The Sleep of Winter

“That grand old poem called winter” is how Henry David Thoreau described winter. Commonly used descriptions of winter are “the dead of winter” and the “the sleep of winter,” as though the natural world is silent. Not so!

Nature looks ahead and makes ready for the new season. For every slumbering leaf, there is a bud. The green of life that outlasts the gray of winter: the pine, the spruce, the hemlock and the fir. These evergreens are often active areas at dusk, as they are favored winter roosting sites for many birds seeking the warmest and most protective cover.

Pictured today is a grove of white pine trees in a plantation at WPC's Bear Run Nature Reserve, Fayette County. These trees were planted as saplings a half century ago as part of a soil conservation effort on fallow cropland.

In the foreground we see the next generation of young pines, partially covered by the snowfall. This is slowly becoming a native forest again.

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th at Bear Run.

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