Common eiders.

Soon after rising, showering, dressing, making and eating breakfast, and heading downstairs to the office with coffee, I ended up shoveling snow again. The morning beamed with the sort of gloriousness only possible when bright sun meets fresh snow. While on the deck tossing shovelfuls off into the brisk north wind, I heard the clear, unabashed, unmitigated song of a house finch coming from the bare limbs of the big overhanging oak above me. I dropped the shovel and ducked in for my camera. It took me a good three or four minutes of tipping my head to find the bird—which sat in one of the tree’s highest branches, giving forth lusciously cascading warbles of sound. Too obstructed by twigs for a decent photo, though, alas.

American goldfinch (♀).

From somewhere up the hill, meantime, came the chip of a northern cardinal. While scanning for the cardinal, I caught sight of a small bird flitting into the crown of the sickly pine at the property line. A goldfinch. And while all this was going on, I heard the ever-present voices of American crows.

The bright sun crossed the sky slightly higher than it did yesterday, and snow melted, and icicles formed. By mid-afternoon, I had a hankering to move and thought first of the breakwater. It had to be close to high tide. My friend Kristen joined me again, and en route we wondered about the wind. Would it counteract the seeming warmth of the afternoon? I was beginning to think not—until I saw the chop in the harbor. So instead we wondered if the torturous headwind would afflict us outbound or returning. Heading out, we hoped; alas, it was returning.

It seems most of the sensible ocean birds stuck to the protected coves, the shelter of the lee. But a few braved the bare, raw waves: a good-sized raft of eiders, several loons (as usual), a great cormorant, a male long-tailed duck. A couple herring gulls floated alongside the ducks, and one ring-billed flew the length of the breakwater—up and back, up and back—I suppose looking for something edible.

Common eider (♀).

The way out was nice: bright, mild enough, and with snow enough that you had to make a point to avoid the hidden cracks between the granite blocks. Heading back, temperatures in the 20s (F) combined with a stout northwest wind to cause an ice-like pain right in the middle of my forehead. Surf splashed over the stones from the shoreside. Out on Vinalhaven, the great turbines, too, turned their faces into the wind. But it let up some about half-way back. A female eider floated calmly to the left of us. To our right, in the little cove, goldeneyes dove and mergansers sailed as the sun headed for the horizon.

When my father was a toddler, his family conspired to have him sit on the lap of one Charles Goodnight, a famous rancher known as “the father of the Texas Panhandle.” Goodnight was by then an elderly cowman—he was born in 1836—and late in his own life I recall my dad marveling at how between the two of them they’d witnessed upwards of 170 years.

I thought of Dad and Mr. Goodnight this week when I read the news of “Herbie,” an American Elm in Yarmouth, Maine, that finally died of Dutch Elm Disease and was cut down on 20 January. After counts and recounts of its rings, arborists finally judged the enormous tree to be 217 years old. When it was but a sapling, George Washington was president. Perhaps another ancient elm in its vicinity back then had lived to a similar age—it would’ve been around before New England was even a glimmer in any European’s eye.

I figure the older you get, the more you consider time. You consider the swiftness of its arc, the brevity of a day, the lifespans of mayflies, the breadth of an ice age. Today, returning against the wind in Rockland Harbor, time seemed long and lazy; tonight already I’m lamenting the loss of this day, 04 February 2010.

Today’s List

House finch
Northern cardinal
American goldfinch
American crow
Herring gull
Common loon
Common eider
Great cormorant
Ring-billed gull
Long-tailed duck
Common goldeneye
Red-breasted merganser

Rockport Harbor (from the Rockland Breakwater).