February Days

By Ed Wesely

A WINTER BUTTERFLY — Of our summer visitors, butterflies are among the most ephemeral, with some species living just a couple of weeks. But as I discovered at a recent Honesdale Winter Festival, a winter butterfly--made of carved ice--is lucky to survive a few days.

	Contributed photo Ice-butterfly (Click for larger image)

The one in my picture rested on a Main Street sidewalk outside the Wallflower store from Saturday (2/10), when it was carved, until it fell apart at the end of the following week. Luckily for the butterfly several very cold nights had preceded a rainy Valentine’s Day, which dissolved much of the three-foot tall statue.

My picture was snapped on Monday morning (2/12), when even the butterfly’s smile was intact.

Discovering this ice-butterfly in mid-winter quickly induced daydreams about crocuses and buttercups, notwithstanding the bank thermometer that  was registering 18 degrees! And turned my thoughts to a wry verse by the poet Emily Dickinson, about a butterfly visitor to her own meadow (over a century ago).

How condescending to descend
And be of buttercups the friend
In a New England town.

AN AMAZING SNOWFLAKE — Several of my recent columns have celebrated the work of Wilson A. (Snowflake) Bentley, who, in 1884, at age 19, began “collecting” and photographing snowflakes. Bentley would often detail his work in a professional journal, the Monthly Weather Review, and illustrate his articles with photographs of unusual snowflakes.

By August 1927 Bentley noted that he’d successfully photographed over 4,700 snow crystals, no two alike, and in that issue of the magazine reproduced one of his most unusual specimens. He wrote: “The storm of January 17 (1927) made itself even more famous by producing one of the oddest snow crystals ever photographed (No. 4621), named the clock crystal because it so much resembles the face of a clock.”

	Contributed graphic "Clock" shaped snow crystal

I’ve done my best to reproduce Bentley’s “clock crystal” for this article. That’s thanks to Ann Foster of the Wayne County Library, who was kind enough to track back-issues of the Monthly Weather Review for me (some a century old), and to obtain photo copies from source libraries.

In this case there are smudges, but Bentley’s photograph is so unusual I believe that even a smudged copy of a 1927 magazine picture is worth reprinting. Readers will also notice about a dozen dots incorporated into the clock face, which, according to Bentley, are probably internal air bubbles.

Speculating about the dots in such crystals he wrote, “Much more puzzling is the occurrence of certain tiny dot-like features (systems of geometrically arranged dots, presumably air bubbles) featured within some of the crystals…. They seem not always to be merely surface features, as they sometimes resist evaporation.”

It’s amazing to me that this miniscule crystal, more ephemeral than ice, still exists on the pages of a book, across the chasm of 74 years.

VALE — The Latin word for “farewell” seems an appropriate one for ending my last February column. By March 8, when its successor appears, skunk cabbage will be open and entertaining pollinators (early flies), and a phoebe may be wagging its tail feathers from a tree perch.

But for snow lovers of the world it will be a bittersweet time. In the dedication to her beautiful children’s book about Snowflake Bentley, the illustrator, Mary Azarian wrote: “For all the snow lovers of the world, who—like me—think that snow is like chocolate; there is never enough.”

Snowflake Bentley would have added a quiet “amen.” In a November 1924 article he explained, “No words can convey the least idea of the intense enjoyment, the almost countless thrills, these winter studies have afforded me. As is usually the case in scientific endeavors, the work has not proved remunerative financially…. Yet, it has repaid me a thousand-fold in the enjoyment I and others have derived from it.”