{Journal Entry for Christmas Day, December 25, 2007] I take my camera with me today during a late afternoon snowshoe through the fields behind the Auburn Maine Middle School and to the Taylor Brook. About half a foot of crusty snow remains on the ground, refrozen after the rain two nights ago. The day has been very clear and well below freezing. The late afternoon shadows are getting quite long. I admire the many seed pods in the fields through which I'm snowshoing. Some are large and shaped liked cucumbers, and are rather wooly inside. Others are small and grainy. A few have burrs that stick to my clothing. I crunch my way through the field and then into the woods. I pass through some rather swampy ground, and have to pick my way carefully to avoid wetting the snowshoes, for the snow often hides shallow puddles that have colelcted water from the recent rain. The deer seem not to have minded the puddles, for their tracks go straight through them, whereas they could be avoided with relative ease. I spot a dead birch that has small wood fragments scattered around its base. This is the work of a woodpecker. Looking up I can see the holes that it has pecked in the trunk, near some shelf fungi that have colonized the dead wood. I walk through sparse forest that looks as though it has been through a recent timber harvest. The grade here is fairly steep, down towards the Taylor Brook, below. I pass several rivlets that are feeding the Brook. Taylor Brook, itself, is a slow-moving and meandering stream that is about thirty feet wide. I pass a snow-covered beaver lodge along its bank, and spot many gnawed-off saplings. A flock of a few dozen Mallard ducks has landed by the brook. Some are swimming in an ice-free patch; others are walking on the ice or amid grasses on a little point bar on one of the stream's meanders. They quack, noisily. Numerous dark-barked bushes grow along the stream's edge, and some now-golden grasses, too. The shadows are lenghening now, and most of the woods are in shadow. I walk back, admiring the pattern of the shadows on the snow, finding one place where rays of shadow eminate from a stand of trees. I follow a small rivlet back uphill, It is flowing strongly, supplied by the recent rain. It sports several small cascades. The low sun is lighting up the birches on the eastern side of the field, giving their normally-white bark a beautiful rosy hue. About one and a half hours.