In the middle of March, I made a quick visit to Gustavus. It was snowing heavily, so the ferry ride was a ride in whiteout most of the way. Good for taking naps (not to mention second breakfast and more than one cup of tea), making up for having to get up early and getting my gear on the luggage cart. A peaceful sort of trip.
Naturalists love to look for animal tracks in the snow and conjure up stories to go with them, but there was so much fresh snow falling that tracks were covered quickly. So animal-tracking was not very exciting, but bird-watching offered compensations.
A thick blanket of powdery snow lay on the ground, and snow continued to fall. But that didn’t deter a pair of ravens. They flew back and forth between a tree behind the house, where they had nested last year, and a flat area just across a small river. Coming back from over the river, they often carried big wads of moss; on other trips, bundles of long strips of plant fiber dangled from their bills.
My friends said that the long fibers came from dead cottonwood trees, so we went over to look. Beavers had felled cottonwoods and willows here, and moose had left the marks of their lower incisors on the fallen willows. On a cottonwood log, the loose outer bark had been pulled away and dropped in small pieces on the snow, and the fibrous inner bark had been peeled off, exposing the bare wood. This was where the ravens had been at work.
The ravens were clearly lining a twiggy nest basket with moss and bark, and lots of it—a cushy bed for the eggs still to come. An eagle cruised up the river and received a rough welcome from the ravens, which escorted it off into the distance. Maybe the ravens were just making sure that this eagle knew there was a no-fly zone here, ahead of the time when the nest would have occupants.
One day we saw a raven flopping about in the deep, fluffy snow—taking a snow-bath. It pushed its head forward into the snow, rubbing on both sides, then vigorously threw snow over its body with flapping wings. Moving to a new, still undisturbed, spot, it repeated the process. I wonder if snow works as well as water for a bath.
The ravens aren’t the only ones who know that spring is coming. Oregon juncos are singing and the sapsuckers are back from winter quarters. Although magpies are still around and so are slate-colored juncos, these will soon head for the Interior, where they nest.
Other birds were out foraging in the snowy landscape. A little group of pine grosbeaks flitted through the shrubbery, chatting quietly with each other and nibbling willow buds. One of them dropped down to the snow and ate the seeds from a fuzzy seed-head that poked up from the snow at bird’s-eye level. Of course, we had to determine what kind of seeds they were, which led to some discussion and then back to the books. Ah, they were the seeds of big-leaf avens, a fairly common plant of open areas.
Just over our heads, a chestnut-backed chickadee perched on an alder, pecking and pulling furiously at something for several minutes. Finally, it began to extract and eat some bright green bits. After it flew off, our further inspection revealed that the chickadee had found a cocoon stuck to the alder twig. The cocoon was very tough—not easy for us to tear open even with forceps (we had to use scissors), but the persevering chickadee had won the prize inside and eaten all the juicy bits except for the very end of the pupa, leaving a fragment of pupal skin. That was one happy chickadee! We wondered how they learn to recognize insect cocoons as potential food sources.
When the tide went out, we strolled along a snow-free beach; what a relief from floundering in the knee-deep white stuff, too soft for those little snowshoes, typical of our area and never meant for powder snow, to do much good. Here the crows were plucking cockles from the silty sand, flying up a few feet, and dropping them. This is a common behavior by which crows crack open a shell to get at the edibles inside, but it depends on the shell landing on something hard enough to crack it. On this beach, there weren’t many rocks, and the chance of dropping a cockle and having it hit a rock was small. One crow tried two different locations and dropped its cockle sixteen times (!!) before it could eat its prey.
There was a stiff onshore breeze that buffeted the foraging crows. So, instead of their usual walking gait, they often faced into the wind and side-stepped — just as I used to do when wading a fast-moving stream.
• Mary F. Willson is a retired professor of ecology.
