Winter has finally arrived with a capital W. After a couple of weeks of downright balmy temperatures in January ("when is it going to snow?") we now get highs in the twenties and nightly lows in the single digits. I guess it could be worse; those poor suckers in upstate New York are buried under ten feet of the white stuff, with more to come. At one point, snow was falling at the rate of three inches per hour...that's extreme even by Alaska standards, although it gets colder in the Antarctic. (It very seldom snows in the Antarctic, it being an official desert and all; blizzards there are just ancient snow being blown around by 100 mph winds.) Up here in Virginia, it is cold enough to stiffen your ungloved fingers and for people originally from Wisconsin (nearly everyone in the D.C. area is originally from some place else) to remark "Damn, it's cold!" If someone born on the tundra says it, it must be true.

Huntley Meadows is a freshwater marsh not far from the city of Alexandria. The magazine Birder's World lists it as one of the nation's birding hotspots. On past visits I have seen such rarities and downright weirds as Mississippi Kites (a hawk like bird that usually stays in its namesake state) and Bald Ibis, a Texas speciality. Yesterday, the whole place was frozen solid, except for a spot just below the beaver dam which serves to create the marsh itself. The open water was crowded with Greenwing Teal and Northern Shovelers. Their frantic paddling is probably what keeps the water open, along with constant dipping for something to eat over shallow bottom that has been gone over a hundred time before. No herons, no hawks except a lonely red tailed passing overhead with no real prospects of snagging lunch.

A small flock of crows, a bird who always seems to find enough to eat, made sport of the hawk, flying parallel with it and swooping close enough to make it roll over in mid flight and present its talons. Crows are quicker and more aerobatic than red tails and both of them know it. The crows taunt the hawk for as long as it pleases them and the hawk puts up with it for as long as it can stand it until the hawk, with accelerated wing flaps, puts on a burst of speed and leaves the crows' territory. The crows, laughing victoriously, take a victory lap, receding into the distant haze until only their raucous voices are left.