Winter World_ The Ingenuity of Animal Survival - Bernd Heinrich [15]
Most of the nest descriptions date more than a century ago, from the heyday of the great naturalists. These descriptions whetted my appetite. The deep cup nests of crossbills had almost always been found in dense spruce trees from as low as seven feet up to seventy feet high. They are reputedly built of spruce twigs, and variously lined with “wool and moss,” “rabbit fur,” “moss and animal fur” (Macoun 1909), “felted black wool-like lichen” (Grinnell 1900), and “long black slender tendrils resembling horse hair” so that the nest appears “nearly black.” The eggs have been reported as having a ground color of pale blue, bluish-green, greenish-white, or creamy-white and they are marked with scattered spots and blotches of “pale chocolate,” “pale lavender,” “ashy-lilac,” “scrawls of black,” and “lines of bay and fawn-brown.” Why would nature produce such beauty in such a temporary thing as an eggshell that the bird sits on and hides? The young are “sooty black” and covered with down, and when they gape for food, their mouth linings shine a “scarlet” or “bright purple red.” In this case the bright colors are signals. They induce the parents to notice and feed their young, amplifying the begging response.
My anticipated winter excursion to see crossbills, or for whatever looking for crossbills might yield, I had driven to Maine in the night. Parking my pickup down at the bottom of the hill below the cabin, I saw only a white hillock hiding my neighbor’s truck; it had snowed much here. I strapped on my snowshoes and was relieved to find the walking easy since the snow was thickly crusted over. The moon was not yet up as I walked by starlight.
A barred owl hooted on York Hill and for a minute or two a second one answered from Larkin Hill on the other side of the valley. It has been a good year for maple, beech, and oak mast; there is a good mouse population. Then I heard only the steady crunching of my snowshoes on the snow. I strained my ears hoping to hear a coyote concert or maybe a saw-whet owl. But the woods soon became eerily silent.
Up at the cabin the snow had slid off the roof on the uphill side, piling up above the back windows and above the top of the back door. Thanks to the downhill grade at the front side of the cabin, I could still get inside. I quickly built a fire and checked the guest log, reading that one visitor had come on February 18 and he had reported “cold, -10°C, and gusty winds. Deep snow. Tough even on snowshoes.” A lot of snow had come since he had been here, because I had seen no trace of his tracks while coming up. And then I crashed into bed.
I was almost asleep when I was serenaded wide awake by howling coyotes perhaps a mile off, toward Wilder Hill. After I was again almost asleep, I heard the faint, hollow, almost pulsing booming rhythm of a great horned owl. I sprang out of bed and opened the window to hear it better. The booming came from near the swimming hole in Alder Stream, and memories flooded back of Bubo, my great horned owl, who had followed us down there to bathe in the pools by the rocks. Perhaps it was he. It seems hardly possible, but a sleepy longing is kept alive on occasions such as this, which are not infrequent.
I awoke near daybreak and groggily forced myself up and onto snowshoes, to be out into the woods quickly. I beat the first rays of the sun coming over the ridge by Kinney’s Head, then watched them shining golden on the red spruces where I had observed the crossbills singing and cavorting a month earlier. A mourning dove started its mournful, owl-like predawn serenade. Two more called from the west and north. There was not a breath of air, and except for the dove’s continuous dawn chorus of coos, it was still.
Minutes later it got noticeably louder. A hairy woodpecker commenced with hollow-sounding drumming. Two others chimed in, hammering also on dead “drums” of wood, sounding a different pitch but the same cadence. Within half an hour of wandering about the woods, I had seen two pairs of red-breasted nuthatches and