Spring stirs love of nature

The melody and the words to Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy” are haunting, and I must have repeated the song four times during a long walk the other day between frigid temperatures and a soggy snowstorm.

That was the day I spotted a downy woodpecker perched in the V of two birch limbs. The same colors as the tree, the woodpecker was difficult to see and, at first, I thought it was a mound of snow packed between the branches. The patch of red on his head caused me to grab the binoculars; I saw it was a downy, rather than a larger, hairy woodpecker.

And it reminded me of other wildlife I’ve encountered and enjoyed in recent days.

At a tray outback that is filled with striped sunflower seeds and finely cracked corn have been our familiar red squirrels, nibbling away as if at a summertime picnic and startled off only by the giant gray squirrel that rarely visits our rocky yard, encircled by cedar and spruce. The gray squirrel looks like a mutant creature, his bushy tail slapping the ledges and scaring away the nuthatches and chickadees.

Across the road, our neighbors boast of finches, an occasional flock of grosbeaks and their resident doves with their low calls, which can be heard in late afternoons. Farther down the road, more plump, rosy-breasted doves compete with smaller birds for the feed strewn across the sunny deck.

On the other side of town, a virtual aviary exists around a woodland house that smells of orchids. There, a flying squirrel balanced on an outside railing continuously feeds, night and day, to the delight of the nature lovers inside.

As I rounded the curve by the sand beach, I thought about our friends and neighbors whose conversation often turns to deer and grouse, to crows and coyotes, to osprey and loons … to all creatures great and small.

Moving in the cove that day as gracefully as in a water ballet were eiders, swimming in a circle, then disappearing, leaving scarcely a ripple in the icy, gray sea. I remembered another cove up the highway a few miles where the shoreline is thickly iced. There, on a frosted tree limb protruding out of the ice, sat an eagle, as still as the wind was fierce, as if he were frozen to the bark.

Two days before glimpsing the eagle, I had seen a fox darting toward and away from the road, back and forth like a flashing traffic light. The quick movement had caught my eye, and I watched in the rear mirror as the fox made its way across the highway to the snow-covered field beyond.

The day of my walk, the air was fresh and mild enough for me to go hatless for the first time all winter. On the eastern road, I wrapped my jacket around my waist, letting the empty arms flap and feeling lighter from having shed a layer.

The sun shone, and the ice coating the roadway turned into thin rivers that meandered downhill as did I.

There on the ledges enjoying the sunshine and a hint of spring was a shiny harbor seal that dove into the water upon hearing the clicking of my boots sounding like horseshoes on the wet pavement.

One day recently, when March brought a quick thaw and an afternoon’s respite from the wind and cold, I sang with Nat King Cole … and became Nature Girl.