Nature's Sounds

It’s so simple; you learned it in first grade while reading stories about Dick and Jane.

Stop-Look-Listen.

That is all that’s required to grasp a moment in Nature and hear her subtle story. She speaks in soft whispers of her quiet journey as she wanders homeward.

It wasn’t an unusually cold morning not a frigid snap or anything like that when I happened upon the sounds of ‘Making Ice’. The creek was flowing and creating a small pool of foam in its center closing in around itself. As I stood and gazed at the foam collecting and forming I became aware of another subtler sound; pop, snap, sizzle, crack, pop, snap, sizzle, crack. Almost like someone cooking something on a very hot griddle-sizzling hot! One needed to be very quiet as it was being overshadowed by the normal sound of the water flowing. Water turning to ice, snapping, crackling, I wonder if it’s painful? or maybe just the joyous sound of transformation.

A few days later I paused spotting the freshly pecked holes of the Pileated Woodpecker who has ravaged about a half dozen trees around Light Point Pond. His line of travel is as obvious as his feeding grounds and the chips of pine wood scattered and littered surrounding the tree trunks. Again as I quieted myself I heard the caw of crows flying in from the south, caw, caw, deep guttural caws. Two flying overhead so low I could hear their wings flapping, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. One, as if he knew I was there below appeared to stop in flight for just an instant and generated a single WHOOOOSH and then kept going onward to his next feeding grounds.
What was the crows’ message? Did he know I was there below?

Stop-Look-Listen, it’s happening all around you all the time.