Mystery After the Blizzard

  Front yard Saturday evening.

 

Vacancy.

Asters, and a white pine that will shelter birds in another decade or two.

 

Saturday's blizzard left frozen waves having troughs with barely a foot of snow while peaks approached 

three feet–and spots bizarrely bare around many trees.  That night I dusted off the snowshoes I'd 

purchased after after the snowy winter of 2015. I sank halfway to my knees with each step and promptly

fell. With my snowshoes floating a foot higher than my hands as I tried to rise, I recalled that the 

snowshoes had come with ski poles!  Today, though, in snow consolidated by the two intervening days, 

the snowshoes proved their worth.  

Curious to find what animals had been about, I went track hunting.  My first surprise was the garage 

where local stray cats often shelter in cold weather: no sign of any coming and going.  Were the cats 

trapped, or gone from the neighborhood, or was the snow simply too deep for them?  If the last, where 

were they sheltering?  

In the backyard and the scrubby woods behind I expected to find the usual bird and squirrel tracks, and 

hoped for coyote.  (It's been years since a coyote regularly visited us in hopes, I suppose, that the egg 

shells in our compost signaled the presence of actual eggs.)  There were no coyote tracks, and barely 

even any squirrel tracks.  Only a few short trackways showed squirrel travel mostly between very small 

trees.  Perhaps these trees were too small to feed a squirrel, or perhaps there weren’t branches near 

enough for aerial travel between such small trees.

 

A few places that drew my interest turned out to be irregular marks of snow and ice fallen from trees.

Long shadows.

Then I spotted tracks made by something that bounded rhythmically to make larger impressions about 

a foot apart.  The back of each impact was marked by a pair of wedge-shaped impressions that 

somehow made me think of a Batman silhouette.  The front of some of these impacts had a single pair 

of small, much-deeper impressions.  (The scattering of snow left when the animal leapt back upwards 

after each impact showed the direction of travel.)  Although some of these trackways.went from tree to 

tree, most of the eight or nine I saw either began or ended in the open–several feet away from the 

nearest tree.  

 

 

 

 

Self-portrait.

 

 

 

A bird then, a raptor, even, perhaps sometimes dropping from a low perch, its wingtips making the 

“batman” ears on either side.  

 

Was the bird hunting?  There were no smaller tracks. Could hidden rodents even be detected beneath 

so much snow? The impacts didn’t seem deep enough to reach the ground beneath, and there was 

never confusion of the snow showing a struggle.  All unsuccessful hunting?

 

And why so many hops in succession?? 

 

 

For now, the mystery remains.

Kayaking the Nemasket River in Winter

With fond memories of an earlier winter river trip, I've been planning and gearing-up for a two-night paddle down the Nemasket  and Taunton Rivers.  I am fussy about the weather though (temps not much below freezing, no rain in the daytime, light to no winds), and I haven't been able to make it work so far.  Then a good snowfall put it in my mind that a day-trip would be almost as much fun, and could include the whole lower Nemasket River from a very nice launch site at Oliver Mill Park down to its confluence with the big Taunton. 

I'd been down the Nemasket once before, with son Stephen several summers ago.  It was a very nice stream, though with a good number of obstacles in the form of fallen trees and shallows.  Recent precipitation would make the river pretty high and shallows few.  Fallen trees, and maybe ice, would be the wild cards.  In summer, any obstacle we could not get around meant wading, and hauling the kayaks over or around.  In winter, wading in water over galoshes-depth would mean dangerously cold, wet feet.  This, I decided, could be dealt with by having dry clothes in a dry bag--already a given in case the kayak upset for any reason.  Any problem beyond that would mean walking out: perfectly reasonable in populous southeastern Massachusetts.

I was also eager to try taking video with a head-mounted camera I jerried from my regular point-and-shoot camera and some aluminum strap.  I had a good time playing with the resulting videos, and will inflict them all here. 

The trip begins.  Beatrice helped me launch, and later rescued me from the roadside.

 

The last video.  (I stopped shooting due to inadequate light well before I ran into real trouble.)  I spotted a swimming muskrat, and several muskrat trails in the ice.  The video ends with the kayak wedged among rocks, but I eventually got free and recovered my paddle.

The trip began later than it should have.  I was able to maneuver around (or over) the trees and through some of the thinner, slushier ice, but more solid ice finally defeated me.  As darkness began to fall, I did finally walk out after completing about three-quarters of the trip, leaving my beloved home-built kayak Serendipity on the bank.  It was a quarter-mile slog through shin- to knee-deep snow in brush, swamp, meadow and woods in darkness to get to the nearest road: it turns out there are out-of-the-way places even here!  When it warms enough to melt the ice, I'll walk back in and finish the trip.

Postscript: boat rescued!  My son and I walked back to the river; he found the boat where someone else had carried it.  We paddled about three more miles, past the confluence with the Taunton River, and then to an overpass, where we pulled it out on the upstream side to avoid rapids below.