A well placed forest chair invites me to stop and sit a while this morning instead of walking further along and down to the creek as I usually do and even though the sky is overcast and still chilly enough at this hour for parka and scarf, I never say no to this kind of thing, especially here, an area that used to be dark and heavily treed, now open to light, created by hurricane Fiona a year and a half ago and where I now hang a couple of feeders which the juncos, chickadees, and squirrels share, and where today I watch a chickadee work at something in the moss, a breakfast of bugs?… but no, the motion is more gathering, nesting material I decide and assume bits of dried grass until it goes on for ages and I realize there’s no actual grass in the area so I can’t imagine what she’s gathering because it’s not the moss itself and when she finally flies off I wander over to see what else is there and I recognize an old deposit of fox scat, (because when you walk in a forest every morning you notice these things) and I know this particular scat has been there for months, I’ve seen it morph, the scat part having deteriorated, leaving a pile of mainly fur… fluffy and clean enough for a chickadee’s nest apparently… which delights me as only scat can, and which is why I never refuse a woodland invitation.

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