FreeLists / tn-bird / [tn-bird] Re: Snowmelt Timberdoodles and other Winter Wonders

["Leslie Keith Koller" <lkkoller@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hope Hershel doesn't mind me posting this to Tennessee Birds also..I  have
wanted to ask a question on these two listservs for a long long time now....

Ol Coot (Jeff Wilson) and Herschel Raney, have either of you two guys ever
been published? Ever thought about it?  I strongly urge you guys to submit.
Any of several magazines I read would be a perfect place for these kinds of
outdoors descriptions. I think I'd like to see your names (both of you) in
Wild Bird or Birder's World or something similar.  Then I could say "Hey, I
know those guys!", and possibly even get an autograph of a published
author...

Keep up the great descriptions here at least, please!!!!

Leslie Keith Koller
Sikeston, New Madrid County,
Way down in the Bootheel,
Missouri

----- Original Message -----
From: "Herschel Raney" <herschel.raney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARBIRD-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2002 9:57 PM
Subject: Snowmelt Timberdoodles and other Winter Wonders


Up to Round Mountain today for the second snow of my
daughter's memory and possibly only the fourth of her life. We
couldn't resist a trip to the woods to look for animal tracks. Virgin
snow was piled up in the woods and was still drifting down from
above the highest pines. The sky was a flat silver color, a diffuse
and neutral dome of light. We bent down to the first tracks we
found. Deer had stepped everywhere through the lanes of dusted
cedars. The deer motions were steady walkings and the occasional
scratch of the hooves on the crust. It was all history. I reminded my
daughter of the truest thing I knew about animal tracks: if you
follow them to the end, there will be an animal waiting there. She
seemed to have never considered this. And immediately wanted to
head off into the brush until we found the deer. I squatted and
peered off into the shadowed wood. Talked her out of it. We
watched one deer step down to the water and drink (or the evidence
of such). Nearby was a place where another deer stopped to, well,
'dingle' shall we say, in the snow. It had melted through to the
ground and looked like a glistening ball of milk duds. We looked
everywhere for Turkey tracks but none, apparently, were on the
move. We searched some more and then on the side road we heard
a sudden vibrato off to the left, a whistle of wingbeats. And over
the head of my daughter I watched a timberdoodle hurriedly going
through the cedar tops.

My daughter and wife went off to make a snowman above the creek
after this. I watched for a bit and then came back to where the
Woodcock seemed to have erupted. I wanted to find the exact warm
place where the bird had been but instead I was rewarded with the
actual tracks of the timberdoodle in the snow. An amazing sight. Of
course, I would never have known what they were if I hadn't seen
the bird come out of those woods. The small feet slipped visibly
from step to step on this short-legged bird, like connect-the-dots.
You could see each track and scrape, track and scrape in two close
lines. The body of the bird was low and made a rounded furrow
around these lines like the goings of an overweight mouse. The bird
had gone from hollow to hollow wherever stones protruded. The
stones had held their heat longer than the surrounding ground and
the snow was thinner there. Around the stones the leaf litter
shown. And at each of these dark halos was the evidence of
timberdoodle bustle, of a busy step and shimmy. It looked as if I
could make out where the bird's beak had pierced the wet soil here
and there. I swear I found the imprint of a woodcock's face.  I
zigged and zagged through the brush after this fresh trail and up
whistled another set of bird wings. This one wove off through the
trees. I went straight over to its tracks. Same story. I tried to
photograph it but it just looked like a jumble and glisten of nothing-
in-particular in the camera viewfinder. It was a beauty I could not
capture. I just nodded. Beyond this was the hop of another bird
with no body scrape. There was heavy foot traffic and a
tremendous tearing at the cedar rich soil. Had to be Towhees. Or
the rough riding Fox Sparrow. Neither one had stayed around for
me.

I showed my daughter the Woodcock tracks. She cocked her head
like she could almost see it and then ran off to eat more snow. Over
by the frozen swamp she said 'Hey Dad, watch this'. And she
closed her eyes, bent over, and pushed her face into the fresh white
crust. It left a Grecian impression of her, a mask: nose and lips and
brow. She, this new girl, appeared to stare up from the snow, eerie
and pale. Nearby, my daughter roughed up a snow angel while I
looked down at this face. And I wondered what the animals would
think later in the dark, stumbling on such a commotion in the snow
as all this. It looked to me like some more trackable evidence: right
here an angel had fallen out of the sky so hard she'd blasted free of
her physical self. And now adrift beneath all this white she'd
peered up from the crust for a last look toward where she'd fallen
from, leaving a touchstone imprint of that moment. And now no
matter how much I turned or swiveled my head I couldn't tell if the
angel was smiling or not.

"Dad, come on, do you like it or what?" She stood there dusted
with the snow that still fell. The snow that fell so quietly.

There are some things you shouldn't even think of pointing the
camera at. My daughter had snow on her lashes-perhaps for the
first time in her life. It was snowing harder. Tomorrow I knew it
would all be dusted over into just another blur and scrape. It would
be tromped on by raccoons and deer, or etched upon by more
hungry Woodcock stitching in the snow. We backed out carefully
anyway, not stepping on robes or torsos, wings or feet. And left it
to the rest of winter and its consequences.

                Herschel


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