“I rejoice that there are owls. They represent the stark, twilight, unsatisfied thoughts I have.” — Henry David Thoreau
In an earlier post, I asked readers to let me know what animals they wanted to learn more about. One request was for information about owls. This quote from Thoreau seems appropriate. I think that many of us wonder about owls. They seem like mystical beings with their huge eyes and silent flight.

“I better get going.” I grabbed one of the forest trails topo maps from the counter display.
Erick made a move to grab his jacket, but then checked himself. I knew he shouldn’t leave his post, and I didn’t want him to. I didn’t need help, or companionship. I wanted to find the cougar, and in the process, find the Witch of the Forest.

Are you as fascinated by the stars as I am? One of my favorite activities as a child was to lay out on a blanket in the back yard after dark and stare up at the sky.
My family had one of those star charts.

“I like all that goes on in the hundred years of a tree’s life, or the two hundred or five hundred years of its span — all the ice and snow, the windstorms, the fires that creep around the edges of some forests and sweep through anhd across others, starting the process all over, and leaving behind a holy kind of pause, a momentary break in power, before things begin to stretch and grow again, as vigorously as ever.”

Outside the window of the vet hospital, the sun glistened on what remained of the last big snow of the spring. The main roads were clear, and so was our parking lot. A few miles away the snow was six inches thick under the trees of the National Forest even though it was nearly June.
I’d just finished neutering a young pitbull lab mix when Doc Shiner called me into his office.

This week’s Nature Connection is a bit different. We are now in the ‘dead of winter.’ it’s cold outside, and the world seems frozen. I am curious about how creatures – from insects to fish to birds – survive. Here are a few tidbits about the special adaptations that different creatures have that enable them to survive these cold weather days.

Robert Frost, from “On a Tree Fallen Across the Road”
In this short poem, Frost personifies a tree, and in doing so, personifies nature. This poem is one of those doorways to thought. What did Frost mean? And what does this poem mean to me?

WHOA! In other words, slow down. The road is not paved. There are ruts, there are CHUG holes and washboards, there are blind curves. You can not go fast. Get it? Slow it down.
So unlike the way we all seem to live our lives these days. But once, for a few hours during the winter twenty plus years ago, I decided to slow down and visit the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve north of Pawkhuska, OK.

So, just a quick look around our neighborhood and we notice that even in the dead of winter there are trees and bushes that are green. “Evergreen” is the label we attach to them. But are they all the same?

“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel.” Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac – December.