The Sportsman's Corner

As an enthusiastic reader and former English teacher, I like to think I have a solid vocabulary. I can often decipher sesquipedalian terms (long words) from the context clues in the sentences where I find them.

In a recent issue of "National Wildlife" magazine, I encountered two words I had not previously run into. The first of these was "zoonotic." Zoonotic refers to a disease that humans contract that was caused by a pathogen that originally lived in animals. Examples of these include MERS, SARS, Ebola and other deadly Ebola problems, AIDS, Zika, pandemic flu, Lyme disease, rabies, and the new disease, COVID-19. According to the article, COVID-19 almost certainly originated in horseshoe bats from Asia, perhaps from Wuhan, China, as has been suggested by researchers who have studied the virus. Nearly as frightening as the virus that has already caused a worldwide pandemic is the idea that more of these scourges are out there and could be transferred to humans as the human population continues to explode; and humans could potentially pick up and spread new zoonotic diseases. As we discovered over the past year, a zoonotic virus can spread rapidly and can kill humans efficiently. Here in the Cove we have endured many hardships from COVID-19, though, hopefully, vaccines to combat the virus will make a difference here soon.

The second word I encountered that I had never seen before was "subnivium," which is defined as "the world that exists under snowpack." As we older citizens recognize, snowpack does not appear as soon nor does it last as long around here as it did when we were younger, let's say 50 years ago. However, this February has been different from the previous few winters. After the month's nor'easter, the snow has lain on the land; and with the cold weather and more snow, it has not melted. This has probably been good for a number of species of wildlife. One might be the ruffed grouse. While research has determined that the Zika virus is doing a number on our grouse, another factor might be the lack of winter snowpack. Grouse like to dive underneath snow at the end of a winter day in order to stay warm at night, since the snowpack acts like an igloo to insulate the birds. Without the snowpack, the birds burn many extra calories just to stay warm and survive. So, February's snowpack might help make the difference in the survival of a few of our birds.

Anyhow, "zoonotic" and "subnivium" were two new additions to my outdoor vocabulary.