Eight years ago I moved here from New Jersey. When I told my employer that I was moving to Maine, his reply was, “I hope you like to ski!”

I would like to ski (cross country – never downhill!), but so far have not tried it yet. Snowshoeing is fun, but to me both activities are a means to an end – to get out and appreciate the winter landscape and all it has to offer.

I begin to relax as soon as I enter the relative solitude of a patch of woods or an open field. I look forward to seeing some birds, but I pay attention to other things as well: the dainty line of a fox’s paw prints tracking across a snowy field, the bounding prints of a snowshoe hare as it crosses a forest trail, the tooth marks of a porcupine that had dined on the bark of a conifer.

Then there are the birds, “the most beautiful expressions of reality,” as the late, renowned Roger Tory Peterson described them. Whenever I start to think my life is hectic or overwhelming, I need only to observe nature and its marvels; soon, everything is in perspective again.

This was so one evening last week. As I set out along a snowy trail, the quietness that only comes with a winter landscape enveloped me. Wispy “mares’ tails” – high cirrus clouds that often indicate a change in weather – graced the sky, while heavier, lower cumulus clouds huddled near the horizon. The latter were beginning to glow orange and purple with the start of sunset, and the snow seemed to gather in these colors and reflect them back at me.

Soon I heard the calls of black-capped chickadees. In winter, these birds often forage with others such as nuthatches, brown creepers, hairy and downy woodpeckers, and golden-crowned kinglets.

Sure enough, a pair of kinglets soon came into view, busily foraging among the branches of a spruce tree. These birds are tiny, smaller even than our wood warblers that come here to breed from more southerly latitudes. Unlike our other species of kinglet – the ruby-crowned – golden-crowned kinglets can tolerate much colder temperatures.

“The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior” states that the golden-crowned kinglet is one of the “smallest birds able to routinely endure freezing temperatures while maintaining a normal body temperature [of 103-107 degrees F].” They spend almost all of their time hunting for food, and at night may huddle together in an abandoned squirrel or crow nest for warmth. Severe cold and icy conditions, however, may cause them to succumb.

These little bundles of energy seem to increase their pace once the breeding season arrives, raising not one but two broods. The male assumes full care of nestlings in the first clutch while the female lays and begins incubating the second. Each baby bird is about the size of a bumblebee and completely naked when it hatches, but is ready to leave the nest little more than two weeks later – quite a feat!

I stood and watched the kinglets as they flew from tree to tree, constantly on the go. One was a male, the other a female. I could tell this because of the rectangular crown patches on each: the female’s is golden yellow with black borders; the male’s is the same, but with the addition of orange within the yellow.

Their feathers were fluffed out against the cold, giving them an almost perfectly round appearance; they resembled little cotton balls, only olive in color. These little dynamos with their fiery crests lent color to the stark winter landscape and made me smile.

Chris Corio, a volunteer at Fields Pond Nature Center in Holden, can be reached at fieldspond@juno.com