Field Notes –

March Nights Have Tales To Tell

By Curtiss Clark

March is here, so get ready for the month’s inevitable struggle with its dual winter/spring, lion/lamb personality. February laid down a blanket of new snow for its successor’s grand entrance on Thursday, and the new month won’t take long to put its own signature on the landscape, written large in slush and mud.

We haven’t had that much snow this year, so I am resolved to enjoy what little of it we still have coming. Of course at this time of year we are all rooting for the March lamb, which can seem like an underdog in these first days of the month. But after the vernal equinox on the 21st, we know the old March lion will lose its wind and lie down with that lamb in surrender.

Kate and I stayed up as late we could Sunday night to watch the Academy Awards, but ran out of steam somewhere in the thicket of awards for technical achievement, sound, art direction, and animation, so we let the Tivo take over our viewing duties and went to bed. It would all be in the paper in the morning anyway.

Monday morning, as you remember, was covered in new snow, and in the morning light you could see how clearly that covering had recorded the events of the night before — as tirelessly as a Tivo, and as comprehensively as the newspaper.

From the kitchen window the snow looked smooth and unmarked. But in walking out to retrieve the Times from the hedge where it had been “delivered,” Kate noticed a proliferation of tracks in the snow and returned to the breakfast table with news — not that Martin Scorsese had won an Oscar, but that a coyote had been sniffing around the end of the driveway. We frequently hear the coyotes’ cascading yelps and howls nearby in the night, but we rarely see them.

Sure enough, the midsized canine tracks came in a straight line from the field across the street to the entrance to our property at the driveway, where there had been much sniffing around. Other tracks in the snow suggested what might have caught the attention of the visitor. They trailed off to the east in a steady straight line in front of the barn toward a neighboring property. The prints were too big for a squirrel, which leaves small tracks in quadriclumps as it runs from the trees to the feeders. Maybe it was an opossum, which we see sometimes in the lights around the house, or maybe a skunk, which periodically seasons the neighborhood with its scent.

After retrieving a track identification book from the house, we concluded there might just be a raccoon living in one of the neighbor’s trees. Its neat five-digit “hand” prints were preserved nicely in the new snow, many of them multiple prints in a single spot, created as the animal walked in its own footprints. And since it was walking away, clearly the coyote had come at a different time in the night, although it headed off in the same general direction after its brief investigation at the end of our driveway.

Uncounted other histories were jotted in the snow that night, not just in all quarters of our yard, but along the entire track of the storm, which swept over us from the south and west: a pair of deer moved from the woods and fields, edging into backyards looking for new buds of growth on the shrubs; a red fox nuzzled the snow by a fallen limb tracing the scent of a vole; a muskrat pulled himself from a pond, moving from strong swimmer to sloppy walker in his first few steps, dragging his rat tail behind him. The new snow holds them all to account.

The freeze and melt of March quickly cleans the slate for the next accounting and does not confuse the story with an accumulation of nighttime tales. There is immediacy to these morning reports.

With its slush and mud and split personality, March doesn’t have a lot to recommend it to seasonal purists who love the stark beauty of January and February or the world’s fresh start in April and May. But these passing nocturnal snow squalls that record the secrets of the night and lay them out like a newspaper for us to read in the morning are a specialty of March. The natural world is quickening in this transitional month, and the story is engaging. If you care to, you can track it in the fleeting snow from the lion to the lamb.