Christmas Day brought showers interrupted by buckets full of sleet. Sometime late Christmas night or before dawn the next morning, a dusting of snow covered the lawn. Winter precipitation is often a mix in the eastern United States. Sleet and freezing rain are almost exclusively eastern phenomena.

The Carolina Field birders, friends and volunteers conducted their fourth annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count on Thursday, Dec. 29.

I learned, when I worked full-time for the Smoky Mountain News, that it helps if newspaper writers are thick-skinned. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing an op-ed piece, a feature or a news story. There will be someone somewhere who disagrees or doesn’t like it and may resort to calling you names.

Winter is a great time for studying tree identification. The mountains look steel-gray from a distance. The forest, up close, is a study in muted earth tones. There’s bark, smooth grey bark, scaly, nearly black bark, fissured gray bark and papery yellow bark to name a few. There are terminal buds, auxiliary buds and lateral buds. Twigs may be hairy (pubescent) or smooth (glabrous). By learning these characters and characteristics, you can turn a winter forest of cold gray and brown timbers into a living forest of black cherry, red maple, basswood, mockernut hickory, Southern red oak, Northern red oak, etc.

The January 2006 edition of “The Auk,” the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union, includes a 15-page article by Jerome Jackson, an ornithologist and professor of biology at Florida Gulf Coast University questioning the conclusiveness of the evidence Cornell and partners submitted as proof positive of the existence of at least one ivory-billed woodpecker in the Cache river National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas.

Cornell University and the ivory-billed woodpecker have been inextricably linked since the announcement in 2005 of the rediscovery of the ivory-billed in the Big Woods of Arkansas. Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO) has embraced that link. It’s featured prominently on its Web site — the last time I checked, it was the most visited segment — and in their solicitations. There is also a bit of an undercurrent out there of skeptics (including me) who feel that Cornell Lab of Ornithology has not provided an airtight case for its claims. Regardless of where you stand on that issue, there is more to CLO than just ivory-billed woodpeckers.

One of my daughter Izzy’s favorite videos is “Little Bear’s Winter Tales.” She likes the episode with the blizzard. The mantra for the characters becomes, “Whether the weather is hot or whether the weather is cold, we’ll weather the weather whatever the weather, whether we like it or not.” It seems like an appropriate mantra for Western North Carolina.

There was a blast from Vice President Dick Cheney’s 28-gauge shotgun — a gun, by the way, that one Web site touts as “...just right for petite shooters” — and lawyer Harry Whittington was down.

We were leaving Monroe, La., just after dawn last Sunday, Feb. 19. We crossed over a small levee and dam on Bayou Desiard. There, strung out down the bayou like a flotilla, were 100 or more double-crested cormorants. When I was growing up in northeastern Louisiana, cormorants were either absent or extremely rare. But today these large fish eaters are expanding and/or reclaiming their territory at an alarming rate.

Around 8 a.m. last Sunday (Feb. 26), my wife and I backed out of the driveway and headed to Clyde’s restaurant so my daughter Izzy could have a pancake for breakfast. It was around 19 degrees. On the side of the driveway, in clumps, slender green fingers were clawing through the brownish-gray leaf litter. Daffodil leaves were reaching for the cold sunlight shining through the bare limbs of the trees.

Step out on the deck with your morning coffee or pause in the yard for a moment after you strap the kids in the car for the ride to school and listen.

Yep, those are birds singing. Chickadees, tufted titmouses, cardinals, towhees, song sparrows, mourning doves and robins are all in full voice in my yard.

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund has renewed its commitment to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s inquiry-based, hands-on science education programs. That is music to this tone deaf naturalist’s ears.

Jeepers creepers, don’t ya here those peepers.

Gram for gram, Pseudacris crucifer is one of the loudest amphibians out there. The spring peeper weighs in at three to five grams and is about an inch long. When males congregate around standing water during mating season – now through May for Western North Carolina – the sound can be deafening.

For those not acquainted with the ivory-billed swami, I will give you a bit of history.

This is from the Smoky Mountain News edition on Jan. 30, 2002, as Zeiss Optics was mounting a search for the ivory-billed woodpecker in the Pearl River bottoms of Louisiana:

After getting all the two-leggeds to bed last night I went out to the yard to wrangle the four-leggeds. Dusk was slipping into night. The full “fish moon” was climbing above the mountains on the southeastern horizon.

According to recent stories by Knight Ridder news services, the Bush Administration thinks our national parks are too fat. A mandate called the “core operation analysis” has been issued directing park officials across the country to cut between 20 and 30 percent of their operating budget while maintaining the parks’ core mission of resource protection and visitor enjoyment. Many parks have already begun to implement cuts and all parks are supposed to be in compliance by 2011.

Anyone who hasn’t been to the woods in the last month would swear they’re in a different world. In a sense, they are. At the end of March most anything above 2,500 feet still looked like winter. A hike today presents quite a different picture.

What some masochistic birders do for fun is called a “Big Day.” It’s when birders set out to spend the majority of the day afield recording as many species of birds as possible.

I was leading a program for the Theosophical Society at Lake Junaluska on May 6. We were touring the Corneille Bryan Native Garden when we discovered a striking white lily growing in a wet area. There were a few of these lilies in bloom out in the wet area, but we couldn’t find a tag that corresponded. After the program, I looked up the lily in a wildflower guide and found it to be the atamasco or rain lily (Zephyranthes atamasco).

In 2005 the ivory-billed woodpecker rose from the ashes of extinction on the merits of an announcement from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The bird had been rediscovered in 2004 in the Big Woods of Arkansas.

The other evening with toddler and infant asleep, my wife and I found ourselves alone as a thunderstorm rolled over the Balsams. We turned out the lights and watched and listened as the storm approached with the sky flickering brighter, the thunder growing louder. It passed with dull thuds and faint flares in the dark.

The only thing rippling more than the water through the rocky headwaters of the Chattooga is the controversy regarding the U.S. Forest Service’s ban on paddling in that stretch. It is a ban that has been in place for 30 years or so and doesn’t sit well with paddlers. Although paddlers have tried for decades to have the ban lifted, Sumter National Forest’s management plans of 1985 and 2004 both left the ban intact.

Around 2 a.m. the other morning I was walking Maddie, my seven-month-old, around the house trying to convince her that it was still bedtime. We passed by our wall of windows in the living area and our yard was ablaze with fireflies. There were so many it even got Maddie’s attention, and she watched intently for a couple of minutes.

“Daddy, Daddy come see!” called Izzy, my four-year-old daughter, running down the sidewalk to catch me as I was leaving for work.

“See what?” I asked.

I recently saw some previews for the documentary “Grizzly Man.” You may remember the story. Back in 2003, after 13 summers of camping among Alaska’s brown bears, Timothy Treadwell was mauled and partially eaten by a bear. A companion, Amie Huguenard, met the same fate.

I have just finished by bird point survey for the Forest Service, which takes me to Mt. Mitchell and Roan Mountain. It’s a chance every year to get reacquainted with Western North Carolina’s high-elevation nesters.

Remember the chaos theory — how the flapping of a single butterfly’s wings could produce unknown and unpredictable atmospheric change? Well the atmosphere must really be cooking because the hills are alive with the sound of flapping.

About a million years ago, through a wormhole, while I was still in college and Grumman aluminum was state of the art in whitewater canoes, some friends and I made a trip to Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas to float the Rio Grande through Santa Elena and Mariscal canyons. It was a memorable trip, the canyons were awesome, the water was exciting and the company was exemplary.

A federal judge in Arkansas halted on Thursday, July 20, an ambitious Army Corps of Engineers plan to pump water out of the White River to help farmers in Arkansas’ Grand Prairie region irrigate crops. The suit was brought by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and the Arkansas Wildlife Federation (AWF), two groups that have battled the controversial project for over a decade claiming that it would do irreparable damage to the southern bottomland habitat along the White and Cache Rivers.

No, it’s not another reality TV series, and there’s no need to call in and vote for your favorite. But if you pause a moment with that first cup of coffee, you’ll notice that the mornings are becoming quieter. It’s hard for us sedentary humans, slogging through 90-degree heat and afternoon thunderstorms to realize, but autumn is just around the corner. Nature, however, runs on a more intuitive clock.

One of the tenets of the theory of evolution is a phenomenon known as character displacement. Character displacement states, in essence, that when two similar species inhabit the same environment and compete for the same resources, natural selection favors a divergence in characters – be it physical or behavioral.

The king of insect migration – King Billy – will soon be gliding its way to Mexico by the millions. The monarch butterfly was dubbed “King Billy” by early North American settlers because its bright orange color reminded them of William of Orange, King of England.

Nothing takes me back to that shotgun shack along the dusty road around Horseshoe Lake quicker than the call of the rain crow. In late July and early August it’s a common sound coming from the woods around my home in the early morning, late evening and in the grey stillness before a summer rain.

I was working in the yard the other afternoon when I heard a crisp “whap!” — like the sound of a line drive in the third baseman’s mitt — just above my head. A pipevine swallowtail butterfly spun to the ground, wings flapping wildly. My first thought was a dragonfly must have made a grab for it. When I reached down to pick it up, I found a bald-faced hornet latched onto its head.

I was clicking Izzy into her booster seat last Saturday about 9 p.m. when she said, “Look Daddy, there’s a bird.” We were on the top deck of Waynesville’s parking garage and it was dark.

“I bet you saw a bat,” I said.

Two ostriches with their heads buried in the sand were having a conversation. The first ostrich said, chuckling, “Man can you believe it — all those wild stories about the earth heating up and the oceans rising?”

Birders are rejuvenated. Binoculars and spotting scopes have been cleaned and readied. Field guides have usurped The Da Vinci Code’s spot on the nightstand. Fall migration is in full swing.

May 3 and 4 were the dates for this year’s 30th annual edition of the Great Smoky Mountains Birding Expedition. This trip began in 1984 as the brainchild of George Ellison, Bryson City resident, author and naturalist; Rick Pyeritz, M.D., who had a practice in Bryson City before he became medical director at University of North Carolina Asheville; and Fred Alsop, Ph.D., field guide author and ornithologist at East Tennessee State University.