28 November 2022 (rain instead)

rain instead of snow . . .

a curious ermine

shines in the pine grove

18 May 2020 (butterfly)

lost in thought…

a cabbage white flutters

around the violets

February 3: White sky

Color of an intaken
breath. Waiting--
blank Monday sky.

December 29: Misty mountaintop fadeaway

The title of this post sounds a bit like a cross between something from The Hobbit and a Dead song, but the moment was real enough. My husband and I decided we needed to get lunch and treats at Morse's Sauerkraut before the snow storm hits tonight. Driving there, we passed austere snow-covered fields and trees laden with snow under a bleak, blank sky. As we headed home, the first flakes began to fall. As we drove into Camden, cresting a hill that offers a view toward the Mount Megunticook ridge line, we noticed how snowfall along the top of the mountain made it seem to simply fade away into the white sky.

Mountaintop fades into white
snowfall. In dreams
it's like that when I die.

December 30: White

I think of the color white now not because of snow or the almost full moon, but because in the past few days, Maine birders have posted on the Maine Birding List-serv photos of two different white birds. These birds are leucistic, not albino. Put simply, leucism is caused by developmentally defective pigment cells, while albinism is caused by a genetic lack of melanin. The main visible differences are that a leucistic animal doesn't have the albino's red eyes and may not be pure white. I've seen a song sparrow with a white face and a crow with some white tail feathers, for instance. But these photos depicted birds that were, if not as pure white as driven snow, almost entirely white.

The first bird is a junco that has been coming to a feeder in Freedom for most of December. Normally, a junco is an overall slate-grey bird with a white belly. This junco, photographed on a very snowy feeder against snow-covered bushes, is strikingly white, with only a thin dark edge to its wings, dark eyes, and a junco's typical pink legs and bill. This beautiful bird looks as if it's been crafted from the surrounding drifts and brought to life--Frosty the Snowbird. I wonder if it's aware how well it blends in with the snow, if it has learned how to make itself invisible.

This morning a birder in southern Maine posted a photo of a leucistic red-tailed hawk that has apparently been regularly seen in Eliot for the past four years in the neighborhood of the Marshwood Middle School. The photographer has seen the bird with his non-white mate. (With most hawks, the females are larger, hence the assumption that the smaller, white bird is male. Apparently his freakish color didn't render him unattractive to at least one other of his kind.)  The photo shows a white hawk flying against a background of bare trees. Except for his dark eye and bill, the hawk truly looks like a ghost bird, or the surreal visitation of some forest angel.

Two unusual white birds during these snowy days of winter, two pale muses:

White bird in winter--
blank as the snow-covered field
and as beautiful.