There are very few people in the world who would take a vacation to the Southern Ocean. Flip and I and 60 others are part of these few. The flights alone might discourage the weak at heart. They started on the Vineyard, thence to Boston, Newark, N.J., San Francisco, over the international dateline to land, 20-plus hours and a day later, in Auckland, New Zealand.

The news of the week has to be centered on snow. Twelve inches of it in my yard, and reports of 16 to 18 inches up-Island.

For those of you who have been commenting on the seeming scarcity of birds at your feeder, this fluffy white stuff may be the thing that brings more birds into your yard. The snow makes it harder for many birds to find their natural foods and so they are more likely to supplement their diet by frequenting bird feeders.

This is the start of the quiet time for wildlife on the Vineyard. Fall migration is essentially over, with the possible exception of a few hawks that got a late start. Most of the hardy species that usually winter here in small numbers have retired to thickets and swampy places. This group includes birds like hermit thrushes, rufous-sided towhees, a few field and chipping sparrows, white-throated sparrows that nest much further north, and some slate-colored juncos. They will survive on natural seeds and berries from poison ivy, bayberry, bittersweet, winterberry, holly and an occasional crabapple. Cedar waxwings, robins and eastern bluebirds also are still around in small groups. Later in the winter, more of these three species may arrive from the Cape if they run out of food over there, making it look like an early spring influx.

The Bird Line (508-696-7577) would often languish unattended were it not for Happy Spongberg, who always keeps an alert eye open in the productive habitat near her home off Tea Lane in Chilmark. This week, Happy reports not one but two yellow-bellied sapsuckers, an adult male and an immature bird, on the same pine tree. The pair, reports Happy, were climbing in a spiral around the tree “like the stripe on a barbershop pole,” with the adult bird occasionally taking a swipe at the youngster, just to be sure everybody knew who was in charge. Sapsuckers are not exactly rare on the Vineyard, and they do linger into the early winter and sometimes beyond. But they are never common; two in one day is unusual, and two in one tree is the kind of thing that makes one go home, make a cup of tea and feel content.

There is a Sphyrapicus varius on a holly tree in Luanne Johnson’s North Tisbury yard. No this is not a disease, but a yellow-bellied sapsucker. Sphyrapicus, for translation purposes, is Sphyra (mallet or hammer) and picus (woodpecker), varius (variegated or multicolored). So the sapsucker is a woodpecker with a mallet of a bill sporting various colors. This is indeed a great description of this woodpecker which is a spring and fall migrant and becoming a common winter resident of the Vineyard.

Announcing that there are no wild turkeys on Martha’s Vineyard is akin to breaking the news that there is no Santa Claus. But that is the truth whether you like it or not. Barbara Pesch and I noted in Vineyard Birds 2 that wild turkeys were introduced by Gus Ben David from Arkansas in the 1970s. These wild turkeys were extirpated in the 1990s. What the heck are all the turkeys that are wandering around the Vineyard from Aquinnah to Edgartown?