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.

The medallion was gone.
Fourteen year-old Carlie’s heart pounded.
“So where is it? You took it, didn’t you. It was MINE!” Her older brother Anthony bellowed.
She tried unsuccessfully to keep the muscles in her face from lifting the ends of her mouth into a smile.

Mid- to late Winter is a hard time for birds. As winter drags on and plants remain dormant, their available supply of seeds becomes depleted. Birds require a lot of food to maintain their high metabolism. Flying takes a lot of energy! Birds are always looking for something to eat.

Ah, morning. There’s nothing like the freshness in the air and the amazing light as it spills over the eastern horizon and reaches across the sky. Birds flutter and twitter, and deer graze in the peaceful dawn.
During his time at Walden Pond, Thoreau found out how precious those early morning hours are as the world wakens.

Okay – so it’s not really a ‘farm.’ But that’s what my family has always called it. It’s land that my dad and my uncle bought after they both returned from WWII.