Naturalist winter frontiers

Winter Frontiers

The day before the November snowstorm, a few vestiges of summer dangled like bits of grass and twigs in autumn's last spider webs. A lone yellow hawkweed, contracted against the cold, looked up out of the grass by the gravel walk. A low weed with tiny white blossoms and heart-shaped pods grew near it -- shepherd's purse, it was. There were dull orange marcescent oak leaves. Winterberry holly branches heavy with red berries, like a galaxy spun from seed. A murder of crows gathered in the topmost branches of empty maples. Up above them, two undulating V's of Canada geese honking in the cloud-strewn distance and flying due south. Lake Winnecook was as flat and gray as slate.
This was late in November. That night in a kitchen window two brown-colored spiders were hunkered down at the center of their geometric webs. These two (Araneus diademetus?) might have lived so long because of the unusual warm this year, but I don't know. They could not survive the coming snow, I didn't think.
It's hard to accurately identify most species of spiders. The ones who live outdoors, many of them, die in the autumn but regenerate in spring when their eggs hatch and a new batch of spiderlings takes over the age-old work. The webs of these two billowed and bounced in gusts of cold wind. One was neatly constructed in taut, carefully measured rectangular radiating from the center. The silk is very tough. The other looked miskempt, with trapezoids loosely lashed to rough triangles. This spider was probably older than the other, less disposed to neatness. They were hunched down in the centers, waiting for bugs that would never come. The wind blew them up and down, and they clung there waiting.
They probably did not have long to live. Soon they would starve or succumb to the cold. But they dutifully built their webs anyway, and if they lasted through the night, they would build them again. They were like two old Chinese poets banished at the end of their lives to the northern frontier and gazing northward to places so bleak it is almost unimaginable. Cold, rolling, rocky grassland in the dark, with nothing beyond but more dark and grassland and strews of boulders and somewhere mountains. No town, no family, no tomorrow. Only vast, empty winter, in the end.
Eight or nine inches of snow came and covered the gravel and willow-herb and goldenrod skeletons where the banded argiopes long ago perished in October frost. Whether the two old poets in the window survived, I don't know. I haven't seen any new webs since the storm. Some of the shepherd's purse survived after the snow melted. Some oaks are almost stripped. Cold and more snow are coming. Winter is vast in northern China, and in Troy.

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