A Walk in the Wonderful World of Winter
by Esther Kiviat

Photo by Esther Kiviat

     The following article is the first of a series by Esther Kiviat describing many kinds of nature walks through out the year, places to go in the Hudson Valley and other outdoor experiences for parents, teachers and children to enjoy together.
     Mrs. Kiviat is a photographer and author known for her Hudson Valley nature images and natural history writings. Besides many years of teaching children and young people from pre-school through college, she has served as a consultant in environmental education and school camping in schools throughout Dutchess County. Mrs. Kiviat is the author of, Changing Tides, a book that chronicles a year in the natural history of the Tivoli Bays tidal wetlands on the Hudson River.

     Discovering the outdoors can be exciting and enjoyable for adults and children of all ages. Here in the beautiful Hudson Valley you don't have to go far to experience the mysteries and delights of nature in all its aspects and in all seasons of the year-in rain and sun, snow and cold-to listen to the music of the wind whistling through the trees and rattling the dry dead leaves of fall, to see great flocks of birds winging southward as the weather turns chilly, or hear them warbling their mating songs as spring returns, or taste an edible wild berry in season.
     It is not necessary to wait until warm weather to start exploratory walks, not only to break the boredom of long stretches of time spent indoors in cold or stormy weather and to get some exercise, but as an antidote to the anxieties of today's terror-stricken world. An hour or two spent exploring the natural environment can help restore your spirits and provide a sense of order and well-being. You do not have to be a scientist or naturalist to introduce young people to the outdoors. You don't have to know the name of a single bird, tree or flower, or whether snakes lay eggs, or where turtles go in winter. All you need to do is revive your own sense of wonder. Open up all your senses to the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures of the natural environment. You can renew and develop your own sensory awareness and enjoyment along with the children.
     Children learn best through real experiences, utilizing all their senses and their whole bodies as they explore. As you expose them to the outdoors through many walks and experiences, their awareness and enjoyment will lead them to develop an understanding of how everything in the natural environment works. They will begin to fathom the interdependencies and relationships of all living things, including themselves. Understanding the natural world around them leads to respect and to a desire to seek solutions to some of the problems that have been caused by our use and misuse of the environment. As children mature, they may also develop a greater understanding of human relationships and global interdependencies, and of ways to seek peaceful ends to conflict.
     Start your walks in your own backyard, the schoolyard, a nearby vacant lot or the churchyard, and progress to the edges of a country road or a farm. Choose a place you like and go back again and again. Nature has many moods and stages. It will never be the same, and children will sense many changes throughout the year.
     Eventually you may wish to take longer excursions. The Hudson River Valley is blessed with dozens of town, county and state parks; with hundreds of rivers, ponds and wetlands; with great riverfront estates and historic sites with rolling fields and wooded nature trails, and with the luxuriant forests and rocky bluffs of the Catskill Mountains, the Shawangunks, the Hudson Highlands, the Taconics and Berkshires.
     The clear crisp days of late fall and winter are a wonderful time to find out what happens to plants and animals when cold and snow come to the Northeast. The air smells different. The landscape is quiet and brown. Only the needle-leaved trees like the pines and hemlocks are still green. What has happened to the green plants of last summer and the buzzing insects that fed on them? Where are the birds and mice that ate the insects, fruit and seeds? Where are the snakes and woodchucks, the skunks and 'possums, and other animals that frequented our backyards and the nearby woods?
     If there is a light layer of snow on the ground, you can discover many clues to living things by looking for tracks and signs and learning to "read" the stories they tell. Winter is the best time to find out which animals live nearby. . . creatures you may never see "in person" because they are so secretive or because many are nocturnal, coming out only at night. Some, like deer, are crepuscular; they come out at dawn and dusk to browse.
     Here are some hints to help you and your children get started on discovering "who lives here:"
     Ground dwellers, such as meadow voles (field mice), coyotes, raccoons and dogs make alternating or diagonal tracts.
     Tree dwellers, such as squirrels, whitefoot mice, and blue jays leave paired tracks.
     Bounding animals, like rabbits, put their larger hind feet in front of their forefeet. The distance between tracks shows how fast or slow an animal was moving; the farther apart the tracks, the faster it was going.
     Size, shape, toe and claw marks are important to note. Members of the dog family (coyote, fox, dog) usually show claw marks; cats, such as house cat and bobcat, retract their claws. Deer and cattle leave deep twin hoof prints. Depth of tracks may indicate whether an animal is light or heavy.
     Other clues to identification are numbers of toes on hind and front feet, width and length of tracks, and shape of pads. Cottontail, domestic cat, fox, and dog have four toes. Skunks, raccoons, opossums, beavers and muskrats are among the five-toed animals. Squirrel and chipmunk tracks display five hind toes and four front toes.
     While you are following tracks, you may come across other signs of animal activity. Blood, bits of fur or feathers along the trail may tell the story of who ate what. Tiny tracks around clumps of grass will reveal where a mouse or a bird hunted for seeds. A core of a pine cone or chewed nutshell reveals the nibblings of a squirrel. A twig sheared neatly off as though cut with a knife is the work of a rabbit.
     Nests, holes, burrows, flattened hollows called "forms" where animals rested in grass or snow, food caches, droppings or scats of different shapes and sizes, a "rope" of earth after snow has melted-all are signs left by wildlife.
     With experience, children may identify many tracks, read stories the animals have written and discover surprising things about the life of wild creatures which live in close proximity to us.
     Remember: The first night of a snow, animals stay in shelter. The second and later nights, they are moving in search of food. Do your tracking early in the day; tracks become distorted as snow melts. A good book to use for identification is Olaus Murie's classic Field Guide to Animal Tracks (Houghton Mifflin). It has over a thousand illustrations of track patterns and signs of mammals, birds, insects and reptiles.
     There are many other enjoyable activities to pursue outdoors at this time of year or to bring home for indoor times: sketching, keeping a walk journal, looking for branches with many dried leaves or seed pods to make into musical instruments, making "snow cones" when fresh snow falls (chocolate or maple syrup poured over snow in a paper cup), capturing snowflakes on a piece of black velvet and examining their myriad shapes under a magnifying glass, making suet cakes to hang on a tree branch for the birds. Each successive walk or outdoor activity will reveal more wonders to explore in the winter world.