Bubbles that look like coins and holes. Off Tubbs Pond dock, Partridge Run WMA, East Berne NY
Some of my nature mantras:
Stop and notice.
Be aware of distractions in your head and in the outside world.
Don’t divide your attention.
Ask questions when something seems unusual.
Wait and see.
Take it in.
***
In a funk, I walk over to the pond on a quick outing, to see if there are unusual ice formations or quirky fallen over plants or any of my other usual photographic thrills. For several days, the temperatures have hovered just above freezing; a thin sheet of whitened ice rests over mostly liquid water.
Often ice is marked by little shapes or lines where objects have struck or steps been made by pads, claws or boots. Much of it melts, refreezes, and reshapes until it is unidentifiable except as blobs and stretch marks. My heart races to find perfect captured bubbles in a column, breathed upward: exhaled perhaps from winter-slow fish or turtles, or gassy plants at the bottom.
On the ice this time, an odd dark shape on the white—how funny! how curious! Random melting and re-freezing? I move to walk on, but hear quiet gurgling sounds. Could it just be my imagination, or a sound carried from elsewhere? I hear it again.
If I wait, I bet I’ll see something! I hope I’ll see something!
Pond ice near the Mohawk River
***
The cattail stalks are dry and pale yellow this time of year, the seed heads exploded white out of grainy brown-toasted hot dog buns. I squint to see between them. Carefully skirting crumbling piles of dog doo, the urban menace to mindless wandering, I move down a bit closer.
Was that rock there before, in the open water? Time to zoom in with the camera.
Curious, what appears among the plants….
A motionless anvil-shaped brown fur head, whiskers spangled with drops of pond water, an eye that looks straight, avoiding my glance. Nothing to see here folks, nope, keep on a-goin’.
No, not a rock.
A blink. Then a double blink.
***
We saw a passel of muskrat babies last year, in the tiny stream that feeds the pond. They were well hidden in the green reeds and overgrown plants there, a parent teaching them to forage. Much like I taught my children to travel the train in Chicago: at first with me and in a group, then the group without me, and finally alone, self-reliant. I wonder if this animal is one of the babies or the parents.
***
I could stay there longer at the pond to see what else might happen but chores call, along with a waiting lunch. When I turn my head, SPLURG! SPLUSH! away it goes, a trail of trembling water behind it. Closer, in the cattails, there it is: a fresh muskrat home of knocked over stalks hidden in the standing ones.
Beavers use sticks, grasses and mud to make lodges; muskrats prefer cattails with their mud.
Off the wet grass, my boots grate and crunch thick salt crystals on concrete. Cold February air nuzzles my exposed cheeks. Wind brings the smell of mud and muck and someone’s wood stove. I smile to glimpse another creature inhabiting its life, like a secret I got to share. I am grateful for the patience with myself–to stand motionless and allow the natural world to reveal itself, doing what it does when I am not here to see.
***
Stop and notice.
Be aware of distractions in your head and in the outside world.
Don’t divide your attention.
Ask questions when something seems unusual.
Wait and see.
Take it in.
***
(In re: animal identification–If the ears protruded more I might say it was a beaver–since I can’t see the body’s size. If the nostrils were more rounded and flared I might think river otter. I know that a muskrat is pretty fluffy under the chin, but this animal is soaked. I might be “all wet” myself, in my identification, but I enjoy asking the questions, and absolutely aware I could be incorrect.)
Of-the-Essence 