"Velka Zima" or Snow and Birdsong
By Soňa Mason
"You know why I like birds?" Our game ranger shuffled along, short-sleeved arms clenched to his sides against the winter morning. We were treating ourselves to a guided game walk at Botswana's Tuli Game Reserve. "If you can't find any animals, there's always birds. There's birds everywhere. Anywhere in the world."
He gave a desultory wave at the trees lining the dry riverbed where we walked. I looked up appreciatively. I never realized that before. Tiny shadows flitted about branches of jackalberry trees meeting overhead and animated the quiet morning. I admired the ability of birds to magically morph into leaves the moment you trained your binoculars on them.
"Don't know how you stand it," texted my brother from his home on the subtropical Natal coast a little further south. Yes, winter in low latitudes is nothing like the minus eight Centigrade in Warwick, New York. Even at my former home in Johannesburg on its mile-high plateau, winter is a sad brown event of insufficient insulation, bringing out the complainer in everyone. Except perhaps those visiting from high latitudes, who bask outside in t-shirts under the midday sun, when the average temperatures have risen enough. "This is just a "small winter," my Slavic father had called it, "not like the velka zima (big winter) up north."
The northern winter has not yet managed to depress me. Maybe the contrast with other seasons makes me appreciate the earliest signs of spring more. Or could it be the loveliness of snow, absorbing sound, softening harsh winter outlines. Snow brightens dark places and brings out the beauty of everyday things. It makes humble rocks stand out and covers tree branches with its eiderdown. It invites me to come out and play, which I do, grabbing skis or snowshoes.
Even now, with the remnants of snow crackling on ice-hard ground under my feet, I have to test this particular coldness under the evening's peach-and-apricot sky. Partly because I'm drawn to a beautiful sunset, partly to see how long I can last without a heavy winter coat before the cold seeps in and scurries me indoors.
The air pinches my cheeks and quickens my lethargic body with a sense of aliveness. I notice details in the landscape that pass me by in summer: the straight-edge top of the marsh reeds, punctuated by lumps of small evergreen trees. I'm surprised to hear a 'seep' and see quick movement among bare branches as I head down to the wetland, where the majority of tiny songsters lurk in the mattress-like shelter of reeds.
How do they do it, I wonder, with those thin stick legs and no boots? Miniscule bodies with almost no bulk to store heat. Feeding on I don't know what meager calories to stoke their inner furnaces. Instead of huddling, they seem to fly about continually, perhaps in search of food, but surely losing all that under-wing warmth. Brrr. I wonder if any of them take a bit of cattail fluff to line their winter shelters.
And yet they sing. A Carolina wren here, tufted titmouse over there. Who would have imagined February as a season of snow and birdsong? I recall the slight depression I feel in late summer each year when the world goes quiet as birds stop singing, their family-raising season over, no more need for territorial defense. But just imagine if we solved our territorial disputes by singing to each other? Inexplicably they begin again. Nesting season still a few months away, and the longest deepest part of winter yet to come. What makes them sing? Is it to cheer themselves? Or just a response to increasing daylight?
Whichever it is does not matter to my spirits, which are lifted by these little souls. The cold will not last forever, go their lyrics. Ms. Dickinson surely got it in one: hope is indeed the thing with feathers that perches in our souls. May they never disappear from our skies.
I sit absorbing the unnaturally warm apartment air while watching the sky give one last surprise red flash across the clouds. The show isn't over til the sun is tucked in for the night. And the birds? I hope they have a warm place to sleep, albeit without furnace-heated air.
Yes. There are always birds.
Community focused news can only succeed with community support. Please consider the various subscription levels.