Winter is a good time to get better acquainted with one of the most remarkable materials on earth. There is always, for most of us, lots of this material around, because it is also one of the most abundant.
Although water has a molecular weight about one half that of the average air molecule, it is a liquid at the temperatures humans find most comfortable, while air, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, and just about everything else in the same weight class, are determined to be gases.
When it gets cold enough for water to show up as a solid, there seems to be no end to the fascinating things it can do. Here at Pinewood Farm, a snowfall reveals the presence and activities of the birds and animals that normally move around us, for the most part, unseen.
I'm writing this during one of the few times in the last six or seven years that we have been snowed in; the infamous cold snap of late January, 1994. We are not actually snowed in. With the promptitude and efficiency of our county road crews, few drifts get deep enough to stop a determined driver.
No, rather, we are iced in. The roads are so slippery that both our paper and our mail were not delivered yesterday, and we have not ventured forth, although we are out of bananas.
A two to four inch fall of snow, with much drifting, stopped long enough to let me clear the porch, path to the bird feeders, and brick walk with an Echo leaf blower, and the driveway with a twelve horse power garden tractor fitted with a snow thrower.
About the time everything was cleared off, it began to snow very gently, tiny clear grains of ice. After several daily lows of below zero Fahrenheit, the ground was very cold, and the fine grains had accumulated to a depth of about two inches when the snow turned to rain, which froze as it soaked into the snow.
The weather only briefly flirted with the low thirties, to drop back below freezing, and a fall of snow resulted during the night, accumulating to about four inches. A walk across the back lawn to the garage led to the discovery that, under the night's addendum, there was a crust just strong enough to remain unbroken until I tried to lift the other foot, when it might or might not break and let the leading foot down for up to a foot.
I was not the only one abroad this morning. And scores of rabbit tracks showed that, if you weren't as heavy as I, the going hadn't been difficult last night. They were particularly fond of using any partially cleared paths that were going their way, like the driveway, or the path from the grade door to the bird feeders.
The first job was to get into the garage. Both large doors were frozen down. Pounding did no good. Fortunately, a small door could be opened to give access to the inside of the overhead doors. One of the doors has an electric opener. Jogging the opener had no effect. Driving a hatchet blade under the door with a hammer, and then lifting the hatchet handle, broke the hatchet handle. Finally, that flat prybar that goes by the name of WonderBar lived up to its name.
Back to the house, blowing an eighteen inch wide path in front of me. Although inefficient at about four inches of snow, the leaf blower uncovered the edge of the drive for the tractor born equipment, and it was easier to start it and put it on my back in the garage.
As I came to where the first rabbit track crossed the driveway, the snow covering the track left in a satisfactory cloud leaving a series of rings about half an inch high and half an inch thick, and just big enough to enclose the space where each rabbit foot had come down.
Only intense blowing would remove the rings. I bent the path I was blowing to cross the driveway to see if the perfect outlining of the footprints would continue. It did, and before I reached the grade door, where I wanted to blow a path to the bird feeders, it began to look as though most of the tracks had been saved in the same way.
My path to the bird feeders had been very popular last night, and the center of it was almost solid with tracks. It looked almost exactly like scores of thin sections of elliptical cross-section bones lying in the path. Out by the feeders, the rain had covered the offering for the ground feeders and frozen over it. The feeders on poles had become completely blocked by snow. The leaf blower cleared them instantly, and a fresh portion of seed relieved those who were trying to scratch through the ice.
The regular partakers, house finches, cardinals, nuthatches, hairy and downy woodpeckers, titmice, juncos, goldfinches, were present in triple or quadruple the usual numbers, the mourning doves in ten times the usual numbers, and some rarities for us, a beautiful red-bellied woodpecker, a couple of house sparrows, and one starling.
I started this account because the persistent footprints reminded me of a painting by Arthur Heming for his serial in Maclean's Magazine in 1925. The story was also published in book form that year by Doubleday, Doran, New York. The title; The Living Forest. After a little digging, I found the book, which I have owned for over sixty years.
The painting shows two woodsmen dressed for cold weather in northern Canada, snowshoes strapped on their backs, walking past what look like large mushrooms. Instead of a title, the caption consists of a paragraph from the book. The paragraph is part of the woodlore an older man is passing along to two boys. The three have been left in the woods by a party of voyageurs and some mining engineers who are the villains. I quote the caption:
Later still, the surroundin' snow may thaw even lower than the packed snow of th' tracks, leavin' the footprints elevated because the snow beneath them is also packed. An' even later still, if the thaw continues, the soft surroundin' snow may disappear so rapidly that the hard-packed footprints may remain standin' like very large, ill-shaped mushrooms, six or eight inches above the level of the surroundin' snow.
It's a wonderful book. I must read it again. My recollection of the plot is vague, and I haven't read all the woodlore it contains since I retired from the world of chemicals and minerals and instrumentation and became more interested in such details.