Jennifer Browne

Mustela nivalis
Least Weasel

Nine degrees, right temperature for sparkling, this fresh snow. Through calf-deep accumulation, the voles are scraping surface tunnels, building burrows. Least Weasels sleek behind to bleed their necks. Linnaeus had it in the name: nivalis, “snowy, snow covered,” though first it was rixosa, “quarrelsome.” I chuckle, imagine tiny teeth drawing blood from the hands of early naturalists, appreciate the revision, nod toward their white fur in winter, their ease beneath the snow. The one I’ve held was so still, so still-perfectly formed, that when I picked it up from the yellow of a two-lane, I thought it might be sleeping. Two ounces, weight of a tennis ball, half a stick of butter. No measure of my grief for every hungry dead thing, grief somehow fitted to my palm. A living weasel is voracious. The swift, clamping bite to a rodent’s nape innate. Even an orphan “become[s] adept at killing at 50-60 days, ” just eight days later than one mother trained, though those eight days of learning are longer than the lean cushion of its fat. A Least Weasel eats nearly half its body weight a day. Consider the mathematics of your own body. How hard it is to stay alive, especially in winters when the snow melts and white fur beacons every owl. I think of the dangers in all I didn’t teach my child, what he had to learn on his own. They need to hide, are keen to take their prey home, empty burrows of the ones they’ve eaten. Making my own way home, the same two lane over Big Savage Mountain, I almost feel it, heavier than it should be in my hands.

^[1] “Least Weasel Short-tailed Weasel Long-tailed Weasel.” The Raptor Center. College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Minnesota.  

Erethizon dorsatum
North American Porcupine

A porcupine will leave
its territory for apples,
for salt, will chew the
dried-sweat wooden
handles of farm tools.
I thought our kinship
was in the sticking,
this shaking shield
I’ve worked to grow,
but little one, I’ll also
wander to find a bite
of sweetness, to taste
the echo of his hands.

Accipiter gentilis
Northern Goshawk

The cat’s ears prick.
A grey flash, and her
stalked sparrow’s lost.
A few feathers, snow.

Centronyx henslowii
Henslow’s Sparrow

Even the field guide notes
the Henslow’s Sparrow is
“easy-to-overlook,” a tuft
of feather grasping grass
in pastures. Movement is
what brings it into sight.
A short, crisp call. Love,
I have also blended into
backgrounds, wary of my
lifting wings, but now
that you’ve spotted me,
I’ll sing to you at dawn,
at evening, softly, softly
through the dark night. 

Jennifer Browne falls in love easily with other people's dogs. She has some poems in chapbooks—Whisper Song (tiny wren publishing, 2023) and The Salt of the Geologic World (Bottlecap Features, 2023)—and journals, including Steel Jackdaw, Gargoyle, and Humana Obscura. She lives in Frostburg, MD. 

Tile: Robert Havell after John James Audubon, Goshawk and Stanley Hawk, 1832, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington