The crackling fire spits and pops.  We nestle against its warmth.  Outside, the season’s cold rests upon the night.  The first snow fell this morning.  And just as we have done every first snow these past four decades, Henry David Thoreau and I settle into familiar places around the hearth, warm biscuits and steaming cups of tea plated nearby, heavy woolen throws laying comfortably across our laps.

To my mind nothing speaks more beautifully of the year’s transition than the tapestries he weaves with simple words placed in expert patterns.  Our fireside visits embrace the season, welcome it, give it a nod and a smile and a warm handshake.  Many an hour have we spent sitting together on evenings such as this, hearing wind rattle windows, watching flames dance warmly, losing ourselves in comfortable thoughts of nature.

I sip my tea and look at him expectantly.  Already I can see him hiking the woodlands of his thoughts, his eyes seeking the first thread of that which is to come.  In his presence I always listen more than waiting to talk.

Finally, thoughtfully, he asks, “Shall we speak of winter?”

“Yes, I think that would be nice.”  I quiet myself, focus on him, feel as much as hear his voice when it pours forth into the small room.

“Just yesterday I watched through the window an egret stroll about the meadow, snowy white and warm peach painted on a canvas of autumn.  Today is different.  Nature now, like an athlete, begins to strip herself in earnest for her contest with her great antagonist, Winter.  In the bare trees and twigs what a display of muscle!  Yet no matter her dress, Nature will bear the closest inspection of her mysteries.  She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain, to solve the questions she splashes before our eyes.

“Winter’s barren landscapes chide us to give our attention to the splendor of things nearby.  When the air is thick and the sky overcast, we need not travel so far to have high expectations, for in her nakedness she teaches us to be less distracted but instead to be more connected, more aware.

“For my part, in winter I take occasion to explore some near wood which my walks commonly overshoot.  I see nowadays in various places the scattered feathers of meadowlarks, etc., where some hawk, or perhaps even a falcon, has torn them to pieces.

“In the midst of this wood hides a pond!  Without winter I would not have discovered it, or its island, or the meadow between the island and the shore, or a strip of perfectly still and smooth water in the lee of the island.  Without winter I would not have known of the coots in the pond and I would not have rested my eyes upon the most beguiling of ducks.  Without winter I would not have seen two pheasants become three, a second lass joining the pair.  These things I would have missed were I too much enamored by flowers and butterflies or the dance of spring leaves waltzed by a zephyr.

“What a shame that would be!  This morning, a gray, overcast, still day, and I stood upon the porch as much listening to as watching the very few fine snowflakes that began falling, and within minutes a regular snow-storm had commenced, fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape.  In half an hour the russet earth was painted white even to the horizon.  Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change?

“I marveled at this abrupt new world, absently tossing seed atop the snow wondering how long it would take the birds to find it—assuming the snow did not cover it first.  I laughed at myself almost immediately for doubting.  The notes of one or two small birds, this cold morning, in the now comparatively leafless woods, sounded like a nail dropped on an anvil, or a glass pendant tinkling against its neighbor.  I knew they were there, the birds, the feathered specters of winter’s stark world, a few seeming as lost as I sometimes am.

“Hiding in that powerful transition of seasons, all around me, more small birds than usual prancing about—sparrows and towhees, even a few joyful chickadees wearing black caps to keep their heads warm.  The comings and goings challenged me with views of birds that hardly could be recognized.

“—Oh, talked, or tried to talk, with Ralph Waldo Emerson this morning.  Lost my time—nay, almost my identity.  He, having seen something I did not, talked to the wind—told me what I missed, and told me repeatedly—and I lost my time trying to imagine myself a bird building a nest so I would not have to listen to his prattling.—

“Nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it.  So sweet and wholesome is the winter, so simple and moderate, so satisfactory and perfect, that it reminds us of old discoveries made new again, reminds us that her children will never weary of it.  What a poem!  An epic in blank verse, enriched with a million tinkling rhymes.  It is solid beauty.  It has been subjected to the vicissitudes of millions of years of the gods, and not a single superfluous ornament remains.  The severest and coldest of the immortal critics have shot their arrows at and pruned it till it cannot be amended.  Ah, what a time is winter!”

We finish our tea and biscuits then, sitting in silence, feeling the heat of the fire on one side and the cold of the night on the other.  When we two, he and I, had taken our fill of drink and snack, we together stand and walk to the door, step through into the night, perch in winter’s embrace as it settles upon the porch around us.

“Winter brings more than newfound happiness and discovery,” he says into the still night air, “for the sun has been set some time now yet darkness fails to hide the challenges that spring like skeletal flowers from frozen ground.  That soft, clear, star-filled sky stretching before us seems the scene, the stage or field, for some rare and important drama to be acted on.  Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.  Methinks I would share every creature’s suffering for the sake of its experience and joy.”

— — — — — — — — — —

Many thanks to Henry David Thoreau, a man who has taught me much, and who teaches me each time he speaks.  (Of note: Much of this is original and unadulterated Thoreau.  In some cases, however, I took artistic license to editorialize, add to, subtract from, paraphrase, or otherwise augment his words to better fit the theme of and/or submissions to this edition of the carnival.  In the spirit of things, I know he won’t mind.)

The next edition of I and the Bird will be presented on January 7, 2010, by Listening Earth Blog.  Please start thinking about your submissions now.

I am out of town.  I won’t respond to comments, post new content, visit other blogs, or even check e-mail.  I don’t expect to return until Sunday or Monday.

If you arrived here ready to submit something for the next “I and the Bird” or the next “Festival of the Trees” and you don’t already have my e-mail address, please use the contact form or send your submission to jason@this domain (‘this domain’ obviously being ‘xenogere.com’).

Please note that comment moderation means anyone not already approved to post comments will be taxied to the queue, so don’t think your comment isn’t going through; it’s just waiting for review and approval.

And where am I going?  I intend to race my chariot to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge and surrounding areas located along the southern Texas coast.  Why?  I hope to see some whooping cranes; more specifically, I hope to see members of the only natural flock of whooping cranes left on the planet.  Their numbers remain critically low and their survival hangs on the edge of extinction where it has been for three quarters of a century: only 15 surviving birds were alive in 1941.

This year?  About 250 birds survive in the last wild flock, though additional cranes live in raise-and-release programs along the east coast of North America where they are trained to migrate by ultralight aircraft.  Both the last remaining wild flock and the released flock, along with a non-migratory flock, number fewer than 500 birds in toto.  That makes the natural flock the largest group and the best hope for the species.

I have never before seen a whooping crane.  Not one in the wild and in the flesh, I should say.  That Texas offers the species its best hope in winter shames me for the fact that I never have traveled to see them—or at least traveled so I could try to see them.  This year is different.  And even if I walk away without photos, being there at this critical juncture means more than paying lip service to hope.

Even as Canada and the United States work diligently to bring the cranes back from the edge, I’m sad to report (PDF) somewhere in the US is a heartless, cruel, inhumane cretin who shot and killed a whooping crane in Indiana, then left the carcass on the roadside:

Wildlife law enforcement agents with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources are investigating the shooting of an endangered whooping crane near the town of Cayuga in central Vermillion County, Indiana.

The crane was shot sometime between Saturday, Nov. 28, when it was observed by an International Crane Foundation staff member, and Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2009, when an ICF volunteer found the carcass along West County Road 310 North, just west of North County Road 225 West.

The crane was identified by a leg band, and determined to be the seven-year old mother of “Wild-1,” the only whooping crane chick successfully hatched (in 2006) and migrated from captivity.

One simply cannot overestimate the cruelty and stupidity of humans.  Beginning with our first steps atop the primate lineage, we have caused extinctions at a rate 100-1000 times what we have seen in the recent fossil record.  We are living in the next great death, the Holocene extinction, a mass extinction directly tied to humans (so it more accurately should be called the ‘anthropocene extinction’).  Thanks entirely to us, at least one species of plant or animal becomes extinct every 20 minutes.  At that rate, 20% of all living species could be extinct by 2028 and at least half of all species could be extinct by 2100.  And those figures assume our rate of habitat destruction, pollution, hunting, sport killing, resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions don’t increase at unforeseen rates.

So why not shoot one of the last whooping cranes on the planet, a member of a species we tried to wipe out 75 years ago and have struggled to save ever since.  I mean, save us all that hard work and shoot a crane today.  I say that facetiously, of course, with not too small a dose of sarcasm.  If the shooter is caught, they need to have the maximum penalties applied from both the state and federal levels.

In June 2009 I reported on the catastrophic season experienced by whooping cranes in Texas due to lack of fresh water:

“…[W]ildlife die-offs of whooping cranes and deer have been reported.”  This past winter “the only migrating whooping-crane flock that exists in the wild lost 23 of its 270 members to hunger and disease brought on by the dry weather, said Tom Stehn, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service whooping-crane coordinator.”  And that loss came despite “the fact that the cranes’ diet was supplemented for the first time in 60 years…”

Historically only one crane in this flock has died each year, so having 23 die in one year crippled the recovery effort for this species, the tallest of all North American birds.  Recent indications are that this year keeps the cranes even with their numbers last year.  From the most recent USFWS census:

The second aerial census of the 2009-10 whooping crane season was conducted 02 December 2009 in a Cessna 210 piloted by Gary Ritchey of Air Transit Solutions of Castroville, Texas with [US Fish and Wildlife Service] observer Tom Stehn. Visibility was very good for most of the flight, but mid-day winds gusting to 25 from the northwest made for a bumpy ride and made the task of finding cranes more difficult. Sighted were 191 adults and 17 juveniles = 208 total. This was an increase of 117 cranes since the last flight conducted November 12th. I am expecting up to 22 juveniles based on August fledging surveys done on the nesting grounds by [Canadian Wildlife Service]. With that number of juvenile produced, the flock may experience a break-even year with a flock total around 247 expected.

Idiotic shooters aside, the past week has seen other extraordinary news about the whooping cranes, most especially a step taken by “an alliance of Gulf Coast environmental and business groups, led by a prominent South Texas family,” a step aimed at ensuring the whooping cranes do not pass into oblivion without a fight.  The group, known as the Aransas Project, has filed suit against the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state environmental agency responsible for regulating use of river water.  The Austin American-Statesman reports:

The [Aransas Project] claims that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which authorizes the use of river water around the state, has allowed too much fresh water to be diverted from the Guadalupe River before it reaches the bays where the whooping cranes winter. As a result, according to the alliance, saltwater levels in the bays have increased, driving away or diminishing the number of blue crabs and wolfberries available for the whooping cranes to eat.

Which matches what I reported in June:

[Freshwater marshes] inundated by Hurricane Ike are not being flushed of salt water.  That lack of flushing is killing plants and damaging soil chemistry.

I went on to show how the lack of fresh water threatened much of the wildlife along the coast, from ducks to deer to oysters to plants, and how it also meant the environment could no longer “support the microorganisms and insects that form the base of the food chain.”  The Aransas Project appears ready and willing to address those issues, though the impetus will be on them to prove that development along the coast or drought conditions or other outlying factors are not to blame for the horrific death toll last year.

But before I blather on ad nauseam (too late, I know), allow me to direct your attention to another article regarding the lawsuit by the Aransas Project.  This article comes from the Associated Press.  Please, before you do anything else today, take a minute to read this: Aransas Project to sue over whooping crane deaths.