Spring flowers
autumn moon
summer breezes
winter snow:
With mind uncluttered
· this is ·
the finest season!
-Wúmén Huìkāi
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Spirit and flesh together manifest
Bashō might have caught
In his net of three short lines
This torrent of trills
Attadīpā viharatha
The world so vast tangled, hungry and I so small
I take this place for mine for so long we both
And on […]
Gloomy Winter’s Now Awa’ soft the westlin breezes blaw … and ilka thing is cheerie, O!
~ Robert Tannahill
Notwithstanding bud-shaking bluster and thermometric vagaries, evidence mounts to confirm that vigorous life returns to the shivering landscape.
Eat hearty, and may blues speedily dispel […]
Fresh snow is often an ideal medium on which diverse passages may be recorded and revealed, though their makers may remain mysterious unless actually witnessed. In this case, paw-prints are fairly distinct, but the rest? Sweeping tail, run-on landing, violent sneeze?
And more of same,
for a short span resolving into a reasonably […]
Bird and small mammal alike often choose eminence over shelter, or (when available) both:
Relaxing on a warmish afternoon,
keeping curious eye on photographers
or conducting a visible-but-private conversation,
up may provide more and safer options than down. But food often obeys the law of universal gravitation, and concentrates […]
Near the bottom of winter, dawn comes late and low.
But where the sun’s elevation daily increases, open water wanes inconstant:
Some waterfowl, like the mute swans that now overwinter here, favor the pond so long as there beckons even a wing’s-breadth of open water, retreating to the rarely glassed-in river only when […]
“Si da el cántaro en la piedra o la piedra en el cántaro, mal para el cántaro.” – Sancho Panza
Windows open; no-one home
Farrar Pond and its environs teem with ghosts: Nipmuc, Massachusett and Pawtucket indigenes displaced by settlers or eradicated by imported disease and alcohol, native wolves […]
And still they camped beside the hole, and still it never rained …
A few days of drizzle refresh the late wildflowers, helping them and their partners
to slake various hungers
and prepare for winter. But absent a hurricane to follow, these meager inches will not soon reach the deeper roots, leaving […]
Small pond above a larger:
Permanent rather than vernal, but amphibians don’t know that. –Nor that, as a human artifact with no direct connection to any natural pool or stream, it is free of egg-devouring fish. (Tadpoles, snakes, salamanders, dragonfly nymphs and other predators… Well, it’s tough world, even submerged.)
Through the winter, […]
Provision of an artifical puddle so close to a much larger (if somewhat less limpid) reservoir might seem redundant.
But smaller birds
and mammals
tend to dine and drink local, by preference. Even a hundred yards’ trek through broken woodland and across muddy bank consumes some effort, and even the […]
Some passages are made in the wee hours; others are revealed in waxing sun and rising breeze. Here a family of raccoons went out a-foraging after dark from their brushpile den,
while smaller mammals (including meadow vole, lower right) left lighter tracks before daybreak. Then the pattern was made noisier as warmed lumps of […]
Though scarlet tanagers favor the kind of oak-rich mixed forest that prevails around Farrar Pond, they hang about in treetops and—despite dramatic coloration—are not often seen. This male
Piranga olivacea
was apparently driven into view by extreme local drought and perhaps itchy feather mites
(note eye-protecting nictitating membrane here and below), two […]
Lone adult white-tailed deer tend to be fairly accepting of human presence, especially in full daylight
Odocoileus virginianus
and when we move slowly and smoothly (predictably?). Well-defended with hoofs and sometimes antlers, not expecting hereabouts to be shot from afar, and easily able to outrun us, they often tolerate fairly close approach;
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