In high latitudes and altitudes, up to nine months of each year can be spent locked in winter. Biologist Stephen Ressel’s course, Winter Ecology, focuses on the unique adaptations of wintering in the north through field trips and journal entries detailing the changes students notice. Writer, artist and scientist Rowen Gorman ’07, took the class in the winter of 2006 and shares her perceptions and poetry in these excerpts from her field journal.
tracks&cracks JANUARY 7, DUSK COLD, CLEAR ALEXANDRA ’77 AND GARRETT ’78 CONOVER’S, WILLIMANTIC, ME
Here, just a few hours inland, winter is a reality rather than a shadow. Ice encroaches on the river and snow carpets the ground revealing a map of animal activity printed across the clean slate. Tracks are not merely identifiers; they are stories. If you are literate in the language of the animal’s patterns of movement, the prints come alive. A line of coyote tracks crosses the trail as I walk towards the river. I step off the trampled path and follow the coyote’s lead, threading through trees and under toppled logs. My tall stature and uneven gait feel awkward and ungainly as I struggle to negotiate around the features in the landscape that posed no obstacle for the coyote, its path straight and unwavering. Paralleling the thread of prints I continue through the open-canopy forest, pausing to examine particularly clear prints, changes in gait where the coyote descends a steep slope, and the potentially lethal intersections of mice and deer. The pursuit is addictive, the story continually unfolding, leading me endlessly onward. It is dusk, but my curiosity makes it difficult to abandon the coyote. Just a little further, just a few more minutes. At last I agree to go my separate way. Getting my bearings, I set off with less confidence and directness than the coyote, my footprints a wavering chain behind me. How do animals find their bearings so successfully? Refined sense of smell? Familiarity?
COA | 19