squirrel – In the Woods

on certain mornings

3.11.25 ~ North Carolina Botanical Garden

Tuesday’s visit to the botanical garden was bright and sunny, and we enjoyed seeing the gentle, even light of the approaching equinox illuminating grasses, spring ephemerals, and shrub buds and blooms. Every year before spring arrives there are controlled burns in some of the piedmont and coastal plain gardens, and we happened to catch sight of one that day. We even spotted a squirrel along a path, so busy eating a bundle of plant stocks and leaves that he didn’t notice how close we were to him.

I can scroll and worry indoors, or I can step outside and remember how it feels to be part of something larger, something timeless, a world that reaches beyond me and includes me, too. The spring ephemerals have only the smallest window for blooming, and so they bloom when the sunlight reaches them. Once the forest becomes enveloped in green and the sunlight closes off again, they will wait for the light to come back.
~ Margaret Renkl
(The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year)

By Chivalries as tiny,
A Blossom, or a Book,
The seeds of smiles are planted —
Which blossom in the dark.
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #37)

The native wildflowers and grasses in these gardens beds evolved with periodic wildfires, which keep trees and shrubs from growing in and return nutrients to the soil. In a few weeks, new growth will be emerging from the ashes.
~ North Carolina Botanical Garden
(Facebook, March 10, 2025)

a yearly controlled burn in the Coastal Plain Habitat

So many simple ‘chivalries’ exist and noticing even a few of them can bring us great pleasure and help us to ‘remember how it feels to be a part of something larger.’

silent sunday

across the railroad tracks

To celebrate New Year’s Day my friend Susan invited her friend Sarah and me to take a nice long walk on Pumpkin Loop in the Carolina North Forest. It was my first time on this trail in the dense pine forest. I remembered to wear my thermal leggings and enjoyed the brisk winter air, while the bright sunlight created sharp, dark winter shadows. We heard many birds and caught glimpses of a few of them.

I have read that squirrels eat pine cones. They use their teeth to peel away the scales on the cone in order to extract the seeds inside. I’ve never seen one doing it, but on this walk I spotted some evidence of the process left behind on a stone.

remains of a squirrel’s pine cone seed feast

post oak
(thanks to Teri for the identification)

sunlit end of cut red cedar (?) log,
covered in moss and lichens,
resting on a bed of pine needles,
with some tiny mushrooms nearby

Leaving the loop trail, we then stopped to visit a labyrinth nestled into the woods.

Carolina North Forest has 750 acres of woodlands and countless trails. It would probably take a lifetime to explore all of them, but that means I will never run out of possibilities here!

ragged-edged beech leaves

Stop and listen to the ragged-edged beech leaves, pale specters of the winter forest. They are chattering ghosts, clattering amid the bare branches of the other hardwoods. Wan light pours through their evanescence and burnishes them to gleaming. Deep in the gray, sleeping forest, whole beech trees flare up into whispering creatures made of trembling gold.
~ Margaret Renkl
(The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year)

12.20.24 ~ North Carolina Botanical Garden

A week ago I made a quick trip to the botanical garden to take a final picture for my four seasons photo hunt, and added it the post, which had become an eight season collection. It was a chilly, gray day but I was tempted to linger and see what other kinds of pictures could be taken in the very dim light of midwinter. One beech tree was full of marcescent leaves. A single leaf was dangling from another one.

Finally, I got pictures of one of the white-throated sparrows foraging under the bird feeders, where there is a little less brush for them to hide under. There is stark beauty to be found in the winter garden, when seedheads are left naturally for the birds to eat.

It still amazes me how pansies are winter flowers down south here! Imagine – pansies outside in December! Even though the temperature was in the low 50s that day, it felt cold and raw to me, in spite of my extra sweater, winter jacket, hat and gloves. I could have used my thermal underware but I didn’t think it would feel that cold out there.

One of the many things I do miss about being a young person is what was my tolerance for the cold. I used to love winter, being a January baby, and have many more fond childhood memories of playing outside in that season than in the others. (No bugs!) My sister and I spent countless hours ice skating in the frozen swamp in the woods behind our house. It was fun gliding across the (sometimes lumpy) icy hollows between the hummocks. A challenging obstacle course. And not a pansy in sight until April!

as autumn becomes a memory

11.27.24 ~ North Carolina Botanical Garden
northern mockingbird

November ends. I come across a poem by my favorite poet — she describes the sense of loss and disconnect I had been feeling all month.

She could not live upon the Past
The Present did not know her
And so she sought this sweet at last
And nature gently owned her
The mother that has not a Knell
For either Duke or Robin
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1535)

I’m grateful for and encouraged by nature, poetry and my books, and family and friends, as I imagine most of us are. This squirrel came up to me on our last visit to the botanical garden, as if to say, “I’m here, too.”

The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
(The Poet)

spotted cucumber beetle on a New England aster

simple healing in
watching a mourning dove feed
on the forest floor
~ Barbara Rodgers
(In the Woods)

beloved mourning doves

11.19.24 ~ North Carolina Botanical Garden

At last! I found some mourning doves in North Carolina! I think these two were probably a pair. I’ve really missed seeing these gentle birds, who frequently visited my balcony in Connecticut, and also used to hang out with me whenever I was weeding my garden. They had come into my life to comfort me after my mother died in 1991. Now I feel my mother’s spirit here. More of this story here.

As I was photographing the mourning doves I got the feeling someone was watching me. Turned out to be a squirrel on a nearby tree, eye level with me. I didn’t need to zoom in at all.

Also close by was a tufted titmouse who was diligently looking for something to eat inside that twig.

Down a different path we encountered a northern cardinal walking ahead of us, and then turning around to give us this backward glance.

Another northern cardinal was way high up in a pine tree, tackling a couple of nuts.

pine needles in the water, leaves hanging over the water

I think I’ve seen a red-bellied woodpecker down here, but this female is the first one I’ve photographed. Isn’t she pretty? It was definitely my lucky day in the botanical garden.

She was inside the wonderful garden and she could come through the door under the ivy any time and she felt as if she had found a world all her own.
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett
(The Secret Garden)

silent sunday

95° feels like 103°

This might be Fred trying to chill out by splooting in the dappled shade under our dogwood tree. The moss probably feels nice and cool on his belly. As the earth keeps warming it’s going to get more and more difficult for this method of lowering his body temperature to work effectively.

the intelligence of a place

3.30.24 ~ ‘old blush’ rose
North Carolina Botanical Garden

It’s always a pleasure to be greeted by the roses dangling from their arbor each time we visit the botanical garden. It never gets old! Like sunrises and sunsets, I suppose. A steady presence. But we were on a new mission this day to locate a Virginia dwarf trillium, another tiny ephemeral we heard was blooming. Along the way we saw…

This (below) was the only undamaged dwarf trillium we could find, surrounded by other kinds of plants. We had torrential rains for a couple of days and I think they did a number on the tiny trilliums. But I’m grateful we got a chance to see this one. It is much smaller than all the other regular size trilliums we’ve been seeing this spring.

Only by living for many moons in one region, my peripheral senses tracking seasonal changes in the local plants while the scents of the soil steadily seep in through my pores — only over time can the intelligence of a place lay claim upon my person. Slowly, as the seasonal round repeats itself again and again, the lilt and melody of the local songbirds becomes an expectation within my ears, and so the mind I’ve carried within me settles into the wider mind that enfolds me.
~ David Abram
(Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology)

squirrel going out on a limb to reach maple seeds
what a mess he made discarding the “helicopters”

carpenter bee
(thanks to Eliza for the identification)

As we were making our way back to the parking lot this giant bee (above) was hovering over the walkway, blocking our path. Well, if it was just going to stay there I might as well get a picture of it. I don’t know if these creatures are unique to this area but sometimes they hover outside our windows and crash into them repeatedly. It sounds like someone is throwing pebbles at the window.

So we’ve lived here for ten moons I think, not very many so far, but our senses are slowly getting familiar with the seasonal changes.