Date: 11/6/24 5:43 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 06 November 2024: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
6:17 a.m. The Day After. Fifty-four degrees, wind South 6 miles per hour,
gusting to 16. Diaphanous mist under a big, textured sky, colors soft and
painterly. Across the east, reaching into the north, high pastel pink
clouds grade to orange—stationary as the hills below. Low, mostly dull gray
clouds scud north at a slow but steady clip. In anticipation of the sun,
small, oblong clouds above Hurricane Hill glow. Pink becomes orange,
becomes luminous silver. Then, the sun ... a cradle of hope, appears—like
it always has—four-and-a-half billion years and counting. A high
contemplative crow, silent as stone, heads north, brushed by daylight.
Another heads west, complaining all the way. Thirteen species of birds,
including red-tailed hawk, mourning dove, American robin, red- and
white-breasted nuthatches, blue jay, golden-crowned kinglet, tufted
titmouse, black-capped chickadee, northern cardinal, dark-eyed junco, and
American goldfinch.
Chickadees: scatter hoarders, scattering and hoarding. Feathered Einsteins.
Joyfully, chickadees hide thousands of sunflower seeds in front-yard lilac,
crabapple, and the twigs of brooding maples. Behind flaps of bark and
inside tufts of evergreen needles. Back and forth, feeder to trees. One
seed at a time. Despite weighing less than a playing card, chickadee has a
brilliant memory. To find the seeds later in winter, tiny brains swell and
become storage vessels for vast information. Deep inside the brain, the
hippocampus recalls the location of 80,000 seeds—a memory built at the
expense of spiders. Every May, adult chickadees gather spiders from the
eaves of my house and garage. Spiders provide chicks with *taurine, *the
essential nutrient that promotes healthy brain development. The result ...
phenomenal memory.
On a dark day, find an industrious chickadee. That they're cheerful,
animated, beneficial, gregarious, tolerant, and cute helps, too.
