With the intense residential development of land in southern New England and especially in southwestern Connecticut, wildlife is on the move. Partridge, quail, fox, bobcats, and other birds and animals keep moving just ahead of the excavations and constructions, leaving behind only their names on street signs.

There are some creatures who have made their peace with development, however, settling into an easy cohabitation with people. Raccoons and the occasional black bear come nosing around garbage bins and birdfeeders looking for easy pickings, and deer have a notorious appetite for human horticulture. But few creatures are finding life in community with humans as easy as the Canada geese. It is for them, quite literally, a walk in the park.

Canada geese are especially fond of lawns and ponds, and suburban Connecticut has provided them with plenty of both. Countless manmade farm ponds have been absorbed into residential areas by creeping development, and fields and pastureland have been replaced by parks and manicured lawns leading right to the water’s edge.

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

So begins “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. Rereading this poem is, for me, the perfect way to unwrap the winter season. Start with the ribbons — great flocks of blackbirds twisting in the early November sky.

Nothing brings stark definition to the pale light on the cold side of the equinoxes quite like blackbirds. Stevens, himself an odd bird with a poet’s heart stuffed inside a lawyer’s dark suit, stuffed inside an insurance office in Hartford, saw this so clearly. He got it all down in 13 quick stanzas — an odd dark number — that perfectly captures the strange dance of animus and bleakness that is winter. Some of it is achingly beautiful.

Make a list of our monuments to the dead. Start small with the headstones in the village cemetery and move to statues in the public square and civic buildings with great names affixed above the door. Then add the obelisks and marble mausoleums and Rushmores and pyramids of presidents and kings.

It is an impressive list. Yet it is dwarfed by monuments we see every day that stand in testament to one of the most heroic and back-breaking construction efforts in history: New England’s stone walls.

In November, after the curtain of leaves has been drawn from the woodlands, we once again see the old stone walls tracing the boundaries of lives lived long ago when our forests were the pastures and fields of our ancestors. The walls stand pretty much as they stood 250 years ago when they were built to specifications defined by property rights and the wanderlust of livestock. And what a construction project it was.