The other morning, I was walking back down the driveway after picking up the newspaper.  It was cold and still dark, early enough so that I had to depend on the last of the moonlight to find my way. I was brought up short by a quartet of deer racing across the lawn no more than a couple of dozen feet away from me. What was particularly striking was their ability to run at full speed without making even a hint of a sound. Black shadows in the moonlight, they might as well have been a mirage, or ghosts, given the utter silence with which they moved. But however silent, they were real.

The sight of those shadow-like deer started me thinking about the many intricate ways that evolution has found to protect its favored children. In the case of these deer, it's the ability to move swiftly and silently through the night. In daylight, I sometimes can spot a sentinel crow standing lookout on a high branch in my front yard, poised to warn its brethren feeding on the ground below with a loud, harsh "caw" that drives them into the air at the approach of danger. Nature overflows with protective instincts like these.

Where evolution seem to have fallen down on the job is with us humans. We have neither fur nor feathers to keep us warm. Our sight and hearing are nowhere near as sharp as that of crows or deer. And we'd probably sound like a runaway truck if we tried racing blindly through a dark night. Maybe it was taking pity on such poorly equipped creatures when evolution decided to leave us instead with our brains, with our heads and our hearts. Unlike the deer or the crow, we have to survive through our capacity to consciously adapt, to think, to learn and to love.

So here in the depths of winter, still far from the warming busyness of spring, is a fine moment for us at BOCES to reflect on these, our gifts, designed to protect us, and as part of that protection, to enable us to protect and nurture those around us and those we serve. The care we take with ourselves, the complex challenges we analyze, struggle with and overcome, the work we do with and for our colleagues and our students, all this demanding use of our minds and our hearts is the fruit of evolution's gift to us. It is our way of racing, shadow like and silent, through a moonlit winter night.