Snowshoe Trail on Icy Snow (© Magi Nams)
On this, the official first day of autumn in Australia, new snow topped with an icy crust glistened like icing over the hills and meadows of Balmoral Mills – one more snowfall on the way to a northern Nova Scotian spring. I snowshoed down the hill from my house, across the bridge, and alongside Matheson Brook to the Nams mailbox, the March sun casting brilliant light onto the icing snow and causing sky reflections that infused the late winter day with stunning, searing blue. The snow on the bridge was packed so high that I walked above the height of the railing like some angel permitted special passage.
A pair of bald eagles flushed from perches in a grove of big-tooth aspens that tower above a steep slope slashing down to the brook. Their long wings whooshed muted winter sound as the white-headed and -tailed eagles flew above the course of the brook, causing me to wonder if the pair was seeking out a nesting site on my home turf. A ruffed grouse erupted into brief, hammering flight through a dense thicket of leaf-bare deciduous trees, eastern hemlock, and white spruce, landing hidden amid the boughs of a conifer. Black-capped chickadees chirped industrious calls as they flitted from tree to tree, seeking bark and bud insects and seeds. Reverberating raps of beak on wood heralded the presence of a pileated woodpecker, this largest of Canada’s woodpeckers the size of a crow and sporting a black body with white underwing linings, head and neck striped with black and white, and a flaming red crest atop its head (males possess a red cheek patch as well). As I snowshoed beside the brook, the pileated flushed from its hunting site on the lower trunk of a spruce tree and winged with long, slow beats to one of the big-tooth aspens from which the eagles had earlier flushed. It swooped in for a landing on the trunk, its two-forward and two-backward clawed toes grabbing the bark like grappling hooks. Sunlight filtering through a lace of aspen branches and twigs caught the woodpecker’s bright crest and turned it to fire blazing against the remains of winter.
