… from her long journey across the Gulf of Mexico!!! It never ceases to amaze me that the a creature so tiny can fly so far. My garden is once more magical … with the arrival of Rose … my bejeweled hummingbird!

It was a very cold, cloudy day here on the East End … the kind of day I like to stay inside by the fire. It felt like snow and, I guess my “wild-friends” thought so too because, outside, there was a flurry of activity.

The resident robins, with their dusky red breasts not yet bright, came from their hiding places in the woods and devoured the purple berries on my callicarpa bushes. They haven’t as yet started on the holly berries or the cotoneaster berries.

A large raucous flock of bluejays mobbed the sunflower seed feeders and the cracked corn bowls. Their beautiful blue plumage brightened a gray day.

The crows here are the biggest I’ve ever seen. I believe they call to me for scraps of food. They look directly into my windows and yell and then wait for me to come out and put some leftovers in the woods for them. As soon as I head back towards the house, they fly down from the trees for their dinner.

Two large bucks ran quietly along the railroad tracks that abut the edges of my woods, their white tails held high.

The turkey “family” returned after an absence of a few weeks. They were maturing and I had to laugh at myself … You would think that, after raising three boys, I would have known, by their raucous behavior, that the turkey “family” I was nurturing, amid dreams of baby turkeys cavorting in my garden, was not a family at all but a group of “young studs”!

There were so many little birds in my garden … wrens, tufted titmice, red-breasted nuthatches, juncos, chickadees, sparrows and woodpeckers … they were zooming around at top speed, filling up, I guess, before the snow fell.

And the squirrels were so funny, climbing, jumping, performing like the dare-devil acrobats they are. I watched one test the ice that had formed on my pond and then decide to take his drink of water in a safer spot - a little nearer to the waterfall … pretty smart little guy!

A little snow fell … just enough to be pretty … just enough to give my pond a sparkly coating … and just enough make my wintry garden look like a fairyland.