It isn’t often that the temperature drops below zero, and it’s even more rare for the temperature to drop below -10, but that’s what happened last weekend and for me, it was a real eye opener.
I have a digital indoor-outdoor thermometer and it does a very nice job of indicating below zero temperatures with a nice big minus sign as plain as day. What I didn’t remember, because of the rarity of low temperatures, was that the minus sign isn’t always so obvious.
The temperature was -3 when I finally went to bed on Jan. 20. The New England Patriots had just won the AFC championship and I was delighted that the following day was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which meant I could recover from the late night. I woke up during the night and headed out to stoke the fire, and in the process I saw that it had dropped to -6. Yikes! So I loaded up the wood stove and went back to bed, wondering what the temperature would be the next morning.
I woke up before sunrise and headed over to the desk by my kitchen window, and was surprised to see that the temperature outside was a balmy 10 degrees. How had it warmed up so quickly? Trusting my technology completely, I headed out to load up the birdfeeders sans jacket. I instantly regretted that decision. Why did 10 degrees feel so freaking cold? Well, I’m sad to say that human error is to blame on that one.
My digital thermometer actually read -10 degrees, but it had been so long since temperatures had dropped that low that I forgot about the fact that the minus sign moves to a different location when double digits are involved. Yet, when I gave it a closer look, I could see that the thermometer did indeed read 10 below zero. No more going outside without a jacket that day!
Then I sat down, with a warm cup of coffee, and I started counting the birds at my feeder. A total of 15 species were present that morning and although the numbers of birds were noticeably low, there was still plenty of activity. I had just been outside for a total of 45 seconds and was sure I would die if I had to stay out there for an hour. These tiny creatures, bright and cheerful as ever, were showing up for breakfast and enduring the cold. There is plenty of science to explain how they do it, but it is always astonishing to contemplate.
Even more mind boggling was the fact that I noticed a mourning dove with a crippled leg. Somehow, a bird with a disability was living its life out there. I was floored. This bird was easy to pick out of the flock of doves that had arrived for breakfast because of its exaggerated limp. Something had gone wrong with the dove’s left leg. The toes on the left foot were frozen into a fist and the dove couldn’t seem to move its ankle at all. As a result, the bird was walking on its heel instead of its foot and it really seemed to struggle as it did so.
I managed to snap a photo that highlighted the manifestation of this injury, and anyone looking at this bird would know that there was something wrong with it. But what really amazed me was the fact that I picked up on the presence of a second dove with a similar affliction. Again, it was the left leg that was injured. Again, the toes seemed frozen into a fist, but this bird did not seem to have the same limp. Whatever had happened, this second bird had a milder version of the injury.
I started wondering about the odds of this happening. Could two random accidents produce the same injury with the same expression, or was this perhaps a congenital defect that identified the two birds as siblings? It would be easy to tell if I had a gene-sequencing machine and both birds in hand, but impossible to tell in the real world, mostly because I wasn’t going out there again. I can be pretty stupid sometimes, but I’m not an idiot. Shut up, Susan.
I’d seen a dove with a bad leg earlier in the winter, but until Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I hadn’t realized that there were two doves with bad legs. They are now easy for me to distinguish from one another because the dove with less of a limp also has some toenails missing. The important thing for both birds is the fact that their wings work fine. With any luck, they will survive the winter and become recognizable regulars at my feeders. Only time, and a lot of observation at my kitchen window, will tell.
Bill Danielson has been a professional writer and nature photographer for 21 years. He has worked for the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and Massachusetts State Parks and currently teaches high school biology and physics. Visit speakingofnature.com for more information, or go to Speaking of Nature on Facebook.