I am not a morning person. I listen with envy as my early-rising friends tell me about their sunrise skating and ski outings, or wax poetic about the dawn bird chorus. I marvel at the people who’ve run five miles before I’ve even poured my first cup of coffee.
For me, outside time often comes at the end of the day, usually in the form of a post-work walk. This time of year, that means walking in the dark.
I’ve spent many spring nights outdoors, moving migrating amphibians across wet roads or listening to the thunder of frog song once they’ve arrived at their breeding pools. Over the years, I’ve learned to scan springtime roads after dark for the blue eyeshine of wolf spiders, and to keep my ears and eyes peeled for barred owls – who are also searching for migrating frogs and salamanders – on their roadside perches. Spring nights are an explosion of life.
Winter nights are different. Winter nights are still, quiet, crisp.
Sometimes it can feel like a herculean act of will power to force myself out the door and into 20-degree darkness after a long day, but I never regret it.
Plowed and sanded yet quiet enough to feel like stepping into the wild, maintained dirt roads offer the easiest winter walking. My favorite route takes me through the woods, past a neighboring farm’s sheep pasture, and over a beaver-dammed stream to the site of two historic homes, once the center of a small 19th-century mill community known ignominiously as Mosquitoville. (One advantage to winter walking is that you don’t have to contend with mosquitoes….)
I always wear a reflective vest and carry a flashlight, which I turn on at the first sound of an approaching car for visibility, but mostly I prefer to leave the flashlight off. It doesn’t take long for my eyes to adjust, and walking in darkness allows me to experience the world in a different way – my hearing heightened, the subtle shadows cast by the moon and winter-bright stars revealed.
A month or so ago, lost in thought and walking only by starlight, I nearly stumbled into a doe. Hearing her sudden huff and the thump of her landing a leap, I shone my flashlight into the woods and saw her staring back at me from just 30 feet away. Later on that same walk, I turned on my light after hearing a rustling, and found a buck tenderly stepping his way through the snow, stopping now and then to graze on head-high twigs. If my presence bothered him, he didn’t show it. Eventually, we both moved on.
Last winter, my nighttime ramblings revealed to me the source of some skeetering I’d been hearing around my compost bin. I’d been puzzling over whether the sound was avian or mammalian in origin when, on a walk, I heard it coming from the side of the road. Some quick work with the flashlight, and I discovered a mouse peering out at me from a stone wall. Mystery solved!
My favorite winter night sound, which I only hear on rare occasion, is the yipping and howling of distant coyotes. Many people assume that these howls are nefarious in origin, the war cries of vicious predators out for blood. In actuality, and at the risk of getting far too anthropomorphic about it all, this group vocalization is a, well, loving sound that reinforces coyote family bonds, while also serving as a territorial display. One biologist likened it to singing, “We’re a happy family, and this is our home!” That same researcher recorded coyote song from more than a mile away, and speculated that, given their exceptional hearing and the fact that sound carries further in cold air, coyotes can likely hear and discern the individual howls of other coyotes from a distance of up to three miles on a calm winter night. For me, the call of the “song dog” always delivers a thrilling chill, a reminder of the wildness in our own backyards.
When I’m feeling particularly adventurous, I strap on snowshoes or microspikes and head “off-road” for a nighttime hike on a local trail – often a rail trail, whose width and easy grades make for less complicated trekking. Though these rambles are rarely strenuous, uncertain footing (roots, rocks, snow, ice) in anything dimmer than the light of a full moon usually requires the use of a headlamp.
My nearest rail trail leads to a beaver wetland, complete with trailside lodge and a bench for enjoying the view. My husband and I will pack a thermos of hot cocoa or tea, park ourselves on the bench, have a sip, and wait for the residents to make their nightly rounds. It’s not uncommon for a beaver to surface just feet from the trail, her back slowly rising through the hole in the ice that she maintains for access to the aboveground world when the rest of her watery pathways are iced in.
When we went last week, the beavers never made an appearance, but the fragrant musk radiating from their lodge told us they were home. The expanse of wetland glowed in the moonlight, and the landscape felt different, somehow, from its familiar daytime self. This was the world of the wild, the kingdom of the coyote and the beaver and the owl – a realm that rises, quietly and largely unseen, each night, while we humans are too busy shuffling in from the cold and settling down in front of the woodstove to pay it any mind.
If I’ve inspired you to experience nocturnal nature for yourself this winter – as I hope I have – I’ll end with a few quick tips: Bundle up, taking special care to keep your face and neck warm. Invest in a reflective vest and bright flashlight. (Cell phone flashlights are not bright enough to help cars see you, or to help you see whatever is rustling in the woods.) If you plan to head off-road, check to make sure that your trail of choice is open after dark, as many parks and conservation areas are closed from sundown to sunup. And, if you’re not quite ready to set out solo, consider joining my friend and colleague Susie Spikol for a nighttime adventure at the Harris Center: she’s leading a moonlit forest bathing sessions on Feb. 6 and March 12, and an owl prowl for families on March 13. You can find more details for all the outings at harriscenter.org/events.
Brett Amy Thelen is Science Director at the Harris Center for Conservation Education.