Christmas Bird Count

Behind the red limbed trees, and above the grey blue water, their voices rose, honking, triadic, together. Tuned just slightly off from the mallards and pintails, they harmonized with the lake's sounds liltingly, jarringly, loudest and most chaotic of the auditory elements. 

Nature is like this. You go into it, expecting nothing. You see leaves, brown and splattering the ground, grass crisped white and the earth lifted and broken by hoar frost. 

The lichens, green and key-lime yellow, are stiff in the cold. The off-white ice, capping every puddle like marbled old paper, both translucent and opaque. 

There are ducks, flying in elastic groups into the lake and out of it, a few brown song sparrows, wrens of unknown species, and blackbirds, singing with the starlings on the wire. Then this, unexpected in the brittle cold, our toes all siding with the frost in our boots, our hands wrapped around binoculars, pink as babies. 

Their honking. I can see why its named what it is, trumpeting, it is, it is trumpeting, it is a strange singing lifting fluting, it is windy and reedy, honking, humorous. Their white necks sway backward and forward like snakes as they swim, rippling the water, their massive white bodies thrilling the lake, their black instruments firmly in place on their faces. There is no description, no words, for the sudden, dynamic events that nature keeps, hidden in ordinary moments, that over and over, I never think will come. 

It was fleeting, but bright, like a thing at night which breaks the darkness, streaking.