and through the snow.
Those first tracks laid down on fresh snow, before the sun begins its melting action and the wind starts to erode, are the most well-defined. They reveal the most about the animal or bird that left them behind. Maybe it’s missing a toe or otherwise showing some old injury. Maybe the gait of the animal is off, favoring one limb over another.
Don’t be surprised if see more people equipped with binoculars than usual in parks and along roadsides all over Polk County in the coming weeks.
The time for the annual Audubon Society Christmas bird count is approaching. Locally, the effort will begin Saturday with the Lake Region Audubon Society count in the Lakeland-Winter Haven area. That will be followed by the Ridge Audubon count on Dec. 26.
There is also a count at Avon Park Air Force Range tentatively scheduled for Dec. 30 and a count in the Green Swamp around Colt Creek State Park in early January.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago with the upcoming hiking season, the COVID-19 pandemic is also affecting how the bird counts are being conducted.