7:20 a.m. 31 degrees, wind S 0 mph. Sky: a flat gray sheet, tight fit. Sun
arrives unnoticed (by me). Permanent streams: Excellent Zone System, an
Ansel Adams special with musical accompaniment—black water, Zone 1; cloudy
ice, Middle Tone gray, Zone V; a dusting of snow, Zone X. Water purls
through an obstacle course of stone and ice. Wetlands and Pond: deep and
repetitive meteorological malaise. January, like August, gripped by the
doldrums.

Raven pair high over the marsh, black against gray (Zone 10 flies below
Zone V), wings rowing, effortless, deep strokes. A downpour for
baritone croaks. Looks like a couple. Feels like a couple, flies wing tip
to wing tip . . . tantamount to holding hands—ravens mate for life.
Sensitively, preen each other's heads—those hard to get to places—one tiny
feather at a time. Social and bright. Charter members of Avian Mensa. Solve
complicated problems . . . winds string with suspended food. Leads wolves
(and coyotes) to frozen carcasses. Oversees Tower of London (may even
understand baseball). A living fable from the book of Aesop.

In Vermont, in the 1960s, rare as a twenty-dollar gold piece. In the spring
of 1976, I took a field trip to Stoddard, New Hampshire, during a graduate
school ornithology class, a see a raven nest high on an inaccessible cliff.
Today, ravens nest on remote Long Island beaches, Co-op City housing
development in the Bronx, a water tower in Forest Park, Queens, and
Brooklyn Waterfront. Several years ago, more than forty immature ravens
roosted in a pine grove, a mile from my home.

Raven couple flies east, hopefully, to encourage the sun.

Amid a cacophony of chickadees, nuthatches, and jays, nineteen robins flush
from roadside pines, a burst of sharp *clucks*. Circling, circling,
circling. Land. Bolt. Circle and circle. Fourteen peel off to the east,
north and well below the ravens.

Every winter, I see robins, the byproduct of the persistent berries.
Buckthorn and bittersweet, exotics that invaded New England . . . with a
vengeance. In spring, the front lawn: earthworms, another exotic, a
colonial-era donation to the Northeast's faunal-roster, becomes an all-day
diner. Meals to go. One robin, in one day, eats up to fourteen-feet of
worms. Since the 1600s, we have revamped the continent into a *robin food
shelf*.

Five linger in the pines, I linger in the road . . . all of us, patiently,
waiting for spring.