Our day began with more snow and a blue gray light exactly like the day ended yesterday. Birds were active, scratching around under bushes and perched on dead weed stalks, eating seeds then letting the fluff drift away in the wind. As I drove toward Hubbell House I was surprised to see an adult bald eagle perched in a cotton wood right amid the cabins. I was with Debbie Salisbury, our Head Housekeeper and we stopped our truck to admire the beautiful bird. We’d only paused for about five seconds when the birddropped from its perch and soared toward the kids’ fishing pond. From out of nowhere a little bird appeared and began to chase the big bird, diving and pecking at its head. The eagle ducked each time the little shadow birdattacked but made a complete circle of the pond. I thought it would fly off but instead it made another circle, still with the little bird harassing it. As we watched, the eagle dropped lower and as it skimmed over the surface. It gracefully spread its talons forward and snatched a fish from the surface of the water. We thought the show was over but it turned and flew toward us, passing about thirty feet overhead with a fourteen inch trout, then disappeared toward the river. In the cold, the bird feeders are filled in the morning, empty in the afternoon, reminding me of information I recently read in Holdfast, by Kathleen Dean Moore, that chickadees stash seeds under bark, flaps of branches, in crevices on tree trunks and rocks, remembering hundreds, even thousands of places. The hippocampus, memory-storage area of the brain, she says, grows in the fall to accommodate those memories. As the winter passes, and the storage areas shrink, so does the hippocampus. It’s not a case it seems of use it or lose it but rather, used it, don’t need it for now.