Date: 12/11/25 6:22 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 11 December 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
6:45 a.m. ( twenty-eight minutes before sunrise). Twenty-three degrees,
wind West ten miles per hour gusting to thirty. Snow outlines hardwoods,
brushstrokes of white, thick horizontal and diagonal lines. Then, a
two-pronged disruption: wind now and, later in the morning, wayfaring
squirrels, rushing to breakfast. Snow on evergreens, sagging boughs, also
wind-teased and redistributed. White puffs everywhere—a secondary snowfall.
Overhead: an aerial panorama, a lustrous mix of black and white and blue
with hints of pink, mottled like the inside of a clamshell.
No river fog. Clear low. Clouds severe the hilltops. The crown of Smarts
Mountain embedded. Moosilauke completely eclipsed. Moose Mountain,
steadfast, just below the ceiling, welcomes an imagined sun.
6:57 a.m. black-capped chickadees, American goldfinches, dark-eyed juncos,
and mourning doves begin to stir. Doves exit a stand of spruce, where they
(likely) spent the night, facing the seeping wind, feathers fluffed
and bills tucked under their wings. Goldfinches arrive in the meadow from
somewhere along the edge of the woods (ecotone). Juncos emerged from cozy
northern white cedars below my deck. Chickadees from secret cavities inside
the woods. Not a woodpecker to be seen or heard.
7:06 a.m. the nacreous sunrise hosts four crows, twisting and turning,
mostly speechless and headed west, beyond the hill and above the valley of
White River. Rollicking into the wind. Enjoying themselves sledding the
wind currents.
Visiting red-tailed hawk, absent for ten days (or more), left with last
week's snow, ceding Hurricane Hill to barred owls, who continue to stitch
the neighborhood together, homeowner to homeowner. I've become a repository
of barred owl sightings: backyard bottom of hill; above the raised beds top
of hill; in an old apple tree midway uphill. Criss-crossing over cars and
pedestrians. And, of course, their hollow voices breathe life into December
nights. As winter deepens, a tolerant owl perches on a cherry limb above my
raspberry patch ... waits with the patience of Job for a floundering red
squirrel headed toward the birdfeeders. Backyard food chain.
*Department of Bewilderment: *I cannot believe that the United States Fish
and Wildlife Service has proposed slaughtering 15,000 barred owls per year
for thirty years in order to protect northern spotted owls in the Pacific
Northwest. That's nearly half a million barred owls! More than a century
ago, we planted windbreaks across the Great Plains, which enabled barred
owls to spread west out of the eastern deciduous woods and reach the
Pacific Coast. They arrived in Oregon and Washington because of us, not in
spite of us. Like spreading glaciers or drifting continents, we were the
evolutionary force that brought two *very* closely related species together
(they have a common ancestor). The owl best-suited to the new (altered)
landscape will survive ... should survive. We cannot turn back the clock,
reconfigure the evolutionary trends we set in motion. Change happens. There
is no such thing as permanency on Earth. Fortunately, the southern
subspecies of spotted owl, the Mexican spotted owl, dwells in the pinon and
juniper canons of Southwest south into Mexico, halfway to Guatemala, which
is not (for the moment) barred owl habitat.
