With a nod to nature-writer extraordinaire Carolyn Foote Edelmann — and a hat tip to a Baltimore-born friend, here is her father’s wonderfully evocative op-ed piece about winter. Zoologist Gairdner Bostwick Moment and his wife, Ann, were among my parents’ best friends and my favorites among their friends. He graduated from Princeton University in 1928.

My friend generally writes with piercing truth about health and nursing issues, but this — reprinted from the Baltimore Sun long ago — is pure pleasure.

BALTIMORE’S BIRDS OF DECEMBER

by Gairdner B. Moment

The first snows of winter dust the roofs and hiss softly as they sift through the fir tree branches or ting as tiny bits of ice hit against the window panes. The time has come to sit around the fire of an evening with a mug of hot chocolate or perhaps of hot buttered rum and discuss weighty issues like vacations past or future.

On one such night the talk turned to birds….To continue click here

The illustration of a kestrel, a sparrow hawk that Gairdner Moment writes about, comes from the website of a University of California at Santa Cruz research project, the Kestrel Parallel Processor.