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The moon lit up my yard that morning, when I went out with the dogs at 6:30. Recently fallen snow in the surrounding Sapphire foothills reflected the full moon’s light. I could see almost as well as during the day. The horses in the pasture watched us, as I’m sure they do each morning, though we usually can’t see them. The trees and shrubs glowed in the bluish predawn.

An angry phoenix, the new bird appeared stretching its wings, repeatedly slapping the surface as it kept launching its body upright, almost leaping out of the water. All the while, it called out, the trembling sound of a woodwind instrument bouncing off the dense bowl of that valley.

Their height and orange-brown bark, scaly and large-patterned, drew me to them, but I knew little else about them.

As we entered a conifer thicket, we happened upon an animal I was not expecting on dry land – a snail – creeping along the curved trunk of a young fir tree.

In my estimation, the Black-capped Chickadee deserves the ornithology award as the ultimate prepper for the long, cold Montana winter. These songbirds must survive on stored seeds until the spring when they can again enjoy a more robust omnivorous diet. Weighing about the same as a AAA battery, Black- capped Chickadees spend the shortening days canvassing for seeds to store in hundreds of tiny hiding places embedded in their ten-mile territory.

Historically, Trumpeter Swans covered much of North America, but by 1932, a National Park Service survey found only 69 trumpeters in the entire contiguous United States. This spurred a conservation effort that included a feeding program in the Red Rocks National Wildlife Refuge near Dillon, Montana.

The change in my cat’s fur reminds me of a larger-scale transition undergone by the snowshoe hare. This hare sheds her brown summer coat at the end of autumn while growing new fur that is not only thicker, but another color altogether to help stay aligned with the change in seasons.

An international team of researchers at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic found a species of termite that takes the act of self-sacrifice to the extreme.

A flutter of striking black, white, and grey outside the window caught my attention, and as I walked closer I saw a dozen large-bodied, sharp-beaked birds hopping around on the treed hillside. The Clark’s Nutcrackers are here again!

I am always surprised to see moss exposed in wintertime. Hiking on trails or backcountry roads, I encounter moss-covered rocks, or mossy ledges that crop out on the slope, like a bed where the quilt has been pulled back part way and you can see the sheets peeking out underneath.