Читать книгу Nature Obscura - Kelly Brenner - Страница 7

WINTER PRELUDE

There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear.

—Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter

During winter, the natural world appears to sleep, cloaked in a blanket of gray clouds, while city residents seem to hibernate, or shuffle along outdoors hidden under umbrellas and raincoats. A closer look reveals that nature is very much awake, but changed. With people huddled indoors the city feels more peaceful, and those who venture outside are heftily rewarded.

At Seward Park, a forested peninsula in Seattle that juts out into Lake Washington, small coots, black with bone-white bills, band together in large swimming flocks, hundreds strong, as bald eagles dive at them, trying to find the weak. Along Lake Washington, which borders the entire east side of the city, the noisy boats of summer are replaced by swans quietly gliding across the surface of the lake, which may be smooth as glass one day and an angry, churning mass the next.

In the peninsula’s forest refuge, tiny birds flock together; chickadees, bushtits, kinglets, and nuthatches swarm through the trees, passing through like a whirlwind, sweeping observers up in their frantic tweets and cheeps before moving on. Every night, throughout the city, crows congregate, creating rivers of black in the skies as they head to their roosts.

In bare-branched trees and on lawns gracing streetsides and yards, moss hides tiny secrets, a universe contained within each green clump. On freezing days, delicate hair ice sprouts from dead wood, and ice crystals grow around the edges of fallen leaves. Occasionally, snow falls on the city, transforming the dirty gray landscape as though freshly painted.